Annotation

This article explores the work of V.M. Syrykh, a prominent Russian theorist and historian of state and law. His historical and legal works serve to demonstrate the positivist nature of Lenin's approach to law as the source of subsequent deformations of the Soviet legal system (the reduction of law to the will of the ruling class and the primacy of politics over economics). The article examines the scholar's assessment of both the positive achievements of the first Soviet codes (family and labor codes) and the negative aspects of lawmaking (food requisitioning, simplification of the justice system), as well as his refutation of scientifically unfounded concepts about the development of the Soviet state and law in the subsequent period, which diverged from Lenin's "Political Testament."