The Civil Code of the RSFSR 1922: features of birth and happy fate

Abstract

Is dedicated to identifying conceptual legal problems related to the conditions and prospects of “revolutionary expediency” in the process of developing the provisions of the Civil Code of the RSFSR of 1922. The legal paradigm of that time was subjected to a profound transformation based on the ideas of “national property”, “class interest”, “Soviet power”, etc. Understanding the historical, socio-political and cultural processes allows to analyze the norms of the so-called proletarian law. It is established that the adoption of the Civil Code of 1922 was preceded by many years of titanic work of a huge number of highly professional pre-revolutionary lawyers who had drafted the Civil Code of Russia by 1914; later, the norms were lightly powdered with the class proletarian consciousness and taken as the basis (more than 400 of them in total) for the Civil Code of the RSFSR of 1922. The provisions of this code effectively operated until 1964, when the new Civil Code of the RSFSR was adopted. It was the code of “victorious socialism”, that have survived the abolition of the NEP (the New Economic Policy), industrialization and collectivization of the country, Constitution of 1936, Great Patriotic War and, finally, building of socialism in a single country. Thus, the adoption of the Civil Code of the RSFSR in 1922 became an epochal event in the life of the peoples of the multinational country, which, in terms of significance of its impact on Russian civilization and the entire world, can be compared with “Corpus iuris Romani”.