E. B. Pashukanis on Terrorism, Political Crime, and International Law: The Copenhagen Congress of 1935

Drawing on a newly discovered transcript of E. B. Pashukanis’s speech and a selection of his documented interventions at the 6th International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Copenhagen (1935), this article examines Pashukanis’s neglected treatment of international criminal law, as well as his conceptualisations of political crimes, extradition, the right to asylum, and the nature of modern terrorism. The article also sheds light on Pashukanis’s reflections on the composition and function of the Soviet judiciary, the distinctive features of Soviet legal protection, and his arguments for the continued necessity of the death penalty in the Soviet Union. Pashukanis’s transcribed speech and interventions in Copenhagen are contextualised against the background of his changing conception of law in the aftermath of forced collectivisation and his contemporaneous feud with Pyotr Stuchka. The aim of this contextualisation is to correct for one-sided treatments of Pashukanis’s concept of legal form that seek to artificially divorce the revolutionary legal theorist from the seasoned legal practitioner who represented the Soviet Union on the international stage. The article is accompanied by the first-ever English translation of Pashukanis’s newly discovered speech and a selection of his documented conference interventions.