Pyotr Stuchka

Pyotr Stuchka, whose name the live English Wikipedia article renders as Peteris Stucka, was a Latvian Bolshevik and Soviet legal theorist, born on July 26, 1865, in Koknese in the Russian Empire, and died on January 25, 1932, in Moscow. He served as the first Bolshevik government's People's Commissar for Justice on two separate occasions in 1917 and 1918, then led the short lived Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic as its chairman from December 1918 to January 1920, before returning to Soviet Russia to serve as the first chief justice of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1923 until his death in 1932. Stuchka argued that revolutionary courts in the earliest Soviet period should apply what he called revolutionary conscience rather than any inherited body of law, observing that from the 1917 revolution until 1922 formal law had effectively been lacking while the new state improvised its own legal institutions from nothing. He treated criminal punishment not as retribution for a moral wrong but as a measure of social defense protecting the revolution against its enemies, a conception of law as a direct instrument of class struggle that made him, alongside Evgeny Pashukanis, one of the two most influential theorists shaping early Soviet legal doctrine before Stalin era orthodoxy displaced their approach.