From Russian imperial justice to Soviet justice

The subject of the article is the history of the inertia of the imperial model of justice in the Soviet era. The aim of the work is to compare individual elements of the justice bodies in the late imperial and Soviet periods. The goal is also to determine how Soviet justice, while developing, gradually "liberated" itself from the old justice models.

The main methods of the study were comparative analysis and the problem-chronological approach. With the help of the first method, it was possible to identify the main parallels between the justice systems of the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia. The second method helped to understand how the transformation of the Soviet model to its own original version took place.

The main results of the work are expressed in the materials of a comparative study of the evolution of Russian justice bodies in the 20th century. For the first time, an essay is presented on the numerous borrowings or continuous existence of pre-revolutionary justice bodies in the early Soviet period. Not having a clear idea of Soviet justice in the new state, communists and lawyers were forced to borrow ready-made models and structures from the previous period. Moreover, the abolition of old institutions was replaced by returns and copies of old authorities appeared. Thus, in 1922, the pre-revolutionary model of law enforcement agencies was almost completely copied. For example, all justice agencies were subordinate to a single center of power in the person of the People's Commissar of Justice, investigators were subordinate to the courts, the notary office was state-owned, most justice agencies were subordinate to the chairmen of the courts, the district system and the status of people's judges coincided with the system of justices of the peace, etc. Since 1928, justice agencies have gradually transformed, getting rid of their "imperial" nature. Political practice led to the gradual displacement of previous models of justice. The modernization of Soviet public administration led to the formation of exclusively "Soviet" justice agencies, which were finally formed only by the 1980s. Conclusions. By the time of the second Soviet judicial reform (1958), Soviet justice had moved far away from the imperial model. Until the end of the Soviet state, individual rudiments of old models remained, which gradually disappeared. Thus, bailiffs were still subordinate to the courts, plenary sessions of the supreme courts carried out judicial policy, bar associations copied the councils of the imperial barristers, the ministries of justice managed the courts, etc. In the early 1990s, during the new judicial reform, almost all the remnants of the old institutions were transformed into new structures. The author identified the main trends in the development of the Soviet law enforcement system throughout the 20th century. Soviet justice served as the basis for the formation of the new Russian justice. The history of the comparison of the legal system and the internal affairs agencies is the subject of separate studies, which will also show many elements of the relationship between Russian and Soviet history.

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