Law of the Soviet Union

The law of the Soviet Union was the legal system that developed after the October Revolution of 1917, built on Marxism-Leninism grafted onto elements of pre-revolutionary Russian law, itself shaped by Byzantine, Mongol and Russian Orthodox canon-law influences and by the Western legal concepts introduced through Alexander II's 1864 judicial reforms. Soviet authorities formally repealed all Tsarist legislation in 1917 and, following Marxist-Leninist theory that law was part of the state's superstructure destined to wither away under true communism, built a system in which the judiciary was formally subordinate to the Supreme Soviet and criminal trials pursued an official investigation of the truth rather than an adversarial contest between parties, resembling continental European civil law procedure more than common law. Modified versions of the Soviet system were exported after the Second World War to other Communist states, including Mongolia, the People's Republic of China, the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, Cuba and Vietnam. The system ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.