part vii • legal history and legal science • heikki pihlajamäki faculty, the so-called Stoßtruppfakultät. Romanists, they had built their private law scholarship on the individualism of Roman law, and had a quintessential role in drafting the German Civil Code of 1900. This individualism was abête noire for theNazis and forbidden by Point 19 of the Nazi Party programme: ‘We demand that Roman law, which benefits the materialist world order, be substituted with German common law.’ Many leading, mostly Jewish, Romanists – Fritz Pringsheim, Hermann Kantorowicz – emigrated. Non-Jewish Romanists stayed, such as Franz Wieacker and Helmut Coing, working their scholarship carefully around the Nazi circumstances. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Roman law had been entrenched in Russian legal scholarship as part of the science of civil law. According to revolutionary legal theorists (Evgeny Pashukanis), law was supposed to become unnecessary and wither away. After 1922 and especially in the late 1930s under Stalin and his Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky, this trend slowly but surely reversed and law returned to its place, this time in the service of the Soviet state (‘Soviet legality’). In this construction, the ‘history of the state and law’ played an important educational and propaganda role. However, no place remained for serious critical legal history. Curiously, the teaching of Roman law continued throughout the Soviet period, and experienced even a certain revival under Hrustsev during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’. Even though taught at the law faculties, research in Roman law never returned to its pre-revolutionary high. Consider the Soviet Republic of Estonia. In the nineteenth century and later in its first period of independence, Estonia had developed a remarkable tradition of legal history and Roman law, from Friedrich Georg von Bunge and other German Baltic historians in the nineteenth century to excellent legal historians such as Leo Leesment, Jüri Uluots, and Adolf Perandi during independence in the 1920s and 1930s. Uluots died in 1944; Leesment was deported to Siberia in 1950, and although he returned to teaching in 1956, his scholarly production never recovered. The Estonian School of legal history did not return to its pre-war levels until the 1990s. During the Soviet period, the ‘history of state and law’ was taught in bulk, mostly in the Soviet propaganda 350
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