Peteris Stucka

Peteris Stucka, sometimes Russified as Pyotr Stuchka (1865-1932), was a Latvian jurist and communist politician who led the pro-Bolshevik government of Latvia during the 1918-1920 Latvian War of Independence and later held senior legal office in the Soviet Union. Appointed People's Commissar for Justice in the first Bolshevik government in November 1917, he oversaw the abolition of the existing courts and their replacement with local tribunals of a judge and two assessors drawn from the soviets, and decreed that pre-revolutionary law would be applied only where it did not contradict revolutionary conscience. He later served as deputy people's commissar of justice of the Russian republic from 1919 to 1921 and as chairman of its Supreme Court from 1923 until his death in 1932, and by the early 1920s he was recognized as the leading figure of the Marxist school of jurisprudence he helped found. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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.