Frost comes out of Kremlin?

The project aims to answer the question of the degree of similarity of the content, forms and methods of the stalinization of civil law in selected countries. As we know, the Stalinist dictatorship in the political dimension did not include ‘its own national roads’ in the march towards socialism. On the contrary, it was based on the aspiration to ‘the equation of step’ in ‘brotherly’ states in this political process. This raises the question of the extent to which the Soviet pressure to transform legislation has taken the same forms in the countries in question. For example, in all countries there was a mass campaign of translations of legal Soviet literature, published in the form of books and magazines, e.g. ‘Nowe Prawo’, ‘Neue Justiz’ (‘New Law’). Research from Czechoslovakia shows that by 1956 more than 500 legal texts of Soviet authors had been published there. The number of such publications in Poland is probably higher. An equally important issue was the selection of appropriate staff in order to transform the law in the direction desired in Moscow. There is also a question about the scope of cooperation between the lawyers of ‘brotherly’ countries in the work of Stalinization. Such cooperation existed between Polish Czechoslovakian lawyers and brought results in the field of Sovietization of family law. However, it did not succeed in relation to other areas of civil law. The question arises as to the causes of this failure. The casus of the GDR, in turn, can probably be an example of more direct pressure, in connection with the position of the USSR as the occupying power and later as the de facto ruler of eastern Germany. A cursory analysis indicates that the methods of work on the new socialist civil law were not fully uniform.

Publikation: Die ersten Beiträge sind in einem Sonderheft (49/2) der Právněhistorické studie (Charles University Journal of Legal History) erschienen.