ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the place of law in the nature and functioning of the Soviet emergency state. It examined more closely with respect to three defining manifestations or episodes after the close of War Communism: collectivisation, 1929-33. Then terror and political purges, 1936-8; and wartime, 1941-5, including mobilisation, production, deportation of 'enemy' nations and the political enforcement in military operations. The ferocious mass violence of the terror carried out by the emergency state under colour of repression law also serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the many-fold intimacy of law as a mode of public ordering and violence as an extreme form of coercion. Dekulakisation was intended to complement and facilitate, rather than to divert resources from, collectivization. Nevertheless, in collectivisation the emergency state's relation to law is not limited to instrumentalism and legitimization. The Soviet emergency state mapped out as comprehensively and presciently as imaginable for all contemporary and follow-on national security states the remit and usages of repression law.
