6 - The emergency measures

Summary

Revolutionary legality under NEP

The idea of the ‘rule of law’ had only the most tenuous of roots in the Russian political tradition. For the Bolsheviks this principle was an absolute anathema not only on grounds of dogma, since they regarded it as a tenet of ‘bourgeois ideology’, but also as a result of their harsh experiences at the hands of the tsarist secret police. The Marxist–Leninist idea of law as an instrument of realpolitik was one with which they were more familiar. This approach was encapsulated by Lenin's statement at the Seventh Party Conference in April 1917 when he contemptuously dismissed the use of regular judicial procedures declaring that, ‘for us it is the revolutionary deed which is important, while the law must be its consequence’. Of course, in any state the application of impartial and regularised legal and judicial procedures is usually one of the first casualties in the event of a political emergency. The bloody events of the civil war reinforced Bolshevik impatience and disdain for ‘bourgeois’ legal practices and their hold on power was consolidated by force majeure, though they euphemistically termed it ‘administrative methods’. The new Soviet government ruled by decree and delegated plenipotentiary powers to party and soviet officials, and particularly the Cheka. The standard guiding principle in the application of the law by government agents was ‘revolutionary’ or ‘class consciousness’.