COMPARING THE SOVIET LEGAL ORDER AND SOME CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN LEGAL ORDE

Authors: Maryna Vahabava

ABSTRACT

This contribution aims to illustrate the legislation providing criminal prosecution in the Soviet Union for systematic vagrancy and parasitism. It analyses in detail such legal provisions and their evolution over time, until the fall of the USSR. The first part is focused on the right to work in the Soviet Constitution, in order to go beyond a mere description of bizarre penal provisions and try to understand their actual role in the light of the socialist conception of labour inspiring the legal order of the USSR, where work was considered both as a universal social right and a universal social duty and structural unintentional unemployment was excluded by the socialist system of production. The concluding remarks explore the connecting thread of this article, the legal conception of work, highlighting how its consideration in a society, as a right and a duty or as a commodity, basically depends on the relations of production and on the history and the present of the social conflict, and how, in turn, this societal consideration determines the approach and the priorities of the lawmaker towards unemployment, severely fighting it, hesitantly alleviating some of its more dangerous consequences or even implicitly fostering it, in a certain amount, as part of the market mechanism.

Keywords: Vagrancy, Begging, Parasitic Lifestyle, Soviet Criminal Law, Right To Work, Welfare

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