Dreams Born and Shattered 385kanis wrote the entry on international law in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of
1929. He retained the generally positivist outlook of Korovin, expressing
approval of the work of such pragmatist fi gures as Zouche and G. F. von Mar-
tens. He favorably contrasted their focus on “actual international customs and
treaties” with the stress of the Grotian (i.e., rationalist) writers on “abstract
concepts.” Korovin was praised for articulating a new and distinctively so-
cialist theory of international law. According to Pashukanis, the world was
now in a transitional period, when socialist and capitalist states were both
present on the world scene— with the result that international law must now,
in this transitional time, take the form of “a temporary compromise between
two antagonistic class systems.”
Support for Korovin’s opinions, however, was soon to fade dramatically.
When Pashukanis wrote his other major piece on international law, a text-
book entitled Outlines of International Law in 1935, it was evident that Ko-
rovin was decisively out of favor. One reason for this was his downplaying of
the role of the state and his ac cep tance of nonstate actors as subjects of inter-
national law. Th ese ideas went against the more hard- edged totalitarian spirit
of Stalinism. Also incompatible with prevailing Soviet offi cial doctrine was
Korovin’s rejection of custom as a source of law. Pashukanis now asserted
that custom and treaties were of equal value as sources. Korovin’s pluralis-
tic view of the various circles of international law also lost offi cial support.
Now it was insisted that the form of international law was the same as it had
been in pre- Bolshevik days, even though the content of Soviet foreign policy
diff ered greatly from that of the tsars.
In the face of these attacks, Korovin dutifully made a full recantation of
his views in 1935. But at least he managed to survive the turbulent times,
which was more than could be said for Pashukanis. He fell terminally from
favor— branded an enemy of people in an article in Pravda in 1937 and
purged the following year. His precise fate has never been ascertained. Th e
reason for Pashukanis’s fall from grace had mostly to do with his ideas
about domestic law, but some of his international-law ideas were also con-
demned. Most notably, the idea of a distinctively socialist international law
lost offi cial favor, as confi rmed by a set of theses on legal matters adopted by
a council of jurists in 1938.
For all of the radicalism of Soviet ideology, it does not appear that any
very major challenge was actually mounted to Western ways of thought in