'Animated by the European Spirit': European Human Rights as Counterrevolutionary Legality’

The struggle within tsarist Russia culminating in the revolution of 1917 was a legal and political event of global significance. The establishment of the Soviet state and its deployment in service of a programme of socialist transformation represented a foundational challenge to prevailing forms of political organisation.2 Rhetorically, if not always in practice, the socialist Soviet state condemned the capitalist economic system and its political encasing, liberalism, as well as the violent imperialism which it saw as an inevitable expression of that system.3 In seeking both to consolidate and internationalise its own state form,4 through communist politics as well as through force both at home and abroad, the revolutionary state challenged liberal conceptions of civil and political freedoms and attracted condemnation in turn.