History of Soviet legal doctrine and its impact on modern human rights practices in Russia

The present research provides an outline of the history of human rights in Soviet legal doctrine in order to show the impact of main trends in its historical development on contemporary legal thinking in Russia. The research is pursued using primary sources that focus on the concepts and evolution of the ideas held by Soviet lawyers, namely - the conception of “proletarian” law of D.Kursky, the “socialistic” concept of human rights of S. Kechekyan, E. Lukasheva and V. Chikvadze who studied the phenomenon of the claim on the formation of a new type of special Soviet law and other. The study aims to fill the gap in international legal scholarship, contributing by the research on Soviet academics whose scientific tradition is only found in Russian-language texts. This present work is conducted using a historiographical method, which is aimed at uncovering the continuities between the past and the present and is based on the premise that history is an inevitable element in order to grasp the essence of modern Russian legal thinking.