Soviet Comments on International Law

Abstract

The postwar cultural isolationism towards the West and a specifically Soviet complex of inferiority inherited from the early years of the regime have produced since the last war an attitude of self-assertion. This somehow childish attitude is expressed, among others, by a frenzy of claims to Russian priorities not only in regard to technological inventions, but also in respect to the learned theories. The Soviet scholars seem to forget that the priority of a thinker in stating a concept, though important in itself, does not reduce another ’ s merit of fully developing a new concept in all its intellectual aspects; moreover, the importance of an intellectual must also be measured by the actual influence he exerted upon his contemporaries and the succeeding generations. A Russian writer may have preceded Bodin in formulating the idea of the state supreme power, but this does not alter the fact that Bodin was the first to establish a fully developed theory of sovereignty, nor does it diminish the Frenchman’s influence upon many generations. However, this Soviet frenzy of claiming priorities may have one beneficial result, namely, it might enrich our knowledge of the older Russian thought. The West is fairly familiar with some Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but knows next to nothing concerning their predecessors. This is why one may read with interest V. I. Zuev’s article:“The Priority of Russian Juristic Thought in the Establishment and Development of the Theory of Sovereignty” (Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, No. 3, March, 1951, pp. 24-37). This article presents another interest as well: It illustrates the Soviet opposition to the contemporary Western tendency to get rid of the encumbering dogma of state sovereignty; the concept of state sovereignty provides a theoretical basis for Soviet foreign policy, especially within the United Nations, and supplies the necessary arguments for denying the superiority of international law over municipal law: