Genkin, Dmitry Mikhailovich

The son of a zemstvo doctor. In 1903 he graduated from the 6th Moscow Grammar School and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University . In 1904 he was expelled from the university for participating in organizing strikes at factories in Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuev and conducting propaganda among soldiers. After restoration at the university, in 1905-1909 he studied at the Faculty of Law , where he graduated with a diploma of the 1st degree.

After graduating from the university, from January 1, 1910 he was left at the department of commercial law of the university, for a period of two years, in preparation for the professorship. At this time, he began to teach at the Moscow Commercial Institute (with which he was associated until the end of his days), where he taught classes in civil law.

The preparation of a master's thesis at Moscow University was disrupted in 1911 because of his departure from the university in protest against the policies of the Minister of Education Kasso . Master examinations were passed to him at Kazan University , after which he received the title of master and the position of privat-docent .

In the period from 1912 to 1914 in Leipzig he worked on the dissertation “Relative invalidity of transactions”, which was not defended, although it was partially published.

In 1917, he became a professor at the Department of Commercial Law of Moscow University, and since 1919, at the same time, a professor and head of the department of civil law at the Moscow Institute of National Economy , and during 1919-1921 he was rector of this institute. At the same time, he was a professor at the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade, chairman of the Foreign Trade Arbitration Commission, and a consultant to the legal department of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. He also took an active part in the creation of the first Labor Code of 1922.

In the period from 1921 to 1936, D. M. Genkin worked as part of a system of commercial cooperation, wrote a number of books and articles.

Since 1938 he worked at the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences, as a senior researcher, and then - head of the civil law sector. With his active participation, a draft Civil Code of the USSR was developed (subsequently the Foundations of Civil Law of the USSR and Union Republics), scientific papers and textbooks in the field of civil law were prepared.

In 1939, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic: “Legal regulation of labor in commercial cooperation”, in which he paid much attention to the essence of labor law and its relationship with civil law.

In 1941-1942, D.M. Genkin was a member of the Supreme Court of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

D.M. Genkin wrote about 200 works on the theory of civil law, legal issues of foreign trade, legal regulation of industrial enterprises.

He was one of the initiators of the discussion about the system of Soviet law and the place in it of civil law, in which his position changed from the pre-war period to the first half of the 1950s. At first, he proceeded from the fact that the law should be divided into branches “depending on those aspects of public life that these branches of law are called upon to regulate,” and not on the method of legal regulation, since the features of the latter, as he believed, “relate to superstructural phenomena ". Subsequently, he began to argue that the method of legal regulation of property relations, determined by the subject of regulation, acts as an additional criterion for determining the scope of civil law. And accordingly, the sphere of civil law includes exclusively property relations arising in connection with the equivalent civil exchange, the participants of which are in equal standing. This distinguishes them from administrative-legal relations in which one side, as a rule, is subordinate to the other. Property relations related to other public relations cannot be divided and for this reason are regulated by other branches of law - labor and family.

Property relations that are not directly or indirectly influenced by the law of value and the principle of equivalence (for example, land, finance), according to Genkin, are regulated not by civil, but by other branches of law.

In his monograph “Property right in the USSR” he put forward the thesis that the property right cannot be characterized as an appropriation, since it is not the appropriation (production) itself, but its condition. In his opinion, the powers of possession, use and disposal in a socialist society in different forms of ownership are different, which means transferring only the title of this right, and not its content, during the transfer of ownership.

Of considerable interest are the views of D. M. Genkin on the problem of the correlation of the right of state ownership and the powers of state organizations to the property assigned to them. Initially, he defended the point of view that the ownership, use and disposal powers exercised by a state organization - a legal entity - in relation to the property assigned to it, are a form of government activity in circulation, due to the law of value in society. State bodies - legal entities cannot possess any powers not inherent in the state itself, since such possession as a result could lead to the opposition of the state body to the state.

After the adoption of the Fundamentals of Civil Legislation of 1961, which recognized the right of ownership, use and disposal of property by organizations on the basis of operational management, this operational management right began to be interpreted by him as a subjective right consisting in the exercise by an entity of his powers, in particular the rights of an organization to own, use and the disposal of property assigned to it. The right of operational management, as well as the right of ownership, is an absolute right, but if the rights of the owner are independent, then the right of operational management is derivative and dependent on the right of ownership. The will of an organization having property under the right of operational management in civil relations is limited by the will of the owner who formed it.

Also, if the powers of the state as the owner can be realized on the basis of the norms of various branches of law, then the powers of the right of operational management are aimed primarily at the implementation of civil law relations.

Exploring the right of personal property in the USSR, Genkin pointed to its consumer nature and productivity of socialist property. At the same time, he interpreted the norms of civil law outlining the limits of possession of property by citizens, not as a restriction, but as a definition of the content of the right of personal property.

Of considerable value is its classification of subjective rights and judgments on the nature of property rights.

All subjective rights are divided by him into three groups. The first includes those that arise directly from the rule of law and exist outside the legal relationship (political rights). In the second, those that, although they arise when there is a legal fact, but exist outside the relationship (absolute rights). As an absolute subjective law D.M. Genkin determined ownership. And in the third group, they included subjective rights arising with the onset of a legal fact and existing in the legal relationship (relative rights, including the right of the creditor in the obligation).

The specifics of absolute subjective rights, including property rights, according to D.M. Genkina, consists in the fact that in them the law can be both an obligation, which is impossible in relative subjective rights.

Developing a question about the nature of a legal entity, D.M. Genkin noted that a legal entity as a social reality cannot be identified with a collective. He proceeded from the fact that the external unity of a legal entity does not at all require its internal unity and differences in it should not affect the question of the legal personality of the organization. It follows that legal entities can also be recognized as organizations whose property outside acts as a single, and inside as a common (shared or joint property). Turning to the problem of liability for damage caused by failure to fulfill obligations, D.M. Genkin noted that the release from liability, that is, the recognition that the damage occurred not through the fault of the debtor, but as a result of the “incident” (incident), should be based on an objective criterion - an objective measure of care that the debtor should have shown in these specific conditions.

He made an attempt to distinguish between incident and force majeure on the basis of the philosophical division of causal relationships into necessary and random. If a case means the absence of any guilt (guilt and case are among the necessary causality), then force majeure is associated with the concept of random causality. Moreover, as noted by D.M. Genkin, as a result of cognition and active influence on human nature, “accidentally caused may subsequently be necessary - causal, and in connection with this, what was once considered force majeure, can be further attributed to the concept of a simple case, or even to wine. ”

Significant in the scientific activity of D.M. Genkin is occupied with historical research. So, he wrote the chapter in the book “History of Soviet Civil Law”, which he devoted to the history of property law. He divided it into two phases, in the first of which various types of property are still preserved, in the second - socialist property is already recognized as the dominant type of property. Moreover, the entire history of property rights in the USSR for the noted period falls into the following stages:

• the conquest of Soviet power
• Civil War and Intervention
• transition to peaceful work to restore the national economy
• socialist reconstruction of the national economy
• the period of completion of the construction of a socialist society and the implementation of the Stalinist constitution
• period of World War II and post-war socialist construction

Stage of features of the development of property legislation during the Great October Socialist Revolution Genkin sees, first of all, in the nationalization of land, mineral resources, forests and waters, large and medium-sized industries, banks, transport, real estate in cities, some trading enterprises, the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade and some of the most important branches of domestic trade, the establishment of local government control over urban trade, food and basic necessities, accounting for this trade and its management.

The legislation on property of the period of foreign military intervention and the Civil War was distinguished by the consolidation of the foundations of personal property of citizens, with the goal of satisfying the personal consumer needs of citizens, property related to socialist property.

Legislation on ownership of the period of transition to peaceful work on the restoration of the national economy allowed capitalist private property to a certain extent and under state control, but at the same time retained state socialist property and laid the foundations for the development of cooperative property. Also, normative legal acts reflected the unity of the state socialist property fund, the ownership of the cooperative socialist property of each cooperative organization, and the gradual transformation of citizens' private property into personal property only for means of consumption.

The legislation on property during the period of socialist reconstruction of the national economy was focused on strengthening and further rights of socialist property in two forms: state and cooperative collective farm and the final transformation of citizens 'private property rights into citizens' personal property rights to means of consumption. Significant changes compared with the previous stages have occurred in the field of personal property rights. So, in fact, provisions that partially allowed entrepreneurial private property ceased to apply. The organization of shops and benches was prohibited, the activities of resellers were prohibited, private property in industry was ruled out, the kulak in agriculture was eliminated.

Legislation on property during the period of completion of the construction of a socialist society and the implementation of the Stalinist constitution is based on the consolidation of socialist property, which has the form of either state ownership or cooperative collective farm property, as well as personal property of citizens and personal property of the collective farm yard.

The legislation on property of the period of the Great Patriotic War and post-war socialist construction basically had the character of administrative-planning decisions on the relocation of production, the creation of new enterprises, the regulation of production and distribution of products. The responsibility for the encroachment on socialist property was also strengthened. In particular, in addition to the criminal, increased liability was established for theft, shortage and abuse of goods.

D.M. Genkin conducted extensive work on the translation of foreign civilian literature. Together with I.B. Novitsky, he prepared a Russian translation of the first volume of the famous Course of German Civil Law L. Ennekzerus (1949-1950). On his initiative, under his editorship and forewords, a collection of normative acts on the civil law of Bulgaria (1952) and a textbook of civil law of the GDR (1959) were published in Russian.

Total D.M. Genkin wrote about 200 works of various profiles. The most significant of them:

Collection of articles on civil and commercial law, Moscow 1915

Issues of civil and labor law during the Great Patriotic War, Moscow 1944

Some questions of the theory of property rights, 1959

Soviet Civil Law: A Textbook for Law Schools, Moscow 1950

The importance of applying the institution of a legal entity in foreign and domestic trade, Moscow 1955

Ownership in the USSR, Moscow 1961

Legal issues of economic calculation of state industrial enterprises, Moscow 1966

Judicial practice in civil matters during the war, Moscow 1943

Soviet labor law, Moscow 1946

Collective farm law, Moscow 1947

The history of Soviet civil law 1917-1947, Moscow 1949

Civil law of the countries of people's democracy, Moscow 1958

• Volkov V.A., Kulikova M.V., Loginov V.S. Moscow professors of the 18th - early 20th centuries. Humanities and social sciences. - M .: Janus-K: Moscow textbooks and cartolithography, 2006. - P. 61. - 300 p. - 2000 copies. - ISBN 5-8037-0164-5.
• Genkin, Dmitry Mikhailovich - article from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia

• Genkin Dmitry Mikhailovich (neopr.) . Chronicle of Moscow University . Date of treatment December 22, 2017.
• Curriculum Vitae on the site "Legal Russia"
• Genkin D. M. Trade Credit Ratings: Legal Research