Civil Turnover

the body of legal facts (planned and other administrative acts, transactions, events, and other acts that constitute rights) and the legal relations arising from them, by virtue of which property is transferred from one legal person to another. In the USSR the parties to civil turnover may be socialist organizations (legal persons) and citizens. Civil turnover also includes relations involving the completion of work and rendering of services.

Civil turnover includes the transfer of property from one person to another both with and without compensation. Thus, socialist civil turnover includes not only circulation of merchandise—consumer goods and the means of production (industrial and technical goods), which are bought and sold for money—but also gratuitous assignments of property (for example, the transfer of property between citizens by a contract of gift or from one state agency to another by the order of authorized planning and controlling agencies). Likewise, civil turnover includes not only the assignment of property from one person to another in terms of ownership or effective management but also the transfer of property for temporary possession and use by another person (for example, for safekeeping). The transfer of property from one person to another as compensation for property damages is also a form of civil turnover.

A distinctive characteristic of Soviet civil turnover is the equality of the parties involved, regardless of what basis (an act authorized by a planning agency or an ordinary legal transaction) is used to effect the transfer of property. The types of transactions that are the basis of civil turnover differ according to the type of property and are defined by the socioeconomic purpose of the property. Thus, for example, land and its mineral wealth, waters, and forests, which are the exclusive property of the state, may be assigned only for use. State-owned buildings, structures, and enterprises (with exceptions indicated by the law) are not subject to purchase and sale. This kind of property, as well as other property that is part of the fixed assets, may not be the subject of lien or the claims of creditors. The range of transactions related to commodity production is significantly broader.

In bourgeois countries the concept of civil turnover coincides with the concept of private turnover, because every kind of property (with the exception of so-called public property, including squares, streets, and monuments and property owned exclusively by the bourgeois state) is a commodity and may be the object of private property and subject to capitalist turnover.