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Law as an Instrument of Revolutionary Change in a Traditional Milieu: The Case of Soviet Central Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Gregory J. Massell
Gregory J. Massell*
Affiliation:
Hunter College of the City University of New York and Center of International Studies, Princeton University
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This study is concerned with a problem central to comparative politics in a world of new nations pursuing stupendous goals: how, and to what extent, political power—and specifically, legal engineering—may be deliberately used in the revolutionary transformation of societies, especially those we generally call “traditional societies.” It pursues that concern through a study of the interaction between central power and local traditions in one of the peripheral areas of the Soviet land mass, Soviet Central Asia. And it is most especially concerned with the meaning and impact of large, abstract, impersonal political blueprints of great movements and figures when pursued by ordinary men in the small, concrete, and intimate worlds of human relations, on the manipulation of which the achievement of all revolutionary goals ultimately depends.

Type
Law and Social Change
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , February 1968 , pp. 179 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Author's Note: This article is a slightly revised version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., Sept. 8, 1967. It is a by-product of a general inquiry into the problems of strategy in planned social change in which I am engaged with the support of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. I am grateful for the facilities the Center has placed at my disposal.

References

1. I have not taken for granted in this paper any previous acquaintance with the literature on Soviet Central Asia—the socio-cultural context from which the data for this study are drawn. Section I, in particular, is provided here largely as background and stage-setting material. While this, in part, accounts for the paper's length, it should be of help to the reader in following critically the argument as a whole.

For some recent general studies by Western scholars, dealing at least in part with Soviet Central Asia, see R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (1964); S. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (1960); R. A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917 (1960); E. Allworth (ed.), Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule (1967); G. Wheeler, The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia (1964); A. Bennigsen & C. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (1967); O. Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (1967); M. Rywkin, Russia in Central Asia (1963); B. Hayit, Turkestan im XX Jahrhundert (1956); H. Carrere D'Encausse, Reforme et Revolution chez les Musulmans de l'Empire Russe (1966). The most thorough historical account of developments in Central Asia in the period on which this article concentrates (1920s) may be found in A. G. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917-1927 (1957).

Extensive ethnographic material on the area may be found in V. I. Masal'skii, Turkestanskii Kray, vol. 19 of Semenov-Tianshanskii (ed.), Rossiia (1913); V. V. Bartol'd, Istoriia Kul'turnoi Zhizni Turkestana (1927); M. A. Czaplicka, The Turks of Central Asia in History and at the Present Day (1918); A. E. Hudson, Kazakh Social Structure (1938); L. Krader, Peoples of Central Asia (1963); T. G. Winner, The Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central Asia (1958); E. Allworth, Uzbek Literary Politics (1964); E. E. Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change (1966); S. P. Dunn & E. Dunn, Soviet Regime and Native Culture in Central Asia and Kazakhstan: The Major Peoples, 8 Current Anthropology (1967).

2. The substantive material in the text that follows, including direct quotations as well as specific references to Soviet views and to events in Central Asia, is based almost entirely on Soviet sources—all of them in Russian, and none of them available in English translation. The leading sources include the following Soviet periodicals: Bezbozhnik; Istoricheskie Zapiski; Kommunistka; Novyi Vostok; Pravda Vostoka; Revoliutsiia i Kul'tura; Revoliutsiia i Natsional'nosti; Revoliutsionnyi Vostok; Sovetskaia Etnografiia; Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo; Sovetskoe Pravo; Sovetskoe Stroitsel'stvo; Voprosy Istorii; Vlast' Sovetov; Zhizn' Natsional'nostei. Among the books there are Kh. S. Sulaimanova & A. I. Ishanov (eds.), Istoriia Sovetskogo Gosudarstva i Prava Uzbekistana (2 vols. 1960 & 1963); V. Bil'shai, Reshenie Zhenskogo Voprosa v SSSR (1959); S. Liubimova, V Pervye Gody (1958); V. Moskalev, Uzbechka (1928); F. E. Niurina, Parandzha (1928); A. Nukhrat, Oktiabr' i Zhenshchina Vostoka (1927) and Vos'moe Marta na Vostoke (1928); B. Pal'vanova, Docheri Sovetskogo Vostoka (1961); P. A. Pavlenko, Puteshestvie v Turkmenistan (1932); Zhenshchiny v Revoliutsii compiled by A. V. Artiukhina, et al. (1959); A. P. Kuchkin, Sovetizatsiia Kazakhskogo Aula, 1926-1929 (1962).

Due to limitations of space, specific references to these sources have been omitted in the text. Detailed bibliographical references will be found in the author's forthcoming book, The Strategy of Social Change and the Role of Women in Soviet Central Asia: A Case-Study in Modernization and Control, to be published under the auspices of the Center of International Studies, Princeton University.

3. See G. Gurvitch, Sociology of Law ch. 4 (1942); cf. G. A. Almond & G. P. Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach chs. VI and IX (1966).

4. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State 156 (1942).

5. Id. at 51, 58 ff.

6. See his Models of Conflict: Cataclysmic and Strategic, in A. de Reuck, et al. (eds.), Conflict in Society 259-87 (1966).

7. I discuss all three strategies of planned revolutionary change in a forthcoming larger study, The Strategy of Social Change and the Role of Women in Soviet Central Asia: A Case-Study in Modernization and Control, to be published under the auspices of the Center of International Studies, Princeton University.

8. W. Moore and A. Feldman have proposed to view society itself as a tension-management system. See their Society as a Tension-Management System, in G. Baker & L. S. Cottrell (eds.), Behavioral Science and Civil Defense Disaster Research Group, Study No. 16, 93-105 (1962). It should be fruitful to explore the linkages between their and our analytical approaches to society and to law respectively.

9. See Legalism 1 (1964).

10. It should be kept in mind that not even a rough quantitative distribution of modes of response on the part of the relevant actors can be attempted at this point. Accessible Soviet sources have so far given no meaningful cues on this account. When Soviet Central Asian archives are opened to scholarly perusal, some rough estimates might become feasible.

11. For this particular quotation, see the interview referred to in J. Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand 298-300 (1935).

12. See the section, Potential Functions of a Heretical Model, supra 196ff.

13. This is not to say, simply, that the less coercive the policy—in the Soviet case—the greater the possibility for revolutionary change. What the evidence does permit us to infer is this: (a) Coercion, even in the hands of a determined and powerful regime which is both authoritarian and revolutionary, cannot be an autonomous and decisive factor in inducing change; (b) The amount of coercion in the process of enforcement constitutes only one of many determinants in the success or failure of law as an instrument of revolutionary change; (c) Just as sudden, indiscriminate, and draconic application of force in the sacred realms of human existence tends to trigger a variety of forms of resistance and hence of hindrances to overall change, so does the de-emphasis of coercive measures serve to remove these specific hindrances. But the positive factors in effecting radical social change may be assumed to be a function, not so much of relatively permissive policies, as of the letter's correlation with a network of requisite supportive attitudes, actions, and structures that serve as a tangible and acceptable underpinning for an alternative way of life.

14. To paraphrase Harold Berman. See his Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law esp. Section III (1963).

15. This confirms Stanley Hoffman's conclusion in another context. See his The Study of International Law and the Theory of International Relations, in Proceedings of the Am. Soc. of Int'l L., 57th Annual Meeting, 26-35 (1963); cf. B.V.A. Röling, The Role of Law in Conflict Resolution, supra note 6, at 328-50.

16. The term is Otto Kirchheimer's. See his Political Justice (1961).

17. This calls for some significant qualifications in Arnold's Rose's proposition regarding the role of law as a shield protecting innovators and daring minorities. See his The Use of Law to Induce Social Change, VI Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology (1956).

18. For a recent, excellent review of the literature on law and (evolutionary) social change, accompanied by some highly incisive propositions on the relationship between law and social process, see Lawrence M. Friedman & Jack Ladinsky, Law as an Instrument of Incremental Social Change, Sept. 8, 1967 (paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill.).

19. This is not to say that Soviet experience permits us to distinguish clearly the effects of legal policy from those of other concurrent policies. The legal drive was, after all, but one segment in a broad spectrum of simultaneous actions initiated by the Soviet regime in political, economic, and socio-cultural realms. Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult to isolate precisely the consequences of legal action over the long term, and hence construct a truly “pure” case, because we know as yet very little about the influence of law on attitudinal and behavioral patterns, as compared with the influence of other social forces. Needless to add, the difficulty of direct access and the relative scarcity of data in the Soviet case compound the problem of broad generalizations in this matter. Nonetheless, while the case with which we have been dealing here is admittedly an extreme one—of revolutionary law applied under authoritarian auspices in a relatively intact traditional Islamic milieu—the very suddenness, intensity, and focus of the drive permit us to draw potentially useful inferences about law as an instrument of revolutionary change. In this brief study we have attempted to lay an empirical and analytical foundation for such propositions. Theoretical generalizations at a higher level of abstraction—generalizations on the forms, uses, and limits of legal action in a broad context of social engineering—require a large-scale and multifaceted effort, and far more comparative material than we now have.