ABSTRACT
Law and the Making of the Soviet World Law and the Making of the Soviet World Stalinism was a particularly brutal, despotic and over-militarized variety of what, Chalmers Johnson, referring to modern Japan, termed the developmental state. Its strategy was to concentrate control of economic assets in the hands of the central bureaucracy; the populace would be treated as a sub-species of asset, either as labour force or military recruits; such forces would then be directed towards the goal of catching up with the advanced capitalist countries. The ideological colouring of the Soviet regime, combined with the Cold War climate, prevented thinkers on both right and left from recognizing it as a particular variety of ultra-bureaucratic developmental state. Socialisation of the Soviet economy antedated the emergence of the Soviet developmental state. The public law machinery underpinning comprehensive state planning and direction, monopolistic state ownership and the exclusion of private trade had been under construction from the phase of War Communism.
