Law between Revolution and Tradition: Russian and Finnish Revolutionary Legal Acts, 1917–1918

Comparative Legal History. 2014. Vol. 3. P. 84–113.

Borisova T. Y., Siro J.

This article aims to compare legislative practices of two socialist revolutions in Finland and Russia (the Bolshevik revolution) in late 1917–1918. Notwithstanding considerable differences of social, political, and economic conditions in Finland and Russia, in both countries the revolutionaries used quite similar legislative means of politics. The revolutionary legislative politics had the same ends - to secure the success of the revolutions, and, eventually, to build a new and better society. This article seeks to demonstrate the history of revolutionary lawmaking as a juncture of two main tendencies - the emergence of new ‘revolutionary’ features of legislative politics and the preservation of prerevolutionary law.

Contextual analysis of both the Russian and Finnish political backgrounds of lawmaking is applied in this work, which leads to the conclusion that the similarity of revolutionary ends defined certain similarity of means used in legislative politics.

Keywords: бюрократия, революция, Russia, legislation, источниковедение, revolution, легитимность, legal history, legality, legitimacy, Soviet law, language of law, legal profession, советское право, источники права, юридический язык, Finnish Law, финское право, право и политика, история государства и права отдельных стран, история россии нового времени