The revised Encyclopedia follows the format of the 1973 edition. It is a compilation of nearly 500 short, factual articles on Soviet domestic and international law.
The alphabetically arranged entries lead readers to subjects as diverse as art, law, philosophy, and religion. The text defines various terms; explores the lives of influential artists, politicians, propagandists, writers, and royal figures; and provides vital information on Russia's past and current geographical boundaries. Features of the book include more than 2,500 encyclopedia entries that are cross-referenced and, where appropriate, include suggestions for further reading; a quick-reference chronology that tracks the important events in Russian history up to the time the volume went to press; a map reference section that features major cities, states, principalities, and historically significant neighboring dominions.
USSR. Analysis of the nature and course of soviet law and administration of justice since 1953 - covers prerogative and normative spheres of civil laws, criminal law, housing and labour law, civil rights, marital status, penal sanction practice, etc. References.
This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.
The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s had both provided a model for Nuremberg and made a mockery of it, undermining any pretense of fairness and justice. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis before being invaded by them. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung over the courtroom, as did the fact that the everyone knew that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, attempting to pin one of their own major war crimes on the Nazis. For lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues, focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. Soviet Justice at Nuremberg illuminates the ironies of Stalin's henchmen presiding in moral judgment over the Nazis. In effect, the Nazis had learned mass-suppression and mass-murder techniques from the Soviets, their former allies, and now the latter were judging them for crimes they had themselves committed. Yet the Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting--and the losses--in World War II, and this gave them undeniable authority. Moreover, Soviet jurists were the first to conceive of a legal framework for viewing war as a crime, and without that framework the IMT would have had no basis. In short, there would be no denying their place at the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Illuminating the shifting relationships between the four countries involved (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.) Hirsch's book shows how each was not just facing off against the Nazi defendants, but against each other and offers a new history of Nuremberg.
The essays in this volume reassess pre-revolutionary Russian legal culture, the debates of the 1920s over the role of law under socialism, and the abrupt and bloody termination of the debate which took place in the 1930s.