Russian labor law in the twentieth century: patterns of development and historical lessons

Abstract

The revolution that took place in Russia on 25 October (or, according to the new style, on 7 November) 1917 is believed to have been the most important political event of the 20th century and to have had a great influence on all aspects of life both within the country and worldwide. This article discusses the extent to which the Russian socialist revolution affected the relatively narrow, although extremely important, area of the mechanism for the legal regulation of labor. For this purpose, the authors compared the concept of socialism and the practice of its implementation in Russia with the practice of the legal regulation of labor in the countries that did not experience asocialist revolution and therefore were considered by socialists as “bourgeois” countries. At the same time, the authors challenged the view of the majority of Russian researchers of the Soviet period, including the researchers of the history of the legal regulation of labor, that Soviet economic history was a process of linear progressive development (when applied to the sphere of labor). The article shows and analyzes the dissimilarity in the qualitative characteristics of the history of the economy and the history of the legal regulation of labor in Soviet Russia. On this basis, the conclusions are drawn as to the influence of the Soviet experience on other countries in the sphere of the legal regulation of social labor and the relevance of this experience for the current times.