Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis as a legal theorist

The article analyzes the work of the famous Russian legal scientist, academician E. B. Pashukanis, whose name is most directly connected with the formation of the Soviet theory of state and law, the solution of important issues of doctrinal support for state building in the 1920s – 1930s and the formation of the Soviet legal system. The focus of this study is on the main problems of the content, nature and focus of E. B. Pashukanis’ legal views, the place of his exchange theory of law in the history of political and legal thought. From a methodological point of view, it is important to use modern historiographical approaches to illuminating and analyzing the history of political and legal thought, which allows us to show the specifics of the legal views of an outstanding Soviet lawyer not only as a moment of formation and development of the Soviet theory of states and law, but also from the perspective of continuity and novelty relative to predecessors and contemporaries, in the light of foreign sources, clarification semantic characteristics of scientific language in his works. Along with the methodological aspects, the novelty of the study also lies in the significant clarification of some basic provisions of E. B. Pashukanis’ legal ideas, related, in particular, to the idea of the “extinction of law” in the conditions of the victorious proletarian revolution and the construction of a socialist society, focusing on the theoretical and cognitive techniques of German lawyers of the second half of the XIX century.