Did the Bolsheviks initiate a new member of the world's family of legal systems, in their spare time after blasting away at the entire Russian royal family in that infamous cottage basement in Yekaterinburg, before or after ordering the assassinations of Kirov and Trostky? What happened to people dragged into courts in the U.S.S.R., if you lived through the extermination of the Kulaks, perhaps by eating the flesh of your dead children?

It's easy to assume that the small communist minorities ruling the U.S.S.R. and its various pathetic wannabe states in places like Mali and other African places, or its shotgun-married "near abroad" areas of the Warsaw Pact, just machine gunned everyone who gave them any crap, and left it at that. Turns out that's not the case.

John Hazard studied "Communists and their Law" for over 50 years, and had access to the brightest communist lawyers througout the world, starting with F.D.R. giving him some assignments in teh U.S.S.R. Hazard ended up cultivating deep relationships with top communist scholars, and even training many of them over the years, in how the civil law and common law countries operated, and then by contrast how communist (or to the chagrin of so many fabian types, "Socialist") legal systems operated.

The communists in Russia pretty much took the French Civil Code and knocked out the private property protections. They pretended to keep the other protections in. A cross current in early Soviet history was the imperative of consulting your own navel-bound sense of "socialist conscience" if you happened to be a judge in this system. Koestler-esque show trials and bogus confessions during the great Stalin purges don't really fit into this analysis. So they are sort of ignored by the legal intelligentsia.

Hazard presents this legal system with sensitivity and perception. He never really answers the question of whether the Soviets and their puppets got beyond disembowling the French civil code, but he hints that he thinks they did. This book will remain as a touchstone to help understand whatever serious efforts were made between 1917 and the disintegration of communism, to set up a new legal system true to the kindest possible interpretation and application of that cantankerous old misanthropic boil-lancer of British Museum scribbling fame, our old goblin, Mr. Misty-Past Karl Marx himself. So the world is clearing its throat and spitting out the 70 year old putrid buildup of communism, but darn it, Professor Hazard was willing to take it seriously. I did, too, when I studied with him in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Warsaw for the Summer of 1982.