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troversial. To non-Russian Slavs, pan-Slavism
could lead to a federation of relatively equal
Slavic nations or it could provide the cover for
Russian imperialism in eastern Europe and the
Balkans. Also within Russia, pan-Slavist ideals
underwent a transformation in the aftermath of
the disastrous
CRIMEAN WAR
(1854-56) from an
ill-defined romantic Slavophilism to a more mil-
itant and nationalistic Russian pan-Slavism.
Influential in shaping this transformation were
Rostislav Fadeev (1824-83) and Nikolai
DANILEV
-
SKY
(1822-85). Fadeev was an army general who
wrote an influential pamphlet,
Russia and the
Eastern Question,
which was issued in serialized
form in the late 1860s and 1870s, while Dani-
levsky wrote
Russia and Europe
(1871), a treatise
that featured Russian civilization as distinct from
that of Europe. Fadeev argued that Russia
should lead the liberation of Slavic lands ruled
by Austria and the Ottoman Empire and form a
Russian-dominated Slavic federation. Danilev-
sky also saw a fundamental conflict between
Russia and western Europe and also envisioned
the long-term emergence of a Slavic federation
dominated by Russia. The ideas of Fadeev and
Danilevsky were influential in shaping popular
opinion in the 1870s and pressuring a reluctant
Czar
ALEXANDER II
and his foreign minister,
Aleksandr
GORCHAKOV
, in provoking the
RUSSO
-
TURKISH WAR OF
1877-78
. Pan-Slavism declined
somewhat in the following decades but resur-
faced in the years leading up to World War I, as
Serbia challenged Austria in the Balkans, with
the expectation of Russian support as a protec-
tor of Slavs. Unable to prevent the Austrian
annexation of Bosnia in 1908, Russia felt more
duty-bound to support Serbia when the crisis
caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in June 1914 resulted in the outbreak
of World War I. Although the Bolshevik govern-
ment renounced pan-Slavism in the aftermath of
the Russian Revolution in favor of the new goals
of international communism and world revolu-
tion, after World War II pan-Slavist themes were
rearticulated in the context of Soviet domination
of eastern Europe.
Pashukanis, Evgenii Bronislavovich
(1891-1937)
Soviet legal theorist
A Bolshevik of Lithuanian origin, Pashukanis
became the most prominent legal theorist of the
early Soviet period. He began his legal studies at
St. Petersburg, but owing to his involvement in
revolutionary politics, he was forced to complete
them in Munich. He joined the
BOLSHEVIK
Party
in 1918, first working as a people's judge and
later as a legal adviser to the Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs. In his most influential book,
Gen-
eral Theory of Law and Marxism
(1924), Pashuka-
nis tried to construct a Marxist theory of law by
reducing legal phenomena to social relationships
based on a market economy. Hence all law, in his
view, is private and bourgeois; as such it is
incompatible with socialism and destined to
“wither away” in socialist society. This position
led Pashukanis to conclude that since crime and
litigation were the result of class conflict, it fol-
lowed that the ending of private property pre-
saged the end of crime. Pashukanis and his
followers developed the theory of commodity
exchange, which would lead to the withering
away of law. This was because it was believed
that all law emanated from capitalism; hence
under socialism there would be no socialist law.
This theory gained ascendancy in the 1920s and
Pashukanis himself became vice president of the
Communist Academy and director of its Institute
of Soviet Construction and Law. In the less
experimental 1930s, Pashukanis's ideas ran up
against the new realities of Stalinist society. In
1931 Pashukanis recanted his views, accepting
that even in socialist societies, law served the
interests of the state. Nevertheless, Pashukanis
continued to teach and worked in the preparation
of the 1936 (“Stalin”) Constitution. In 1936 he
was appointed deputy commissar of justice. The
Stalin Constitution of 1936 was a deathblow to
Pashukanis's theories as socialism now required
criminal laws to protect state assets. The notion
that law would disappear along with classes and
the state as the Soviet Union approached social-
ism was no longer tolerated and in January 1937,
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