Political religion is a popular concept for studying totalitarian regimes including the Soviet political regime. In this paper, I contribute to the field by utilizing it for studying Soviet law. I start with brief description of the Soviet political religion and its ideological premisesMarxism-Leninism teachings on state and society. Then I elaborate on what I call “the symbol of faith of Soviet law” a set of ideas or dogmas that exhibit the influence of Soviet political religion on Soviet law. These ideas concern the nature of Soviet law, its role in society and in the movement toward communism, how law interacts with politics and the State, and its relationship with bourgeois law. Then I show how Soviet jurisprudence developed these ideas in what I call “theology of Soviet law”. Finally, by exploring four concepts in Soviet law uniqueness, publicness, politicization, and socialist legality, I try to clarify how and to what extent Soviet political religion influenced the real legal system of the Soviet Union.

The general introduction sets out how the book differs from standard studies of the titular subjects, its objectives, methods and structure. It sets out three main ways in which the concept of religion is defined: normative political religion, descriptive sociological religion and evaluative legal religion. It notes that English law tends to be blind to the forms that religion, and especially Islam, takes and this can cause problems both for the faithful and for wider society. It identifies the theoretical models that shape the book – liberal individualism, multiculturalism and classical pluralism – and how these will be deployed and to what end. It identifies the institutions that will be discussed in relation to British Islam – banks, charities, schools, elections, clans – and sets out the hopes of the book as a whole.