ABSTRACT
The gap between the functions and theory of the Soviet civil state is particularly evident in light of the glaring disjunction between the debates in jurisprudence and the parallel debates in economics, over the course, pace and sequencing of industrialisation, which shaped the Soviet developmental state. This chapter examines the functions, which ensure the civil state's serviceability for the developmental state. The Soviet civil state was a dimension or 'emanation' of the state itself, rather than a mode of structured collective life or social activity apart and distinct from the state, in the original Hegelian sense of burgerliche Gesellschaft, a society of citizens, or bourgeois. Civil law was reintroduced as a framework for a state-dominated mixed economy, and was intended as a state expedient. After the interregnum of War Communism, the Bolsheviks seized civil law without a great deal of hand-wringing, consternation or apology.
