Is The Theory Compatible With Practice: Comparing The Exercise Of Inheritance Laws In The People’s Republic Of China And Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3200011

This paper compares the inheritance rights of citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) focusing on the consolidation period of the socialist regime, exploring what the Marxist concept of ‘abolishment of private property’ meant for these two prominent practices of transition to communism. By doing so, it aims to answer the following question: can analysis of passed laws during a period itself be a good indicator of the congruence of a party to its declared ideology? The thesis adopts the comparative-historical method integrated with the legal comparative method and demonstrates how the pre-communist period affected the implementation of inheritance laws in both cases. The interpretive findings gathered from the study show that in both of the cases: 1) what is meant by the abolition of private property is the abolition of the private ownership of means of production, 2) the scope of the right of inheritance widened to include more people and more property to bequeath, which means historically, the socialist policies in the PRC and RSFSR, mark an objective extension of the right of inheritance, and 3) laws and regulations regarding inheritance were in line with theoretical premises of Marxism and the goal of transforming into a communist state. I claim that laws are not quite telling because ideology, is profoundly irreducible to its indicators this phenomenon becomes even more apparent in a theory that is becoming, instead of complete.