Carl Schmitt in the USSR

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of the perception in the USSR of C. Schmitt and his works. It is shown that the Russian Empire paid attention to and criticized Schmitt’s 1912 work Law and Judgment. Soviet readers in the 1920s–1940s were already acquainted with the content of Schmitt’s key works such as Political Romanticism, Dictatorship, The Historical and Spiritual State of Modern Parliamentarism, Political Theology, The Concept of Political, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, and On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, and a discussion of these works was a part of the intellectual life of the USSR in the 1920s–1940s. Moreover, Soviet Marxist-theorists of law, while criticizing Schmitt’s ideas, agreed with some of his ideas regarding the criticism of the bourgeois state and law until 1933. However, after 1933, Schmitt’s works in the USSR turned into an object of harsh criticism, and he himself was proclaimed a key fascist theoretician of state and law. Since the late 1940s, because of the so-called struggle with “cosmopolitanism”, Schmitt’s works received less attention. In the 1950s–1970s, Schmitt’s works appeared only in some critical statements, and the works of Soviet authors of the 1920s-1940s about Schmitt actually fell into oblivion. A new wave of interest in Schmitt began only in the second half of the 1980s, and his works can already be considered in the context of the intellectual history of modern Russia.