Dreams Born and Shattered 383plunder and violence,” but that it positively welcomed “all clauses containing
provisions for good- neighborly relations and all economic agreements.”
On the broader question of what approach to take to international law,
Soviet doctrine underwent a number of shift s. At all times, however, Soviet
attitudes were underpinned by a basic belief in an underlying and perma-
nent hostility between capitalist and proletarian economic classes. Th is in
turn was now refl ected on the international level in the belief in a natural
hostility between states dominated by those classes, that is, between Bolshe-
vik Rus sia, on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other. Th ere
was an equally natural suspicion of traditional international law, since it was
wholly a product of relations between the capitalist states.
Th e fi rst socialist exposition of international law was by Yevgeny A. Koro-
vin, whose career would be something of an intellectual roller coaster ride.
In 1924, he wrote a book entitled Th e International Law of the Transition
Period. Refl ecting the Bolshevik confi dence that the laws of history were
fi rmly on the side of socialism, he anticipated the coming era of global social-
ism would be characterized by an appropriately new kind of international
law, in which the solidarity of the industrial working classes would be the
foundation. Th is appears to have been essentially a solidarist vision, with in-
ternational law being transformed in the long term into what one (nonsocial-
ist) commentator described as “a federal law for a world- wide Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics.”
Th at heady vision, however, was for the future. In the immediate term,
Korovin maintained that no unity with the capitalist world was possible on
the juridical, moral, or ethical planes. Th ese two realms lived in a state of
permanent Hobbesian hostility vis-à- vis one another, much in the manner
of the Dar al- Harb and the Dar al- Islam of medieval Islamic law. As in the
original Hobbesian vision, though, it was recognized that actual armed
confl ict was not inevitable. A certain degree of functional cooperation was
possible in three areas: humanitarian interests (such areas as public health
or the preservation of historical monuments), technical areas (such as com-
munication and transport), and matters of social or po liti cal importance.
Socialist and capitalist states, Korovin explained, can “meet on the strictly
limited ground of mutual concessions” and thereby conclude treaties with
one another. Th e eff ect, he pronounced, is that, even though “[t]he Tower of
Babel of world- wide unity is left in ruins... , the number of individual