TheAttainmentofHumanRightsinSocialism

TheAttainmentofHumanRightsinSocialism

byKostaavoki

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:4/1981,pages:365375,onwww.ceeol.com.

THE ATTAINMENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALISM

Kosta avoki Law under socialism, or what is called socialist law, has been a reality of our age for more than sixty years. This is a long enough time for it to have shown its true nature, that is, all the values which should serve as an example, but also all the weak points which should be eliminated in the further development of socialism. Of course, there are different ways to examine the legal order in existing socialist countries. One of the most common approaches, for instance, is to study the new class substance of this law. Interesting attempts have also been made to observe law under socialism in terms of the need for it to wither away and gradually transfer the class state and law to the museum of antiquities. And it is from this approach that emerged the well-known theory and practice of self-management: socialization of the state, law, and politics. Oddly enough, however, it is hard to find a leading philosopher or law expert in individual socialist countries who has undertaken a serious and unbiased study of the positive legal order with regard to the attainment or trampling of elementary human rights and freedoms, although contemporary ideological presentations and prevailing slogans constantly point up the liberating character of the new socialist order. The mere attempt to raise such questions is frowned upon. And those local nationals who try are usually ascribed hostile intentions, while the interest of foreign writers in this question is qualified as bloc rivalry and interference in the internal affairs of other states. This fact alone eloquently speaks for the fact that the guarantee and attainment of human freedoms and rights in existing socialist countries is not just a crucial, but also a largely disputed and sensitive, question. This essay is an attempt to indicate the different forms in which this question arises. It has no serious claims to studying this matter in full detail. The main point of reference here is the political and legal order in the Soviet Union which has the longest experience in building socialism, and whose achievements and failures in this process are the most far-reaching. The other point of reference is the experience of those socialist states in which Soviet influence is decisive. Discussions on human rights and their attainment in the existing order of this or that country usually proceed from the modern natural law theory according to which by virtue of the fact that one belongs to the human race (gens humana), every individual has certain inalienable rights. As such, these elementary human rights, as natural rights, precede every system of government and constitute not only the basis on which it rests, but also a legitimate reason to change or abolish it when it becomes an obstacle to attaining the objectives because of which it was originally established. In terms of their actual attainment in a given state order, these rights constitute a corresponding group of freedoms, powers, and immunities which represent the inviolable basis of the individuals moral 365

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autonomy in relation to government. However, I will not discuss the intricate and in many ways disputed question of how natural law is rooted in the notion of human nature, or the differences between nature and convention. Instead, the essay will set out from the broadly accepted tenet that elementary human rights, being natural rights, are a fundamental condition of human social life and a morally correct political order. Here, human rights and freedoms stand as the minimum condition under which people can develop and progress as autonomous and independent beings. In other words, guaranteeing and consistently respecting elementary human rights is the conditio sine qua non of a good society, as, according to the ideas of its founders, the socialist society should be. 1. Threatening and trampling upon elementary rights

A primary question in these discussions is: what is, or what should be the main novelty introduced in the sphere of human rights by the October and other socialist revolutions, and what, in terms of liberating the individual, gives socialism a hard edge over todays bourgeois societies? Since elementary human rights were basically established at the beginning of the modern age, the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century could only adopt classical declarations of human freedoms and rights, and make more or less successful attempts to expand and enrich them with new, primarily social and economic rights. But what socialist revolutions could and should have done is not so much to point up new human rights, as to realize classical human rights and turn them into a practical deed and positive, active freedom of each and every member of the political community. Therefore, Ernst Bloch could rightly say that the main principles and fighting slogans of the French revolution freedom, equality, fraternity rise far above the horizon of bourgeois society, since their best part has yet to appear.1 This manifesto of elementary human rights clearly shows that it is not always a question of the great gap between past and the future, but rather one of carrying out the thoughts of the past,2 so as to establish the truth of this world as the practical equation between mind and reality, freedom and law. Because in the most famous French declarations, the striving towards dignity, human rights, and legal guarantees of human security and freedom as tried and tested categories of human dignity still remain an unfulfilled task, an objective which has yet to be fully achieved. Unfortunately, some socialist states deny and even abolish not only the best that the idea of human rights contains, but also the fundamental basis which precedes every freedom and every right which is simply called the right to life. But in order to avoid any misunderstanding from the start, let it be said that, as a rule, the right to life is never denied as such; what is denied or abolished are the legal guarantees which make this right safe and inviolable. Clear evidence of how this actually worked is the following example of a political trial which revealed the true face of Stalins reign of terror and tyranny to the public world. The counter-revolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist group headed by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov, was tried before the military council of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union from August 19th to 22nd, 1936, on charges of having

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organized and prepared attempts on the lives of leaders of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet government and the murder of Kirov. Many years later it was established that innocent people had been sent to their death after this trial. Nikita Khrushchev, in two famous speeches, even clearly intimated that Stalin himself may have organized the assassination of Kirov, although these suspicions were impossible to prove because, in the interim, all material evidence had been destroyed and all material witnesses had been liquidated one by one. However, it would be wrong to claim that this trial, and the court murders which followed, constituted the abolition of the elementary right to life simply because an ordinary court error was in question. Far from it. The error as such only confirms the rule that judges try to determine the facts and rule according to their conscience, but, even with the best of intentions, they can also err, because no person, and so no judge, is entirely above this human weakness. But something quite different is at issue here, because even the possibility of determining the truth through court procedures was abolished beforehand. In order for the truth to be determined (which, of course, cannot always and entirely be achieved), a corresponding procedure must be applied towards this end, which for all intents and purposes means the accuseds right to receive assistance in defending himself or herself before the court (i.e. the professional assistance of a freely chosen lawyer); it means the inviolability of the accused and the witnesses for the prosecution and defense, and this rules out the extraction of false confessions and perjury by means of blackmail and torture; and, finally, it means the accuseds right to an unbiased and independent trial. Since this was a public trial, it became immediately known that the accused had been deprived of professional assistance from freely chosen lawyers. And worse still, in the Soviet public and world communist movement, not only were these legal guarantees denied and without them the right to life is no right at all but their function as a necessary condition for ensuring that trials are not just ordinary acts of private revenge dressed in legal attire was brought into question. Under such circumstances there could be no question of an unbiased and independent trial, especially since as soon as the accused were arrested, a fierce campaign was launched in the press and public under the ominous slogan no mercy for the enemy, demonstrating once again that such political campaigns with their branding not only define and condemn the alleged enemies, but actually create them. Many critics of the worst aspects of Stalinism too easily accept the facile pronouncement that these were instances of the ordinary abuse of power and that this would not have occurred had Stalin not been so prone to tyranny and cruelty with political opponents. In other words, personal failings or human character is to blame and not the nature and set-up of political institutions. However, this approach easily passes over the fact that at issue here is not just the baneful personal inclinations of those in power, but first and foremost the nature of the political order in which firm and reliable legal guarantees of elementary human rights did not exist at all. For, in principle, if capital punishment is allowed in a state, then public power in the form of a competent court can legitimately execute it, if all legal guarantees which render this procedure objective, and which make the right to life as such secure and safe, are consistently applied and honored. In

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the event that such guarantees do not exist, then the right to life is no right at all, but rather life itself depends on the goodwill of those who rule, and goodwill can always turn into illwill, just as life can turn into death. This was not just a mere possibility, for suffice it to recall that Stalin himself used to confirm entire lists of death sentences with just a stroke of his pen, without ever trying to consider and try each case separately. Moreover, this absence of firm and reliable legal guarantees of human security and freedom was not just a sporadic exception but rather a general rule which could threaten the freedom and life of each and every person. For instance, virtually no use was made in the Soviet Union of the institution of habeas corpus, which as a means to check the arbitrary deprivation of freedom, obliges police organs to turn an arrested person over to the court immediately, as the sole body competent to decide on whether such a restriction of personal freedom is justified. During Stalins reign of terror, it was quite normal for an arrested individual to be detained in prison for months, and even years, without ever obtaining a court ruling on the justification of such a deprivation of freedom. All these forms of threatening and trampling upon human freedoms and rights, and even the right to life itself, belong to a time which we would like to believe is behind us. But this does not mean that such violations of human rights still do not occur, and that liberty and dignity are truly inviolable values. The breadth and number of such violations has appreciably gone down, especially their worst forms: overt terror, the taking of hostages, punishing the family of political prisoners, collective punishment of all members of an ethnic group, and cruel prison conditions which, as a rule, means slow but certain death. But actual violence against individuals and their freedom has not entirely disappeared. One might even say that such violations of human rights have taken on more subtle forms. And new forms have emerged such as the abuse of psychiatry allegedly to treat political renegades and heretics. Especially prevalent is the threat to individual freedom and dignity stemming from fears for ones own material and social well-being, which is aroused by the use of different forms of existential pressure such as loss of employment, interruption of ones career, demotion, impeding promotion, etc. So, for instance, out of fear that they might lose their jobs, teachers teach things in which they do not believe; out of fear for their future, students repeat after the teacher. Out of fear that they will not be politically suitable for a better, especially a leadership post, people join official political organizations. Fear of the consequences of abstention sends people to the polls to vote for proposed candidates and to pretend that they view this ceremony as a real election. Out of fear for the possible consequences, people do not publicly, and often even privately, say what they really think. Fear that they may be prevented from continuing their public work and other unpleasant consequences makes many scientists and artists pay lip-service to ideas which they do not personally uphold, to write things with which they disagree and even know to be untrue, to join official organizations, to participate in jobs of which they have the lowest opinion, or to recant their earlier ideas and butcher their own works. Admittedly, as a rule this is not fear in the usual psychological sense of the word, but rather in a deeper, ethical sense; it is part of a collective

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consciousness of constant and omnipresent danger. For no ones social or material position is inviolable in a society where virtually all people live by labor the means of which are state owned, and state controlled. And there is hardly an individual who does not have something to lose. At stake is whatever is of meaning to the individual, ranging from the many privileges of those who take part in the power structure, the possibility to perform a corresponding job, to the basic possibility of living within the restricted frameworks of legal security for loyal citizens, but not, say, for those classified as so-called dissidents or extremists. In the words of Vaclav Havel, this system of existential pressure would not be effective were it not for the fact that it rests on cruder forms of pressure and blackmail. Because there will always be individuals who are prepared, in the name of their convictions, to lose all the amenities that are usually important to ordinary people, therefore, in the case of individuals who turn their backs on ordinary measures of existential pressure, much harsher measures must be applied, those which, following the customary practice of Stalins time, are conceived and applied by the so-called political police. This, then, is the ultimate reason for blockages to any disagreement. Or, as Vaclav Havel says, on the basis of his own experience:
This is the hideous spider whose invisible web runs right through the whole of society; this is the point-at-infinity where all the lines of fear ultimately intersect; this is the final and irrefutable proof that no citizen can hope to challenge the power of the State. And even if most of the people, most of the time, cannot see this web with their own eyes, nor touch its threads, yet even the simplest citizen is well aware of its existence, assumes its silent presence at every moment in every place, and behaves accordingly behaves, that is, so as to ensure the approval of those hidden eyes and ears. And well does he know the importance of that approval. For the spider can intervene in a mans life without any need to have him in its jaws. . . . Thus, the very fact that the state police are in a position at any time to intervene in a mans life, without his having any chance to resist, suffices to rob his life of some of its naturalness and authenticity, and to turn it into a kind of endless dissimulation.4

These and similar examples of threatened elementary human rights show that the tragic lesson of Stalinism has not been fully understood and accepted, and that there are still countries where the value and necessity of firm guarantees of human security and freedom are denied in the name of socialism. Furthermore, when political expedience necessitates it, resort is made to periodic violations of elementary legal safe-guards, which are otherwise honored. Then the rights of the accused, especially in the case of political opponents and political crimes, are sometimes restricted: the possibility and inviolability of defense, particularly the role of a freely chosen defense attorney, are limited; in some cases the trials are closed, which could be taken to mean that the prosecution lacks reliable and properly compiled evidence; mass communications media are used to create the proper public mood which brands the accused before their guilt is actually determined, and this brings into question the independence of judgment. Of course, the question is why do such manifestations still exist? It is not easy to answer. Since the socialist revolution was first carried out in an economically undeveloped and poor country, it appears that from the very start socialism chose

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the wrong direction in competing with capitalism, and concentrated on the economic and material side of social development while neglecting the question of human liberties. And since mans freedom and dignity are often neglected and trampled upon, freedom and human rights become an important question for us, one which we cannot overlook. 2. Potestas legibus soluta

One of the reasons for this threat to elementary human rights in certain socialist countries is the fact that law was given an exclusively instrumental value as a means to pursue current policy and to fight against those who disagreed with this policy. Reducing law to an instrument of political power, which is a lower and extracted value in relation to the power it serves, is only the other side of the wellknown idea and practice that supreme rulers are above the law, and, therefore, in a given situation can derogate the law itself when they deem it to be purposeful. This legally unrestricted power is said to constitute potestas legibus soluta, i.e., to be absolved of the duty to abide by the law. Under this system one or several rulers can act at will without having to follow any legal norms, and their deeds and decisions are considered as acts of state to which everyone owes obedience. This form of institutionalized self-will came to fullest expression in ancient Rome after the collapse of republican institutions, when prevalence was given to the despotic constitutional principle of princeps legibus solutus (meaning absolved of the duty to honor the law), since the will of the ruler himself carried the weight of law (quod principi placuit legibus habet vigorem). One of the main shortcomings of the post-revolutionary Bolshevik government was precisely that it remained potestas legibus soluta absolute and unlimited power. Once they had defeated all their opponents and acquired power, the Bolsheviks were not ready to limit it in advance and tie their hands in choosing the means with which to fight those who thought otherwise. Most important of all, they did not want to tie their hands in the sphere of criminal prosecution and punishment, i.e., the possibility of inflicting harm on others. And this resulted in making the destruction of all traditional restrictions on the power of the state one of the main features of that new age. It appears that this was mostly predetermined by the previous type of power which had been brought down by the revolution. The revolution was preceded by a long period of unlimited autocracy, and it seems that there was nothing more natural than to replace one type of absolutism with another. Indeed, this is what happened in the French revolution where the third estate (i.e., the people as the new sovereign), was placed above the law, just as the previous sovereign, the French king, had, since the times of Bodin, enjoyed genuine absolute power, which, like the power of the Roman emperors, was potestas legibus soluta. And just as the person of the king was the source of both power and the law, so the people, too, took on this twofold role: in keeping with the idea of popular sovereignty it was the source of all power, and in keeping with the idea of volont gnrale, which out of the multitude created one entity the Nation it was the source of the laws themselves. Like the French revolutionaries, the Russian Bolsheviks accepted this

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uncritical belief that power and laws are derived from the same source and, therefore, that there is no need to create and uphold a difference between constituent power (pouvoir constituant), which with the passing of the constitution lays the foundations of the given political community, and constituted power (pouvoir constitu), which runs affairs within the scope of the authorizations and restrictions determined under the constitution. But the result of not honoring these differences was the possibility of uncontrolled expansion of the limits of power at the expense of guaranteed freedom. For, as is well known from the history of constitutionalism, differentiating between passing the constitution as an act of constituting the given political order, and other regulations and measures as acts of already constituted power, only has meaning and justification if the constitution sets the limits of power and determines an inviolable sphere of individual freedoms and rights which power cannot touch. And this means that the raison detat which governs the current state administrators must be of a lower order than guaranteed freedoms. In fact, elementary rights and freedoms should stand as a counter-balance to all political expedience and must lie at the heart of restrictions on state power. But for this to be achieved, these rights must rest on foundations which constitute the basis of the entire state order and which as such are of a higher order than the concrete authorizations and acts of individual state organs. For only in this way can these rights be inviolable. And, therefore, they do not constitute rights which state power passes out to its subjects, but rather the basic objectives and limits of that power. To a certain extent they are pre-governmental or supra-governmental and as such express the priority of a free society with regard to the organization of state power. Indeed, this is the main reason why this kind of guarantee of human rights represents not only a historically outlived accomplishment of liberalism, but also a fundamental value which far exceeds the horizons of the bourgeois society. If human rights are not respected under socialism, then we get its distortion, authoritarian socialism, which, according to Bloch, was capable of reproducing Tiberiuss effects and with that truly uninherited lawlessness in socialism.5 Here Bloch was probably thinking of Tacituss idea that autocracy completely changes persons, corrupts them, and turns them into a fierce tyrant who threaten the freedom and life of everyone within reach of their power. Under authoritative socialism where genuine lawlessness rules, such results Tiberiuss effects are inevitable, because those in power are above the law and, therefore, are capable of bringing everyones freedom and life into question at will. 3. The longevity of the state of siege

A particularly important trait of the legal order in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries within the scope of its influence is the absence of firm and reliable legal guarantees of elementary freedoms and rights. This refers to the relatively lasting suspension of elementary rights and legal guarantees of human security and liberty. Most important of all, this suspension of elementary freedoms is usually justified by the presence of a constant threat to the very survival of the given state order.

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Of course, this suspension of laws and individual freedoms in a state of emergency is not something unique to more recent times nor is it peculiar just to individual socialist states. On the basis of the experience of ancient Rome and Athens and the application of English bills of attainder, Montesquieu concluded that even in a republic liberty must sometimes be suspended: I must own, notwithstanding, that the practice of the freest nations that ever existed induced me to think that there are cases in which a veil should be drawn for a while over liberty, as it was customary to cover the statues of the gods.6 But the real model for transcending a state of emergency situation was the dictatorship in ancient Rome as a specific republican and interim institution which differed greatly from tyranny and other distorted state forms. First and foremost, it was a means to defend the republican constitutional order at times of serious and direct danger. The Senate was authorized to decide on whether such a danger did actually exist, and then the consuls would entrust the power of dictatorship to one person outside the regular circle of those who held state power. The dictators power was temporary: it lasted only as long as did the danger and under no circumstances could it exceed six months. In the course of three hundred years this rule was never overturned, although dictatorship was introduced some ninety times during this period. The interim quality of dictatorship was also reflected in the fact that ordinary state officials retained their posts and immediately took over all state affairs as soon as the dictator turned over his duties. Only during the twilight of the republic did Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar arbitrarily adopt the position of life-long dictator, whereby the dictatorship ceased being a traditional republican institution. And, finally, the power of the dictator during the age of the republic was indeed great, but it was not unlimited. The dictator could suspend laws, but he could not change them or enact new ones. This classical institution in the event of a state of emergency appears in modern times in the form of the Anglo-Saxon martial law and the continental institution of a state of siege (ltat de siege). A distant echo of this is certainly the well-known dictatorship of the proletariat, whose very name indicates its ancestry. It should immediately be said, however, that there are major differences between the ancient dictatorship and modern institutions in the event of a state of emergency (martial law and ltat de siege), on the one hand, and the newly created Soviet dictatorship, on the other. These modern institutions, just like their ancient precursors, mean primarily suspending the law, and especially individual constitutional and legal provisions regarding civil liberties and rights. But the Soviet proletarian dictatorship meant much more than this. According to Lenin, dictatorship is power relying directly on violence, which is bound by no laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is power which has been gained and which is maintained by the violence of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, power which is not bound by any laws.7 Lenin repeatedly warned that powerunlimited, unfounded on laws, based on violence in the most literal sense of the word is dictatorship.8 In other words, dictatorship in Lenins sense does not presume the temporary silencing of laws but rather their complete absence. This is unlimited power above and beyond all laws. Another, still more important, difference concerns the duration of the

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dictatorship. As we have already shown, until Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar, dictatorship was an interim institution, established only in the event of extreme danger to the survival of the state. The Soviet proletarian dictatorship was introduced as a relatively constant and lasting political institution. In order to justify the longevity of its existence, the actual danger because of which it was established had to be long-lasting. This was the explanation given by Stalin, and the notion he invented for this purpose was designated by the term capitalist encirclement,9 by which he meant enemy encirclement. This expression is cleverly coined because it vividly evokes the siege which leads to the introduction of a state of siege. This, then, is a distinctive siege, which, as opposed to the siege of a fortified town, is constant and long-lasting. Finally, the permanence of the proletarian dictatorship due to the duration of the enemy encirclement to a certain extent expressed still another difference regarding classical dictatorships and similar institutions of the modern age. This difference pertains to the actual purpose of introducing and perpetually maintaining dictatorship. Classical dictatorship, and later modern institutions, had severely limited objectives. They were above all a means to offset misfortune and evil which jeopardized the very survival of the people and state, and as such usually did not touch the status quo. The Soviet dictatorship also assumed an essentially new, positive, and all-embracing role. According to the ideas of its founders, it was to be not just a lethal weapon for defense against looming evil and misfortune, but also an effective means for achieving freedom, good, and happiness, for building a new socialist society in which these positive values would experience complete realization. The dictatorship, to be still more precise, was to be a means for eliminating all obstacles and destroying all opponents who stood in the way of building a new society, but it was also an effective way to persuade those who were still hesitant to pursue this road. And in order to achieve this, all means were justified, nothing was sacred if it stood in the way. As Trotsky explained: As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantianpriestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the Sacredness of human life. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.10 So according to Trotsky and his fellow-thinkers, the magnificent foundation of the future lies in violence and blood. And in the name of this idea, some must be liquidated so that in some distant future the personality of others may be free and sacred. This, however, called for a relatively lasting suspension of elementary rights and the legal guarantees of human security and liberty, which could only be achieved by abusing the classical institutions of a state of emergency and proclaiming the permanence of a special kind of state of siege. 4. Unlimited power instead of an order of freedom

One of the major failings of socialist revolutions to date, and especially the October revolution, is that the newly created legal and political order was primarily an order of power, of power with no restrictions, instead of an order of freedom. Indeed, this practical outcome of the October revolution could have

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been presumed, because as early as April 1917, Lenin clearly declared that the basic question of every revolution is the question of power in the state. And when the revolution was carried out, the newly acquired power first became the monopoly of the ruling and only allowed party, later to be concentrated in the hands of just a few: a great leader. But the greatest misfortune was that from the conviction that the question of power in the state is the basic question of the proletarian revolution, Stalin quite logically deduced that consistently building socialism actually means further building up and perfecting the state apparatus of power, including its separate organs of force such as the security service and political police. Not just Lenin, but also his successor Stalin, liked to talk about emancipating not only the proletariat but the entire human race as well (hence the idea of world revolution), although they spoke more about the freedom and rights of individual collectivities, such as class and nation, and much less about individual liberty and dignity, hardly mentioning elementary human rights as an inviolable sphere of individual freedom. Liberty and human dignity were discussed only as a question which was extracted from the basic question of power in the state. In my opinion, however, this was a crucial mistake, because liberty and human dignity cannot be extracted from, but rather are the basic question of, the socialist revolution. This means that revolution should not simply be reduced to establishing the new power of this or that single party, but rather should constitute the foundation of freedom, what Henry de Bracton in his day called Constitutio Libertatis.12 Since emancipation is the basic objective of revolution, it must directly result in the practical foundation of freedom. And it is this that has been largely betrayed, because the above-mentioned revolutions failed to establish even reliable constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of elementary freedoms and rights, let alone anything more. It is forgotten that power as such, including revolutionary power, must not be all-embracing and omnipotent, that it must be limited, that elementary rights and liberties must be outside the grasp of power, that those who hold power usually tend to overstep the limits which have been drawn for them, and that, therefore, reliable constitutional guarantees are necessary to prevent such abuses of power. Most important of all, this is only the first step, since secure enjoyment of elementary human rights can never be equated with political freedom, which has a positive, active character. What Constitutio Libertatis can offer is primarily a negative freedom freedom from pressure and violence. This, then, is only the initial condition, for political freedom is primarily a positive freedom, reflected in active participation in public life. Therefore it presumes that as members of the community, men and women have the ability to realize the best they can offer.

NOTES
1 2 Ernst Bloch, Prirodno pravo i ljudsko dostojanstvo (Natural right and human dignity), Beograd, Izdavaki centar Komunist, 1977, pp. 146, 165. Marxs letter to Ruge, September 1843, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Rani radovi (Early Works), Zagreb, Naprijed, 1961, p. 47.

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All the ensuing examples are from Vaclav Havels An Open Letter to Gustav Husak, Encounter, September 1975, pp. 15-16. Ibid., p. 16. Ernst Bloch, op.cit., p. 210. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York, 1949), Vol. I, Book XII, Chapter XIX, p. 187. V. I. Lenin, Proleterska revolucija i renegat Kaucki, Izabrana dela (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Selected Works), (Belgrade, 1960), Vol. 12, p. 362. V. I. Lenin, Prilog istoriji pitanja o diktaturi, Izabrana dela (Contribution to the History of the Question of Dictatorship, Selected Works), Vol. 14, p. 49. J. Stalin, Pitanja lenjinizma (Questions of Leninism), (Beograd, 1945), pp. 597-598. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor, 1963), p. 63. V. I. Lenin, O dvovlasu, April 22, 1917, Izabrana dela (On Dual Power, Selected Works), Vol. 10, p. 421. He repeated this on September 27, 1917, when he said: The most important question of the revolution is, indubitably, the question of Power. One of the Main Questions of the Revolution, Selected Works, Vol. 11, p. 166. This is how Henry de Bracton described the Magna Carta in his De Legibus, fol. 186 b.