Поход Алексея Сидорцева против советского суда: свидетельства, аргументы и поиск материальной истины

This article explores a repertoire of interactions between Alexei Sidortsev, a tenacious Soviet worker defending his rights, and the Soviet legal bureaucracy up to the Supreme Court. Using the Sidortsev case as an example, I plan to demonstrate the judicial logic of interpreting the parties’ various arguments and evidence. This case allows us to describe and analyze the range of rights and legal opportunities available to the Soviet worker under interwar law. I also focus on the rhetorical transformations of Sidortsev’s arguments, changing from ideological to pragmatically bureaucratic. Although Sidortsev was skilled in ideologized Soviet language, it was the material argument that was decisive in courts interpretations of the facts of the case. On this basis, I argue that material truth in the socialist legal consciousness is not determined by the discursive political language of denunciation that we have come to regard as defining in the Soviet system.