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117-427: Socialist law or Soviet law are terms used in comparative legal studies for the general type of legal system which has been (and continues to be) used in socialist and formerly socialist states . It is based on the civil law system, with major modifications and additions from Marxist–Leninist ideology. There is controversy as to whether socialist law ever constituted a separate legal system or not. If so, prior to

234-618: A communal apartment . In 1961, Gorbachev pursued a second degree, in agricultural production; he took a correspondence course from the local Stavropol Agricultural Institute, receiving his diploma in 1967. His wife had also pursued a second degree, attaining a PhD in sociology in 1967 from the Moscow State Pedagogical University ; while in Stavropol she too joined the Communist Party. Stalin

351-634: A "radical restructuring" of foreign policy. A major issue facing his leadership was Soviet involvement in the Afghan Civil War, which had then been going on for over five years. Over the course of the war, the Soviet Army took heavy casualties and there was much opposition to Soviet involvement among both the public and military. On becoming leader, Gorbachev saw withdrawal from the war as a key priority. In October 1985, he met with Afghan Marxist leader Babrak Karmal , urging him to acknowledge

468-709: A candidate member to a full member of the Politburo ( 25th term ), the highest decision-making authority in the Communist Party. At the time, he was the Politburo's youngest member. After Brezhnev's death in November 1982, Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary of the Communist Party , the de facto leader in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was enthusiastic about the appointment. However, although Gorbachev hoped that Andropov would introduce liberalizing reforms,

585-428: A complex series of reforms to restructure society and the economy. He was concerned by the country's low productivity, poor work ethic, and inferior quality goods; like several economists, he feared this would lead to the country becoming a second-rate power. The first stage of Gorbachev's perestroika was uskoreniye ("acceleration"), a term he used regularly in the first two years of his leadership. The Soviet Union

702-525: A dependent role). An article published in 2016 suggests that socialist law, at least from the perspective of public law and constitutional design, is a useful category. In the NYU Journal of International Law and Policy , William Partlett and Eric Ip argue that socialist law helps to understand the "Russo-Leninist transplants" that currently operate in China's socialist law system. This helps to understand

819-680: A distinction; his final paper had been on the advantages of "socialist democracy" (the Soviet political system) over "bourgeois democracy" ( liberal democracy ). He was subsequently assigned to the Soviet Procurator 's office, which was then focusing on the rehabilitation of the innocent victims of Stalin's purges, but found that they had no work for him. He was then offered a place on an MSU graduate course specializing in kolkhoz law, but declined. He had wanted to remain in Moscow, where Raisa

936-517: A dormitory in the Sokolniki District . He and other rural students felt at odds with their Muscovite counterparts, but he soon came to fit in. Fellow students recall him working especially hard, often late into the night. He gained a reputation as a mediator during disputes and was also known for being outspoken in class, although he would reveal some of his views only privately; for instance, he confided in some students his opposition to

1053-467: A failure. The purpose of reform was to prop up the centrally planned economy —not to transition to market socialism . Speaking in late summer 1985 to the secretaries for economic affairs of the central committees of the East European communist parties, Gorbachev said: "Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at

1170-832: A guide from the French Communist Party . He was surprised by how openly West Europeans offered their opinions and criticized their political leaders, something absent from the Soviet Union, where most people did not feel safe speaking so openly. He later related that for him and his wife, these visits "shook our a priori belief in the superiority of socialist over bourgeois democracy". Gorbachev had remained close to his parents; after his father became terminally ill in 1974, Gorbachev traveled to be with him in Privolnoe shortly before his death. His daughter, Irina, married fellow student Anatoly Virgansky in April 1978. In 1977,

1287-426: A high honour to be a member of the highly advanced, genuinely revolutionary Communist Party of Bolsheviks. I promise to be faithful to the great cause of Lenin and Stalin, to devote my entire life to the party's struggle for Communism. — Gorbachev's letter requesting membership of the Communist Party, 1950 In June 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party. He also applied to study at

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1404-484: A hut of their own could be built. The Soviet Union was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party , and during Gorbachev's childhood was under the leadership of Joseph Stalin . Stalin had initiated a project of mass rural collectivization which, in keeping with his Marxist–Leninist ideas, he believed would help convert the country into a socialist society . Gorbachev's maternal grandfather joined

1521-533: A largely ceremonial role with little influence, and moved his own ally, Eduard Shevardnadze , to Gromyko's former post in charge of foreign policy. Other allies whom he saw promoted were Yakovlev, Anatoly Lukyanov , and Vadim Medvedev. Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin , who was made a Secretary of the Central Committee ( 26th term ) in July 1985. Most of these appointees were from

1638-518: A legal system is "an operating set of legal institutions, procedures, and rules". Depending on the definition, a legal system may contain only the set of laws or legal norms issuing from a particular sovereign authority or bound by a shared underlying norm or set of rules, or it may also include for example the institutions and processes by which those laws or legal norms are interpreted and given effect. The 19th-century legal positivist John Austin distinguished legal systems from one another based on

1755-462: A mixed system. The distinction between civil law and common law legal systems has become less useful over time as the two groups have become more similar to one other, and also less cohesive as some members of each group have become more different from others. Some analysts also consider socialist legal systems to constitute a separate group. The Nordic legal tradition , encompassing the legal systems of Scandinavia and Iceland, may also be considered

1872-472: A necessary measure to ensure perestroika by alerting the Soviet populace to the nature of the country's problems in the hope that they would support his efforts to fix them. Particularly popular among the Soviet intelligentsia , who became key Gorbachev supporters, glasnost boosted his domestic popularity but alarmed many Communist Party hardliners. For many Soviet citizens, this newfound level of freedom of speech and press—and its accompanying revelations about

1989-614: A new generation of well-educated officials who had been frustrated during the Brezhnev era. In his first year, 14 of the 23 heads of department in the Secretariat were replaced. Doing so, Gorbachev secured dominance in the Politburo within a year, faster than either Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev had achieved. Gorbachev recurrently employed the term perestroika , first used publicly in March 1984. He saw perestroika as encompassing

2106-521: A period of political liberalization in the Marxist–Leninist country. Although Gorbachev later stated that he had had private concerns about the invasion, he publicly supported it. In September 1969 he was part of a Soviet delegation sent to Czechoslovakia, where he found the Czechoslovak people largely unwelcoming to them. That year, the Soviet authorities ordered him to punish Fagim B. Sadygov,

2223-406: A philosophy professor of the Stavropol agricultural institute whose ideas were regarded as critical of Soviet agricultural policy; Gorbachev ensured that Sadykov was fired from teaching but ignored calls for him to face tougher punishment. Gorbachev later related that he was "deeply affected" by the incident; "my conscience tormented me" for overseeing Sadykov's persecution. In April 1970, Yefremov

2340-507: A reformer and changemaker. However, as the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of these reforms, so did his approval rating; contemporary Russians often deride him for weakening Russia's global influence and precipitating an economic collapse in the country . Mikhail Gorbachev also ran unsuccessfully in 1996 which, despite neoliberal reforms in Russia at the time, showed mass unpopularity with the results of his administration and possibly regret in

2457-501: A resurgence of socialist legality as the dominant trend. Socialist legality itself still lacked features associated with Western jurisprudence. Socialist law is similar to the civil law but with a greatly increased public law sector and decreased private law sector. A specific institution characteristic to Socialist law was the so-called burlaw court (or, verbally, "court of comrades", Russian товарищеский суд) which decided on minor offences. After China's Reform and Opening Up ,

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2574-474: A separate group of legal systems. However, both of these are more commonly considered subgroups of the civil law tradition. Prior to the late 20th century, mixed legal systems were rarely taken into account in classifications of legal systems, but today they are recognized as the most common case: a 2000 study of world legal systems found 92 mixed legal systems, 91 civil law systems, and 42 common law systems. Classifications of legal systems have often reflected

2691-400: A single legal system, while others may have multiple overlapping legal systems arising from distinct sources of sovereign authority, as is often the case in federal states . In addition, different groups within a country are sometimes subject to different legal systems; this is known as legal pluralism . International law is also sometimes classified as a legal system, but this classification

2808-659: A wide range of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize , in the West he is praised for his role in ending the Cold War, introducing new political and economic freedoms in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the German reunification . Gorbachev has a complicated legacy in Russia. While in power, he had net positive approval ratings, being viewed as

2925-408: Is defined by a shared rule of recognition under which a pronouncement is recognized as valid law. These positivist accounts of the legal system have been challenged from various perspectives. Twentieth-century scholarship on legal pluralism emphasized that many legal norms do not arise from an identifiable government or sovereign, and therefore legal systems could not be defined simply based on

3042-773: Is disputed. Legal systems vary in their sources of law and the extent to which they are based on formal written law; some civil law systems have been based exclusively on statutory law while some customary law systems are based entirely on oral tradition. Legal systems are classified in many different ways. One popular classification divides them into the civil law tradition , common law tradition , religious law systems, customary law systems, and mixed legal systems . Modern scholarship, however, has moved away from these fixed categories toward an understanding of legal systems as drawing from multiple legal traditions or patterns. Legal systems have been defined in various ways. In one influential definition by John Henry Merryman ,

3159-437: Is not used in the source legal system but is spoken in multiple other legal systems (for example, a German legal document into French) must decide which legal system's legal language and conceptual framework to use in the translation. The classification of legal systems is also of practical importance in legal translation because it governs the difficulty of the translator's task: the more closely related two legal systems are,

3276-588: The Canadian Parliament . There, he met and befriended the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Yakovlev , who later became a key political ally. In February 1984, Andropov died; on his deathbed he indicated his desire that Gorbachev succeed him. Many in the Central Committee nevertheless thought the 53-year-old Gorbachev was too young and inexperienced. Instead, Konstantin Chernenko —a longstanding Brezhnev ally—was appointed general secretary, but he too

3393-686: The Komsomol youth organization and, after Stalin's death, became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev . He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, overseeing the construction of the Great Stavropol Canal . In 1978, he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee ; he joined

3510-549: The Komsomol , the Soviet political youth organization, becoming leader of his local group and then being elected to the Komsomol committee for the district. From primary school he moved to the high school in Molotovskoye ; he stayed there during the week while walking the 19 km (12 mi) home during weekends. As well as being a member of the school's drama society, he organized sporting and social activities and led

3627-603: The Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February, Yeltsin called for more far-reaching reforms than Gorbachev was initiating and criticized the party leadership, although he did not cite Gorbachev by name, claiming that a new cult of personality was forming. Gorbachev then opened the floor to responses, after which attendees publicly criticized Yeltsin for several hours. After this, Gorbachev also criticized Yeltsin, claiming that he cared only for himself and

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3744-810: The USSR . David also acknowledged, but gave lesser importance to, the Islamic, Hindu , and traditional Chinese legal traditions. David's classification remained highly influential for several decades. However, in the late 20th century it came under attack for being excessively scientistic and nationalistic . In 1973, German comparatists Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz proposed a similar classification that recognized "Romanist" (typified by France), "Germanic", Anglo-American, Scandinavian, Socialist, Hindu, Islamic, and "Far Eastern" groups of legal systems, which were all distinguished from one another on stylistic grounds. Until

3861-498: The World Justice Project ranks national legal systems annually by their adherence to the rule of law . A distinguishing feature of legal translation compared to other forms of translation is that it often involves translating not only between languages but also between legal systems. A translator tasked, for example, with translating a legal document from one language and legal system into another language that

3978-471: The armed forces into neighbouring Afghanistan to support its Soviet-aligned government against Islamist insurgents ; Gorbachev privately thought it a mistake. At times he openly supported the government position; in October 1980 he for instance endorsed Soviet calls for Poland's Marxist–Leninist government to crack down on growing internal dissent in that country . That same month, he was promoted from

4095-498: The sovereign from which the laws flowed. A similar analysis had been proposed some centuries earlier by Francisco de Vitoria . Under Austin's analysis, any law that is part of a legal system must have been enacted by the same sovereign legislator. The 20th-century Austrian scholar Hans Kelsen took a different approach, in which all legal norms in a legal system must arise from a single underlying basic norm . The English theorist H.L.A. Hart argued instead that each legal system

4212-463: The "distinctive public law institutions and approaches in China that have been ignored by many scholars". Soviet law displayed many special characteristics that derived from the socialist nature of the Soviet state and reflected Marxist–Leninist ideology. Vladimir Lenin accepted the Marxist conception of the law and the state as instruments of coercion in the hands of the bourgeoisie and postulated

4329-458: The 1985 Red Square holiday celebrations, and encouraged frank and open discussions at Politburo meetings. To the West, Gorbachev was seen as a more moderate and less threatening Soviet leader; some Western commentators however believed this an act to lull Western governments into a false sense of security. His wife was his closest adviser, and took on the unofficial role of a " first lady " by appearing with him on foreign trips; her public visibility

4446-455: The 1990s, these classifications of legal systems into family groups were typically considered rigid and fixed over time. But through the scholarship of H. Patrick Glenn this metaphor of static legal families has been supplanted by the concept of legal traditions, in which hybrid or mixed systems are the norm rather than the exception. In 1997, Ugo Mattei proposed classifying legal systems according to their social constraints, and particularly

4563-527: The American scholar John Henry Wigmore proposed a five-part classification of legal systems: primitive, ancient, Euro-American, religious, and "Afro-Asian". Wigmore's approach, the first to elevate the United States to top-level significance and the first to take Indigenous legal systems into account, was also noteworthy for erasing the distinctions among the different European legal traditions. In

4680-574: The CPSU Former President of the Soviet Union Secretariate (1985–1991) Presidency (1990–1991) Foreign policy Post-leadership [REDACTED] Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician and statesman who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of

4797-438: The Communist Party and helped form the village's first kolkhoz (collective farm) in 1929, becoming its chair. This farm was 19 kilometres (12 mi) outside Privolnoye village and when he was three years old, Gorbachev left his parental home and moved into the kolkhoz with his maternal grandparents. The country was then experiencing the famine of 1930–1933 , in which two of Gorbachev's paternal uncles and an aunt died. This

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4914-702: The Communist Party emphasized the rule of law as a basic strategy and method for state management of society. Jiang Zemin first called for establishing a socialist rule of law at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1997. In his writings on socialist rule of law in China, Xi Jinping has emphasized traditional Chinese concepts including people as the root of the state ( mingben ), "the ideal of no lawsuit" ( tianxia wusong ), "respecting rite and stressing law" ( longli zhongfa ), "virtue first, penalty second" ( dezhu xingfu ), and "promoting virtue and being prudent in punishment" ( mingde shenfa ). Xi states that

5031-595: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 and additionally as head of state beginning in 1988, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990 and the president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s. He

5148-536: The KGB. In his new position, Gorbachev often worked twelve to sixteen hour days. He and his wife socialized little, but liked to visit Moscow's theaters and museums. In 1978, Gorbachev was appointed to the Central Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture ( 25th term ), replacing his old patron Kulakov, who had died of a heart attack. Gorbachev concentrated his attentions on agriculture: the harvests of 1979, 1980, and 1981 were all poor, due largely to weather conditions, and

5265-633: The North Caucasus; he holidayed with the head of the KGB , Yuri Andropov , who was favorable towards him and who became an important patron. Gorbachev also developed good relationships with senior figures including the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin , and the longstanding senior party member Mikhail Suslov . The government considered Gorbachev sufficiently reliable that he was sent as part of Soviet delegations to Western Europe; he made five trips there between 1970 and 1977. In September 1971 he

5382-475: The Romano-Germanic civil law; for this reason, law theorists in post-socialist states usually consider the socialist law as a particular case of the Romano-Germanic civil law. Cases of development of common law into socialist law are unknown because of incompatibility of basic principles of these two systems (common law presumes influential rule-making role of courts while courts in socialist states play

5499-432: The Soviet economy, namely from decreasing tax collections from declining alcohol sales, resulting in losses of up to US$ 100 billion between 1985 and 1990. Another serious problem was the strain on the Soviet healthcare system, as uneducated Soviet citizens had resorted to drinking rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover or cologne as dangerous substitutes, resulting in a rise in poisoning cases. Gorbachev later considered

5616-550: The Soviet jurisprudential norm that a confession proved guilt, noting that confessions could have been forced. During his studies, an antisemitic campaign spread through the Soviet Union, culminating in the Doctors' plot ; Gorbachev publicly defended Volodya Liberman, a Jewish student who was accused of disloyalty to the country by one of his fellows. At MSU, Gorbachev became the Komsomol head of his entering class, and then Komsomol's deputy secretary for agitation and propaganda at

5733-581: The Soviet legislature, a largely honorific position. In June he traveled to Italy as a Soviet representative for the funeral of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer , and in September to Sofia , Bulgaria to attend celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of its liberation from the Nazis by the Red Army. In December, he visited Britain at the request of its prime minister Margaret Thatcher ; she

5850-714: The Stavropol City Party Organization ("Gorkom"). By 1968 he was increasingly frustrated with his job—in large part because Khrushchev's reforms were stalling or being reversed—and he contemplated leaving politics to work in academia. However, in August 1968, he was named Second Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, making him the deputy of First Secretary Leonid Yefremov and the second most senior figure in Stavropol Krai. In 1969, he

5967-469: The Struggle for Temperance was formed to promote sobriety; it had over 14 million members within three years.Anti-alcohol propaganda was distributed, mostly by way of billboards extolling the virtues of a sober workforce. As a result, crime rates fell and life expectancy grew slightly between 1986 and 1987. However, bootleg liquor production rose considerably, and the reform imposed large costs on

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6084-508: The Supreme Soviet appointed Gorbachev to chair the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs due to his experience with mobilizing young people in Komsomol. In November 1978, Gorbachev was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee. His appointment had been approved unanimously by the Central Committee's members. To fill this position, Gorbachev and his wife moved to Moscow, where they were initially given an old dacha outside

6201-426: The United States; he was appalled at the prospect of nuclear war , was aware that the Soviet Union was unlikely to win the arms race and thought that the continued focus on high military spending was detrimental to his desire for domestic reform. US president Ronald Reagan publicly appeared to not want a de-escalation of tensions, having scrapped détente and arms controls, initiating a military build-up, and calling

6318-478: The annual speech marking the birthday of the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin ; this required him re-reading many of Lenin's later writings, in which the latter had called for reform in the context of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, and encouraged Gorbachev's own conviction that reform was needed. In May 1983, Gorbachev was sent to Canada, where he met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and spoke to

6435-507: The area and tried to improve the lives of their inhabitants; he established a discussion circle in Gorkaya Balka village to help its peasant residents gain social contacts. Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa initially rented a small room in Stavropol, taking daily evening walks around the city and on weekends hiking in the countryside. In January 1957, Raisa gave birth to a daughter, Irina, and in 1958 they moved into two rooms in

6552-417: The area around Chernobyl. Taubman noted that the disaster marked "a turning point for Gorbachev and the Soviet regime". Several days after it occurred, he gave a televised report to the nation. He cited the disaster as evidence for what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, such as shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia. Gorbachev later described the incident as one which made him appreciate

6669-511: The authorities. Gorbachev became close friends with Zdeněk Mlynář , a Czechoslovak student who later became a primary ideologist of the 1968 Prague Spring . Mlynář recalled that the duo remained committed Marxist–Leninists despite their growing concerns about the Stalinist system. After Stalin died in March 1953, Gorbachev and Mlynář joined the crowds massing to see Stalin's body lying in state. At MSU, Gorbachev met Raisa Titarenko , who

6786-516: The campaign to have been an error, and it was terminated in October 1988. After it ended, it took several years for production to return to previous levels, after which alcohol consumption soared in Russia between 1990 and 1993. In the second year of his leadership, Gorbachev began speaking of glasnost , or "openness". According to Doder and Branson, this meant "greater openness and candour in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debates, in

6903-498: The city. They then moved to another, at Sosnovka , before finally being allocated a newly built brick house. He was also given an apartment inside the city, but gave that to his daughter and son-in-law; Irina had begun work at Moscow's Second Medical Institute . As part of the Moscow political elite, Gorbachev and his wife now had access to better medical care and to specialized shops; they were also given cooks, servants, bodyguards, and secretaries, although many of these were spies for

7020-525: The classifier's view of geopolitical power relations. In 1909, Adhémar Esmein proposed classifying legal systems into Roman, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, and Islamic groups, which corresponded to the five major global empires of the time. This classification ignored, among others, the legal systems of Africa, China, and Japan, which Esmein did not consider significant. In 1913, Georges Sauser-Hall proposed an explicitly racial classification of legal systems into Indo-European, Semitic, and Mongolian. In 1928,

7137-783: The collapse of the USSR. Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye , then in the North Caucasus Krai of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , Soviet Union . At the time, Privolnoye was divided almost evenly between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. Gorbachev's paternal family were ethnic Russians and had moved to the region from Voronezh several generations before; his maternal family were of ethnic Ukrainian heritage and had migrated from Chernihiv . His parents named him Viktor at birth, but at

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7254-460: The country had to import increasing quantities of grain. He had growing concerns about the country's agricultural management system, coming to regard it as overly centralized and requiring more bottom-up decision making; he raised these points at his first speech at a Central Committee Plenum, given in July 1978. He began to have concerns about other policies too. In December 1979, the Soviets sent

7371-516: The country's past—was uncomfortable. Some in the party thought Gorbachev was not going far enough in his reforms; a prominent liberal critic was Yeltsin. He had risen rapidly since 1985, attaining the role of party secretary in Moscow. Like many members of the government, Gorbachev was skeptical of Yeltsin, believing that he engaged in too much self-promotion. Yeltsin was also critical of Gorbachev, regarding him as patronizing. In early 1986, Yeltsin began sniping at Gorbachev in Politburo meetings. At

7488-538: The coup's wake, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes. After resigning from the presidency, he launched the Gorbachev Foundation , became a vocal critic of Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin , and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement. Gorbachev is considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century. The recipient of

7605-456: The creation of popular, informal tribunals to administer revolutionary justice. One of the main theoreticians of Soviet socialist legality and proletarian law in this early phase was Pēteris Stučka . Other proponents of proletarian law included Dmitry Kursky and Nikolai Krylenko . Alongside this trend was one more critical of the concept of "proletarian justice", represented by Evgeny Pashukanis . A dictatorial trend developed that advocated

7722-484: The degree to which they adhered to three patterns: "rule of professional law", "rule of political law", and "rule of traditional law", from which all legal systems drew to some extent. The paradigmatic examples of these three patterns were the United States, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, respectively. In contrast to these historic and stylistic classifications, some organizations have developed classifications and rankings of legal systems based on particular metrics. For example,

7839-420: The eighth leader of the Soviet Union. Few in the government imagined that he would be as radical a reformer as he proved. Although he was not a well-known figure to the Soviet public, there was widespread relief that the new leader was not elderly and ailing. Gorbachev's first public appearance as leader was at Chernenko's Red Square funeral, held on 14 March. Two months after being elected, he left Moscow for

7956-424: The elected Congress of People's Deputies undermined the one-party state. When various Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist–Leninist governance in 1989 , he declined to intervene militarily. Growing nationalist sentiment within constituent republics threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading the hardliners within the Communist Party to launch an unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. In

8073-520: The end of the Cold War , socialist law would be ranked among the major legal systems of the world. While civil law systems have traditionally put great pains in defining the notion of private property , how it may be acquired, transferred, or lost, socialist law systems provide for most property to be owned by the state or by agricultural co-operatives , and having special courts and laws for state enterprises. Many scholars argue that socialist law

8190-419: The first time, traveling to Leningrad , where he spoke to assembled crowds. In June he traveled to Ukraine, in July to Belarus, and in September to Tyumen Oblast , urging party members in these areas to take more responsibility for fixing local problems. Gorbachev's leadership style differed from that of his predecessors. He would stop to talk to civilians on the street, forbade the display of his portrait at

8307-445: The governing Politburo ( 25th term ) as a non-voting member in 1979 and a voting member in 1980. Three years after the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev —following the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko —in 1985, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as general secretary, the de facto leader. Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and its Marxist–Leninist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform

8424-459: The harvest; the money earned allowed him to pay for a wedding. On 25 September 1953 he and Raisa registered their marriage at Sokolniki Registry Office and in October moved in together at the Lenin Hills dormitory. Raisa discovered that she was pregnant and although the couple wanted to keep the child she fell ill and required a life-saving abortion. In June 1955, Gorbachev graduated with

8541-547: The insistence of his mother—a devout Orthodox Christian —he had a secret baptism , where his grandfather christened him Mikhail. His relationship with his father, Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev, was close; his mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was colder and punitive. His parents were poor, and lived as peasants. They had married as teenagers in 1928, and in keeping with local tradition had initially resided in Sergey's father's house, an adobe -walled hut, before

8658-422: The lack of widespread public support for his government and pursue a power sharing agreement with the opposition. That month, the Politburo approved Gorbachev's decision to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, although the last troops did not leave until February 1989. Gorbachev had inherited a renewed period of high tension in the Cold War. He believed strongly in the need to sharply improve relations with

8775-407: The latter carried out only personnel shifts rather than structural change. Gorbachev became Andropov's closest ally in the Politburo; with Andropov's encouragement, Gorbachev sometimes chaired Politburo meetings. Andropov encouraged Gorbachev to expand into policy areas other than agriculture, preparing him for future higher office. In April 1983, in a sign of growing ascendancy, Gorbachev delivered

8892-613: The law school of Moscow State University (MSU), then the most prestigious university in the country. They accepted him without asking for an exam, likely because of his worker-peasant origins and his possession of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. His choice of law was unusual; it was not a well-regarded subject in Soviet society at that time. At age 19, he traveled by train to Moscow, the first time he had left his home region. In Moscow, Gorbachev resided with fellow MSU students at

9009-624: The law school. One of his first Komsomol assignments in Moscow was to monitor the election polling in Presnensky District to ensure the government's desire for near-total turnout; Gorbachev found that most of those who voted did so "out of fear". In 1952, he was appointed a full member of the Communist Party. As a party and Komsomol member, he was tasked with monitoring fellow students for potential subversion; some of his fellow students said that he did so only minimally and that they trusted him to keep confidential information secret from

9126-524: The market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism." Gorbachev's perestroika also entailed attempts to move away from technocratic management of the economy by increasingly involving the labor force in industrial production. He was of the view that once freed from the strong control of central planners, state-owned enterprises would act as market agents . Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders did not anticipate opposition to

9243-510: The momentary state of the "legal system", while others including Andrzej Grabowski use "legal system" in the opposite sense, to refer to the momentary state of the "legal order". Various different taxonomies of legal systems have been proposed, for example into families or traditions on historic and stylistic grounds. One common division is between the civil law tradition and the common law tradition , which covers most modern countries that are not governed by customary law or Islamic law or

9360-525: The more straightforward the translation process is. The difficulties in translating between common and civil law legal systems is particularly well-known. Thus for example, even though Finnish and Swedish are unrelated languages, the similarities between the Finnish and Swedish legal systems makes the translation process more straightforward than translating a legal document between dissimilar systems. Mikhail Gorbachev Former General Secretary of

9477-414: The national legal systems were subordinate parts. H.L.A. Hart considered international law to be law, but not a legal system, because it lacked a rule of recognition, rule of change, or rule of adjudication. However, it is increasingly considered to be a legal system. The origin of this view of international law is credited to the 18th-century German legal theorist Georg Friedrich von Martens . Although

9594-428: The need to protect the procedural and statutory rights of citizens, while still calling for obedience to the state. New legal codes, introduced in 1960, were part of the effort to establish legal norms in administering laws. Although socialist legality remained in force after 1960, the dictatorial and utopian trends continued to influence the legal process. Persecution of political and religious dissenters continued, but at

9711-430: The next general secretary; as a longstanding party member, Gromyko's recommendation carried great weight among the Central Committee. Gorbachev expected much opposition to his nomination as general secretary, but ultimately the rest of the Politburo supported him. Shortly after Chernenko's death, the Politburo unanimously elected Gorbachev as his successor; they wanted him rather than another elderly leader. He thus became

9828-696: The perestroika reforms; according to their interpretation of Marxism, they believed that in a socialist society like the Soviet Union there would not be "antagonistic contradictions". However, there would come to be a public perception in the country that many bureaucrats were paying lip service to the reforms while trying to undermine them. He also initiated the concept of gospriyomka (state acceptance of production) during his time as leader, which represented quality control. In April 1986, he introduced an agrarian reform which linked salaries to output and allowed collective farms to sell 30% of their produce directly to shops or co-operatives rather than giving it all to

9945-603: The perversions of Stalin. He helped spread Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist message in Stavropol, but encountered many who continued to regard Stalin as a hero or who praised the Stalinist purges as just. Gorbachev rose steadily through the ranks of the local administration. The authorities regarded him as politically reliable, and he would flatter his superiors, for instance gaining favor with prominent local politician Fyodor Kulakov . With an ability to outmanoeuvre rivals, some colleagues resented his success. In September 1956, he

10062-916: The position. As head of the Stavropol region, he automatically became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( 24th term ) in 1971. According to biographer Zhores Medvedev , Gorbachev "had now joined the Party's super-elite". As regional leader, Gorbachev initially attributed economic and other failures to "the inefficiency and incompetence of cadres, flaws in management structure or gaps in legislation", but eventually concluded that they were caused by an excessive centralization of decision making in Moscow. He began reading translations of restricted texts by Western Marxist authors such as Antonio Gramsci , Louis Aragon , Roger Garaudy , and Giuseppe Boffa , and came under their influence. Gorbachev's main task as regional leader

10179-420: The postwar period, the influential French comparatist René David classified the world's legal systems into four broad groups: Romano-Germanic, common law, socialist law, and "other conceptions of law and the social order". This classification represented a French Cold War worldview, with the Romano-Germanic legal systems epitomized by France, common law systems by the United States, and socialist law systems by

10296-671: The press, and in Soviet culture". Encouraging reformers into prominent media positions, he brought in Sergei Zalygin as head of Novy Mir magazine and Yegor Yakovlev as editor-in-chief of Moscow News . He made the historian Yury Afanasyev dean of the State Historical Archive Faculty, from where Afansiev could press for the opening of secret archives and the reassessment of Soviet history. Prominent dissidents like Andrei Sakharov were freed from internal exile or prison. Gorbachev saw glasnost as

10413-591: The regional Komsomol, in which position he went out of his way to appoint women as city and district leaders. In 1961, Gorbachev played host to the Italian delegation for the World Youth Festival in Moscow; that October, he also attended the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . In January 1963, Gorbachev was promoted to personnel chief for the regional party's agricultural committee, and in September 1966 became First Secretary of

10530-492: The same time there was a tendency to decriminalize lesser offenses by handing them over to people's courts and administrative agencies and dealing with them by education rather than by incarceration. By late 1986, the Mikhail Gorbachev era was stressing anew the importance of individual rights in relation to the state and criticizing those who violated procedural law in implementing Soviet justice. This signaled

10647-516: The scale of incompetence and cover-ups in the Soviet Union. From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became increasingly open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population. In a May 1985 speech given to the Soviet Foreign Ministry —the first time a Soviet leader had directly addressed his country's diplomats—Gorbachev spoke of

10764-460: The school's morning exercise class. Over the course of five consecutive summers from 1946 onward he returned home to assist his father in operating a combine harvester, during which they sometimes worked 20-hour days. In 1948, they harvested over 8,000 centners of grain, a feat for which Sergey was awarded the Order of Lenin and his son the Order of the Red Banner of Labour . I would consider it

10881-757: The secret police , an account that influenced the young boy. Following on from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, in June 1941 the German Army invaded the Soviet Union. German forces occupied Privolnoye for four and a half months in 1942. Gorbachev's father had joined the Red Army and fought on the frontlines; he was wrongly declared dead during the conflict and fought in the Battle of Kursk before returning to his family, injured. After Germany

10998-461: The sovereign. H. Patrick Glenn argued that legal systems were a structurally inadequate way of thinking about law because they failed to capture the epistemic and ill-defined nature of law, arguing for legal traditions as a better unit of analysis. Scholarly opinions on whether international law is a legal system have varied. Kelsen viewed international law as either included in all national legal systems, or an overarching legal system of which

11115-412: The state for distribution. In a September 1986 speech, he embraced the idea of reintroducing market economics to the country alongside limited private enterprise, citing Lenin's New Economic Policy as a precedent; he nevertheless stressed that he did not regard this as a return to capitalism . In the Soviet Union, alcohol consumption had risen steadily between 1950 and 1985. By the 1980s, drunkenness

11232-399: The terms "legal order" and "legal system" are commonly used interchangeably, some writers have distinguished them. A number of legal positivists have used one term to refer to the set of legal norms in effect in a territory at a particular moment, and the other to refer to the set of legal norms over time. Theorists such as Eugenio Bulygin and Carlos Alchourrón use "legal order" to refer to

11349-423: The two fundamental aspects of the socialist rule of law are: (1) that the political and legal organs (including courts, the police, and the procuratorate) must believe in the law and uphold the law, and (2) all political and legal officials must follow the Communist Party. Legal system The term "legal system" is often used to refer specifically to the laws of a particular nation state . Some countries have

11466-476: The use of law and legal institutions to suppress all opposition to the regime. This trend reached its zenith under Joseph Stalin with the ascendancy of Andrey Vyshinsky , when the administration of justice was carried out mainly by the security police in special tribunals . During the de-Stalinization of the Nikita Khrushchev era, a new trend developed, based on socialist legality, that stressed

11583-486: Was "politically illiterate". Yeltsin then resigned both as Moscow party secretary and as a member of the Politburo. From this point, tensions between the two men developed into a mutual hatred. In April 1986 the Chernobyl disaster occurred. In the immediate aftermath, officials fed Gorbachev incorrect information to downplay the incident. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, 336,000 people were evacuated from

11700-497: Was a breach of standard practice and generated resentment. His other close aides were Georgy Shakhnazarov and Anatoly Chernyaev . Gorbachev was aware that the Politburo could remove him from office, and that he could not pursue more radical reform without a majority of supporters in the Politburo. He sought to remove several older members from the Politburo, encouraging Grigory Romanov , Nikolai Tikhonov , and Viktor Grishin into retirement. He promoted Gromyko to head of state,

11817-670: Was a major social problem and Andropov had planned a major campaign to limit alcohol consumption, but died before the plan was put into action. Encouraged by his wife, Gorbachev—who believed the campaign would improve health and work efficiency—oversaw its implementation. Alcohol production was reduced by around 40%, the legal drinking age rose from 18 to 21, alcohol prices were increased, stores were banned from selling it before 2 pm, and tougher penalties were introduced for workplace or public drunkenness and home production of alcohol. The program also recommended that drinking scenes be censored from old movies. The All-Union Voluntary Society for

11934-443: Was aware that he was a potential reformer and wanted to meet him. At the end of the visit, Thatcher said: "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together". He felt that the visit helped to erode Andrei Gromyko 's dominance of Soviet foreign policy while at the same time sending a signal to the United States government that he wanted to improve Soviet–US relations . On 10 March 1985, Chernenko died. Gromyko proposed Gorbachev as

12051-462: Was behind the United States in many areas of production, but Gorbachev claimed that it would accelerate industrial output to match that of the US by 2000. The Five Year Plan of 1985–1990 was targeted to expand machine building by 50 to 100%. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom, although by late 1986 he acknowledged this merger as

12168-534: Was defeated, Gorbachev's parents had their second son, Aleksandr, in 1947; he and Mikhail would be their only children. The village school was closed during much of the war but re-opened in autumn 1944. Gorbachev did not want to return but when he did he excelled academically. He read voraciously, moving from the Western novels of Thomas Mayne Reid to the works of Vissarion Belinsky , Alexander Pushkin , Nikolai Gogol , and Mikhail Lermontov . In 1946, he joined

12285-598: Was elected as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and made a member of its Standing Commission for the Protection of the Environment. Cleared for travel to Eastern Bloc countries, in 1966 he was part of a delegation which visited East Germany , and in 1969 and 1974 visited Bulgaria . In August 1968 the Soviet Union led an invasion of Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring,

12402-486: Was enrolled in a PhD program, but instead gained employment in Stavropol ; Raisa abandoned her studies to join him there. In August 1955, Gorbachev started work at the Stavropol regional procurator's office, but disliked the job and used his contacts to get a transfer to work for Komsomol, becoming deputy director of Komsomol's agitation and propaganda department for that region. In this position, he visited villages in

12519-611: Was followed by the Great Purge , in which individuals accused of being " enemies of the people ", including those sympathetic to rival interpretations of Marxism like Trotskyism , were arrested and interned in labor camps, if not executed. Both of Gorbachev's grandfathers were arrested (his maternal in 1934 and his paternal in 1937) and spent time in Gulag labor camps before being released. After his December 1938 release, Gorbachev's maternal grandfather discussed having been tortured by

12636-561: Was in very poor health. Chernenko was often too sick to chair Politburo meetings, with Gorbachev stepping in last minute. Gorbachev continued to cultivate allies both in the Kremlin and beyond, and also gave the main speech at a conference on Soviet ideology, where he angered party hardliners by implying that the country required reform. In April 1984, Gorbachev was appointed chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of

12753-558: Was necessary for its survival. He withdrew troops from the Soviet–Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States president Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War . Domestically, his policy of glasnost ("openness") allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and press , while his perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve its efficiency. Ultimately, Gorbachev's democratization measures and formation of

12870-523: Was not a separate legal classification. Although the command economy approach of the communist states meant that most types of property could not be owned, the Soviet Union always had a civil code, courts that interpreted this civil code, and a civil law approach to legal reasoning (thus, both legal process and legal reasoning were largely analogous to the French or German civil code system). Legal systems in all socialist states preserved formal criteria of

12987-536: Was part of a delegation that traveled to Italy, where they met with representatives of the Italian Communist Party ; Gorbachev loved Italian culture but was struck by the poverty and inequality he saw in the country. In 1972, he visited Belgium and the Netherlands, and in 1973 West Germany . Gorbachev and his wife visited France in 1976 and 1977, on the latter occasion touring the country with

13104-564: Was promoted First Secretary of the Stavropol city's Komsomol, placing him in charge of it; in April 1958 he was made deputy head of the Komsomol for the entire region. At this point he was given better accommodation: a two-room flat with its own private kitchen, toilet, and bathroom. In Stavropol, he formed a discussion club for youths, and helped mobilize local young people to take part in Khrushchev's agricultural and development campaigns. In March 1961, Gorbachev became First Secretary of

13221-468: Was promoted to a higher position in Moscow and Gorbachev succeeded him as the First Secretary of the Stavropol kraikom. This granted Gorbachev significant power over the Stavropol region. He had been personally vetted for the position by senior Kremlin leaders and was informed of their decision by the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev . Aged 39, he was considerably younger than his predecessors in

13338-525: Was studying in the university's philosophy department. She was engaged to another man, but after that engagement fell apart, she began a relationship with Gorbachev; together they went to bookstores, museums, and art exhibits. In early 1953, he took an internship at the procurator's office in Molotovskoye district, but he was angered by the incompetence and arrogance of those working there. That summer, he returned to Privolnoye to work with his father on

13455-616: Was the only Soviet leader born after the country's foundation. Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye , Russian SFSR , to a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin in his youth, he operated combine harvesters on a collective farm before joining the Communist Party , which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state . Studying at Moscow State University , he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 and received his law degree in 1955. Moving to Stavropol , he worked for

13572-769: Was to raise agricultural production levels, a task hampered by severe droughts in 1975 and 1976. He oversaw the expansion of irrigation systems through construction of the Great Stavropol Canal . For overseeing a record grain harvest in Ipatovsky district, in March 1972 he was awarded the Order of the October Revolution by Brezhnev in a Moscow ceremony. Gorbachev always sought to maintain Brezhnev's trust; as regional leader, he repeatedly praised Brezhnev in his speeches, for instance referring to him as "the outstanding statesman of our time". Gorbachev and his wife holidayed in Moscow, Leningrad, Uzbekistan, and resorts in

13689-480: Was ultimately succeeded as Soviet leader by Nikita Khrushchev , who denounced Stalin and his cult of personality in a speech given in February 1956 , after which he launched a de-Stalinization process throughout Soviet society. Later biographer William Taubman suggested that Gorbachev "embodied" the "reformist spirit" of the Khrushchev era. Gorbachev was among those who saw themselves as "genuine Marxists" or "genuine Leninists" in contrast to what they regarded as

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