Publisher's Synopsis
When this book first appeared in English, it was commonplace to speak of 'international law in a divided world' or of an 'international law of peaceful coexistence and cooperation'. Those times are past, at least in the sense that those expressions are used. Although the law of peaceful coexistence remains embedded in international legal documentation of the era, it has passed beyond the horizons of the rising generation, which in both East and West has no memory of what the discussion was all about. As for 'divided world', the division along these lines is confined principally to China, North Korea, and Cuba. Even in these countries the subject matter of this book, while pertinent, has receded into the background. For all of that, however, the foundations of the theory of international law set out in this volume, stripped of their ideological dress, continue to inform Russian approaches to the theory of international law. This book survives as the most influential Soviet contribution to international legal theory for the second half of the twentieth century and now appears as the author wished it to be in a country unconstrained by censorship and Party policies of the day. His theory of bringing the wills of States into concordance as the foundation for creating rules of international law is unchallenged in modern Russian international legal doctrine.
