Ignacy Czuma

Current Philosophy of Soviet Law and Legal Romanticism

The Soviet State developed in its structure those elements which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a destructive effect on society and man, and hence called for their elimination and removal, instead of making them flourish and prevail. Sovietism accepted these agents of decay as its own, deemed them worthy of developing even if they carried with them the most evil and absurd sacrifices and destruction. Since Tsarist Russia differed as a state from, say, the French Third Republic in its attitude to religion, the Soviet Union rapidly caught up by introducing the separation of Church and state, and took further measures, already implemented in the West. These were: the complete banishment of God from public life; making the state morally self-sufficient (the state determines its own morality); banishing God from schools (the secularization of schools), banishing God from work, banishing God from the family (civil marriages were made obligatory), sequestering Church property, sequestering churches, etc. Having caught up with the West, the Soviet State goes a step further, namely it wrests God from the human soul, using all of the most criminal methods. It raises obstacles to renting churches, it spies on religious people and turns them in, harasses, kills and tortures the clergy, uses the machinery of the state to promote atheism, or rather a war against God and religion. After the previous stage effected by European civilization, that of banishing God from the life of society and the state, the ultimate step is taken on the way to wrest God from the human soul.

The Soviet State ceases to be a high-quality good of a separate kind. The nineteenth century made the state into an instrument of the political party, of Masonic lodges, of plutocracy; the Soviet State becomes a weapon of dictatorship which a handful of intelligentsia, with a high proportion of Jews, inflicts on the multitudinous nations subject to the Russian State. The state becomes an instrument of “oppression” – ostensibly used by the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in fact initially by the dictatorship of the party, but this also only ostensibly, because it is really a dictatorship of an oligarchy, and to be more precise, of an individual (Lenin, Stalin). The dictator and despot puts on a mantle of the dictatorship of the working class. The Soviet State does not bring people together, but destroys people and sets them against each other. This state is not spiritually edifying, but wrecks, kills and smothers. The role assigned by bolshevism to the state is all the more abominable that the dismantling and withering away of the state is announced (Lenin). In the course of events, it becomes more and more evident that the original phantoms of an amicable, “classless”, harmonious society which rules over things, not people, is becoming an increasingly bloody irony. The life of the state is then prolonged and ever longer or indefinite stages are proposed. Forms of government (or at least their appearances, but appearances can be attractive) are imposed of which the Soviet State was to be a negation (democracy, free elections, parliament, constitution, legislative, executive and judiciary powers, civil rights and obligations, etc.)

The Soviet State does not recognize any moral law above itself, and for that reason it has to resort, as did the nineteenth century state, to the only effective defense, which is coercion and violence. Coercion and violence, the grim daily reality of the Soviet State, elevated onto the highest plane of human existence, became the primary and the only foundation of social and national life. Not a spiritual bond, not a moral bond, but a bloody and savage coercion. Since the element of a moral goal and a moral order has been bloodily erased, the will again comes to the fore, amazingly enhanced in its role, blending with coercion and violence. There are no moral constraints on coercion and violence. The will has a savage freedom, exploited and abused, as we can see. The monstrous antics of the Roman Emperors seem like innocent play against this staggering and savage license of the will in the Soviet State. Under such circumstances we should not be surprised by the unbelievable, in their scale, experiments involving life, blood and terrible sweat as well as the humiliation and tormenting of human beings. Neither is the playful will - not tempered by any moral restrictions, having the immense state coercion at its disposal - constrained by reason, which has been placed out of immediate view.

The nineteenth century produced a type of head of state for ceremonies and official acts (touring the country, opening exhibitions, approving government nominations imposed by the parties, receiving diplomats, etc.); the Soviet State further reduced this defunct institution. The collegiate body is the pinnacle of the constitution, while ceremonial functions are performed by one person from this collegiate body. The actual supreme power resides elsewhere, as it does in a parliamentary republic. Thus the facts tell a different story than official pronouncements. In fact the Soviet State has had a monarchy since 1917 (Lenin), an absolute monarchy – after the ascendancy of Stalin we are dealing with a despotic monarchy – in its most perverted and cynical form.

The nineteenth century worked out a whole framework for the art of party politics. The party is a barrister, well paid because winning the case means gaining power, but a shameless and exclusive barrister. Nobody but the party has such a fine understanding of what is good for the people it represents, nobody but the party has the right to represent all of society or a portion of it. The party lives by lying, it promises a lot, delivers little, there are no means it would not use to stay in power or remove others from power, slandering its enemies and their actions, glorifying its own people and their actions. The party created a whole great art of winning and maintaining trust, it insinuated itself into professional life, local government, civil offices, often even the courtroom, the army, becoming a cancerous growth upon these institutions. The Soviet State has arisen from the party, and the party has been growing fat on the state. Corrupting the state’s moral structure made this task easier. However, the party is in its turn a springboard for concrete people. Once they are established with its help, the party becomes, as the state has done, a passive instrument in their hands. This continues now in the Soviet State and in every country where the party establishes itself and becomes ultimately perverted.

The nineteenth century removed God from the state. Thus it took away a standard for evaluating man, because without God man is an animal of little worth. Man must be valued on the basis of what he is. If he is only a transient animal, his value is quite different than if he is an indestructible, eternal person. Bolshevism adopted the concept of a dwarfed man that had been prepared for it by others in the West (materialism, Darwinism, and positivism) and gave this concept a cruel expression. […]

Having lost its moral bearings, the state itself creates morality. What kind of morality? The exploitation by the capitalist “mogul” and his ruthlessness, the “iron” economic laws of the nineteenth century, so blatantly directed against the dignity, value, agency and personality of the human being, are trifles when compared with this cruel exploitation of man, worker and peasant by the employer state. The economic bondage under capitalism has been transformed into an economic and feudal bondage under the Soviet State (collectivization, the Stakhanovite system, and so on). Social justice, maltreated already in the nineteenth century state, vanishes completely in the Soviet State. For when he turns his back on God and His Laws, man loses the awareness of what is right and what is wrong. Love among human beings owes its essential character and value to the love of God and it is in God that it seeks its surest measure and touchstone. Where there is no love, hate, the symbol of the Soviet State, flourishes.

Banishing God from the life of society and of individual human beings, the Soviet State loses its bearings in the order of human values. For the same reason the nineteenth century already brought material values to the fore. The Soviet State will go further along this path. The people are pointed to material things as the foremost value and aim in life.

The Soviet State does not recognize the broad range of autonomous goods: love of God for humans, love of one’s country (recently enjoying a comeback), love of one’s family, etc. For the materialist orientation leads to the mechanization and standardization of social life, it produces a homogenization of social phenomena or, to use a Nazi term, their Gleichschaltung.

The selected fragments are from text by Ignacy Czuma: “Dzisiejsza filozofia sowieckiego prawa a romantyzm prawniczy” (“Current Philosophy of Soviet Law and Legal Romanticism”), originally published in Pamiêtnik Literacki, organ of the Lublin Society of Friends of Science (Towarzystwo Mi³oœników Nauki), reprinted from 1930 facsimile, Lublin (pp. 22-43).