384 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )agreements increases daily.” In his opinion, treaties were the sole source of
international law, since customary rules had been established wholly by the
capitalist states. Socialist legal thought in this regard had a distinct affi nity
with the common-will variant of positivism (although Korovin rejected the
distinction made by the common-will school between law treaties and con-
tract treaties).
Certain key aspects of mainstream positivism featured in Korovin’s
thought— and remained central to socialist theories of international law.
One was a hearty rejection of natural law, as contrary to the Marxist prin-
ciple that ideas arise out of real economic and social relationships, and that
universal and eternal norms do not exist outside of the historical and eco-
nomic pro cess. Korovin was also a supporter of the voluntarist principle
of autolimitation. In addition, he insisted on a strict and rigorous equality
of all states. Also consistent with positivism was an explicitly pluralistic and
contractual outlook on international law. Korovin denied the existence of
a single, universal system of international law. He posited instead that there
were various diff erent systems or “circles”— one for the Western Hemi sphere,
another for the major powers, another for national minorities, another for
colonial states. Th ere was still a further one dealing with relations between
socialist countries and capitalist ones.
In certain respects, Korovin marked out new departures in international
law, of which two may be noted briefl y. Neither was exactly new. First was a
willingness to consider nonstate entities to have a role to play as subjects of
international law. Here, there was a distinct echo of the nationality school of
the nineteenth century, with its stress on nations rather than states as the
primary units of collective social and po liti cal life. For nations, however,
Korovin substituted economic classes— which diff ered from nationalities in
having a worldwide distribution. A second quasi- innovation of Korovin was
his employment of the principle of the sovereign equality of states in the ser-
vice of opposition to imperialism. He condemned the various badges of
legal in e qual ity such as the extraterritoriality systems operated by the major
powers in the developing countries. Th roughout its history, anti- imperialism
was to be a powerful strain of socialist doctrine.
Th e ideas of Korovin were generally echoed— at least initially— by E. B.
Pashukanis, who became the leading theorist on law in general during the
early Stalin period. Although not an international-law specialist, Pashu-