Pēteris Ivanovich Stučka

On 17 December 1918 the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed with Lenin's political, economic and military backing, and Stučka headed its government. At the first joint congress of workers', landless and riflemen's soviets in Riga, the Latvian Central Executive Committee appointed an eleven-member Council of Commissars chaired by Stučka, who was also Commissar of Justice. Every member of the government sat on the executive committee's presidium and the party's central committee, concentrating power in a narrow circle; eight economic commissariats were merged into a People's Economic Council, and war, internal affairs and justice into a Revolutionary War Council. His deputy was Jūlijs Daniševskis.

The government resumed the radical course of the Iskolat period. Expropriation of bourgeois property was popular at first, but the unilateral nationalisation of all agrarian land, relying on the landless and promoting collective farms instead of distributing land to peasants, destroyed rural support and led to failed food supplies and critical shortages in the towns. A wave of Red Terror followed in search of "counter-revolutionaries". Revolutionary tribunals and a People's Court were set up, and on 13 February 1919 the Revolutionary Military Council of Soviet Latvia decided to create a network of concentration camps, the first official plan of camps for mass political repression; the main facility, Stukmaņi, held more than 1,600 prisoners. As anti-Bolshevik forces approached Riga in May 1919 executions intensified, including the killing of 32 prisoners in Riga Central Prison, while in Daugavpils the terror peaked in March 1919 with the execution of 76 prominent figures in Dubrovin Park. Red Terror in Latvia is estimated at roughly 1,500 to 2,000 victims. Stučka was the political head of this regime; its main organiser of terror was Daniševskis. Stučka himself later wrote that "from November 1917 to 1922, law was formally lacking", and Victor Serge called him "a great figure now forgotten" who instituted a strictly egalitarian regime in which the party committee was also the government, members were forbidden material privileges and vodka was banned.

After Riga fell on 22 May 1919 the republic's territory shrank to part of Latgale; the government moved from Riga to Rēzekne and Velikiye Luki and, after defeat at Daugavpils in early 1920, dissolved itself on 13 January 1920. Back in Russia, Stučka worked from 17 January 1920 in the Russian bureau of the Latvian party's central committee, renamed the Foreign Bureau on 25 January, and became its chairman on 31 January; when the Comintern executive's Latvian section secretariat was created after the Second Congress, he was elected its chairman on 15 October 1920. In 1924–1928 he chaired the Comintern's International Control Commission, while also serving as deputy People's Commissar of Justice of Soviet Russia. In 1928, when the Soviet and Comintern leadership instructed the Latvian Communist Party to prepare for a possible war, he called for reviving Latgale separatism and advised communists to join the aizsargi (National Guard), arguing that it would be no misfortune if, in a moment of struggle, "our people or persons agreeing with us" took up weapons and killed leaders.

Stuchka's legal theory was the starting point of Marxist jurisprudence. In his major 1924 work The Revolutionary Role of Law and the State, he defined law as "a system, an order of social relations which corresponds to the interests of the ruling class and is maintained by the organized power of this class — the state." This definition represented a fundamental break from contemporary legal thought by anchoring law not in norms or statutes but in the actual social relations of class society.

Stuchka distinguished three forms of law. The concrete form is law as actual social relations, that is, law as it lives and operates within relations of production and class relations. The abstract form is twofold: law as written statutes and enacted norms, and law as legal consciousness: the ideological system through which people understand and legitimize law. For Stuchka, a genuinely Marxist jurisprudence must analyze concrete law, class social relations themselves, while understanding statutes and legal consciousness only as expressions of this concrete foundation.

This approach stood in productive tension with Evgeny Pashukanis's "commodity exchange theory." Where Pashukanis traced law to commodity exchange relations and saw private law as the archetypal legal form, Stuchka located the core of law in class relations of production, offering a broader framework encompassing both public and private law. Stuchka acknowledged Pashukanis's brilliance but argued that reducing law to commodity exchange could not adequately explain the class character of proletarian revolution and Soviet law. Pashukanis himself, in his later writings, incorporated Stuchka's concept of relations of production as the "content of law," and their theories converged. This debate, conducted while the two men led the Communist Academy's law section together in the early-to-mid 1920s, represents the most creative period of Marxist legal theory. Though critics charged that Stuchka "drowned law in the base" by identifying it too closely with production relations, his insight, that law must be understood from the standpoint of production relations, is recognized as having established a distinctive methodology for Soviet jurisprudence.