Patent Debates on Invention from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union

Aiming to develop its nascent industrial economy, in 1896 Imperial Russia adopted a new patent system that borrowed substantially from the German precedent. Yet this system was never embraced with enthusiasm by Russians since in legal, economic, and social terms Russian inventors faced many difficulties casting inventive activity in terms of Patent Office regulations. A series of Imperial and then Soviet patent laws were thus not effective in economic development. Eventually the Soviets would hold up “worker inventiveness” as the vital quality that would thrive under new production relations so thoroughly just and rational as to render patents superfluous. While the 1924 patent law would be a pragmatic concession to European industrial politics, the 1931 statute would reassert the primacy of state enterprises over patent holders, but even this truly Soviet law continued to pay lip service to the durable concern for inventors’ creative authorship.