To Know Russian Mind, Begin With Their Legal System

Are you puzzled over why dealing with the Russians can be so bewildering and frustrating? We seem to think differently. I got a strong glimmering of why the other day. I learned from Marshall Wilson Houts that to understand the Russians, you must understand their law which greatly differs from ours. Their attitude toward law is intricately related to their attitudes toward treaties and contracts.

Houts of Laguna Beach, author or editor of 35 volumes dealing mostly with how to detect and prove violent crime, was the speaker last week at a meeting of the Friends of the UCI Library.

This latter day “Sherlock Holmes,” as his friends and admirers sometimes call him, said Russian law is based on Roman law, a system also used by other countries, such as China and South America, while our law is an English common law system.

Furthermore, Russian law confounds us because the Soviet constitution is so different from ours. Constitutional guidance stems from the Communist Party, the fundamental objective of which is to support and strengthen the socialist system, Houts said. This is why a lecture on human rights, the way we understand them, is “utterly ridiculous from a Soviet point of view.”

Everything in the Soviet Union has its legal basis: the state constitution. Therefore, to suggest to a Russian that his human rights are being violated is to tell him that his whole legal system must be changed.

Constitutionally, the Russian state owns everything, yet a Russian citizen can own a house, but not the land. Houts said that Soviet jurisprudence regards this as “a non-antagonistic inconsistency.”

Houts, adjunct professor of law at Pepperdine University and clinical professor of forensic pathology at UCI medical school, got a first-hand view of Russian law recently when he was invited to Russia to view a murder trial. He and 20 American lawyers and judges spent 16 hours of sessions with Russian lawyers, judges and other legal people.

The murder trial was what we’d call in this country “vehicular manslaughter,” he said. A driver was accused of striking and killing a 78-year-old woman when his car swerved on an icy road. In this area of law, the defendant is tried by a judge from evidence boiled down from previous notes. A community representative takes the place of a jury. Community representatives rarely contradict judges’ rulings.

The judge constantly interrupted the defendant’s testimony by exclaiming, “But you crossed the yellow line.” Apparently helped by a plea for leniency from the dead woman’s daughter, the defendant was given four years on probation and lost his driver’s license.

Houts said that civil damages are decided in a criminal case, “a concept abhorrent to a common-law lawyer.”

In the prerogative sphere of law, the state can and does intervene in cases, for, as he said, everything is interpreted legally in accordance with the aims of building communism.

He said the idea of precedents is foreign to Russian law. There are no great law libraries in Russia, as here. All civil and criminal law is contained in four code books. All decisions are rationalized from basic communist concepts.

Therefore, he said, Americans must learn to understand this foreign legal system before we can ever hope to deal with the Russians. The best I can conclude is that to make a treaty with Russia stick you’ve got to sell them on the idea it will benefit communism somehow. Then its legal from their point of view. It looks like a job of Madison Avenue diplomacy might work.