quence of ideological tenets, held sacred by the Nazi zealots, as the destruction of the ‘kulaks’ during the Stalinist collectivization campaigns. Millions of human lives were destroyed as a result of the conviction that the sorry state of mankind could be corrected if only the ideologically designated ‘vermin’ were eliminated. This ideological drive to purify humanity was rooted in the scientistic cult of technology and the firm belief that History (always capitalized) had endowed the revolutionary elites … with the mission to get rid of the ‘superfluous’ populations … ”52
History shows beyond any doubt that class genocide in Marxist regimes have been aided and abetted by a political philosophy that encourages, inadvertently if not explicitly, governmental policies that turned out to be profoundly genocidal. The problem is not so much that such a philosophy does not pay enough attention to policies that turn genocidal, but rather that such a philosophy (and those who support it) may actually bear some responsibility for what happened. Such philosophy prepared the mindset and provided the rationale for the implementation of state-directed mass murder and violence. So it happened to be precisely in the former Soviet Union, and not Nazi Germany, that the first concentration camps in Europe were established. As early as October 1923, there were 315 of these concentration camps in the Soviet Union. Some of them were described by their very few survivors as death camps, which to even in the smallest details resembles the descriptions of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. As Kaminski pointed out:
“Trotsky and Lenin were the inventors and creators of the new form of the concentration camp. [This means not only] that they created establishments called ‘concentration camps’ … . The leaders of Soviet communism also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation … . And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as well as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models.”53
In a normative sense, all the most prominent Marxist jurists of the former Soviet Union considered the mere existence of law “a theoretically inconvenient fact”.54 In their analysis of legal practices of the 1920s, law was generally defined by them as “a disciplining principle that helps strengthen the Soviet state and develop the socialist economy.”55 This sort of definition appears to perfectly justify political repression against any person or group that in the judgement of the state authorities could harm the interests of the state or inhibit the development of the socialist economic order.
According to these Soviet jurists, once the period of transition had been completed, the socialist state and all its positive laws should just wither away, given the absence of further class conflict to activate the engine of dialectical conflict.56 Now the fact is that no society can actually exist without law. When a system of government turns out to be anti-legal, it ensures that instead of the rule of law there will be only the rule of terror and oppression. Hence all the terror and oppression in Marxist regimes are the integral part of the foundations of lawlessness laid by Marx himself. As the first Commissar of Justice Isaac Steinberg in the Soviet Union so candidly put it in 1920, even though the revolution was over, the terror would have to continue, because, in his opinion, this was an intrinsic feature of every Marxist regime.57
Marx believed that laws are the product of class oppression, and that laws would have to disappear with the advent of communism. Marxist ideas are closely associated with despotic communist regimes, since these regimes have claimed Marxism as their official ideology. Unfortunately, the M