Publications

This article analyzes the origins of the concept of symphonia, its historical development, and its utilization by the Russian Orthodox Church as a normative ideal for church-state relations. In various historical contexts, this concept has referred to different normative requirements; it relied on different paradigms in Byzantium and in medieval Russia and it acquired new meanings in Imperial Russia. The reinterpretations of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to legitimize its position in the political life of contemporary Russia take this concept far from its original meaning. Using methods from the history of concepts of, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, the author considers how the semantic transformations of symphonia in modern contexts by the Russian Orthodox Church lead to a hollowing of this concept. This conception is hardly reconcilable with the normative logic of the actual Russian political and legal systems.

This volume examines the elements of formalism and decisionism in Russian legal thinking and, also, the impact of conservatism on the interplay of these elements. The actual conservative narratives, about the distinctiveness of Russian law, reveal certain features of the intellectual culture that is transmitted in legal education, scholarship and practice. These narratives are based on the idea of sovereignty understood as legal omnipotence of the state. References to sovereignty justify the requirement of legality in the sense of fidelity to the letter of the law. They also often serve as a rationale for crafting exceptions to constitutional non-discrimination principles as they are applied to political, religious, sexual and other minorities.

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In his monograph The Burden of the Empire. The Administrative Policy of Russia in Central Asia. Second Half of the 19th Century, D. V. Vasilyev analyses imperial Russian policy in the region, focusing on the administration of the steppe provinces and Russian Turkestan between 1865 and 1891. This approach allows the author to observe the evolution of views of the central and regional authorities responsible for the administration of these regions and compare broader imperial policy. The monograph is innovative, as it provides a parallel examination of Russian policy in the steppe provinces and in Russian Turkestan, with the author analysing draft regulations in chronological order. The measures taken to adapt the administrative system in both regions are considered at specific stages of their development. Vasilyev refers to new archival materials, which should be of interest both to researchers of the imperial Russian policy in Central Asia and specialists in the administrative and legal history of the Russian state. Careful and comprehensive analysis of the sources offers the reader an informed perspective on these documents and makes it possible to trace specific aspects and changes in imperial policy.

This essay examines methodological nuances connected with historical research of Russian law. These nuances are studied against the backdrop of two books published respectively by Professor Ferdinand Feldbrugge and Professor William Pomeranz on Russian legal history. The methods employed by these authors reveal specific features of Russian legal language and mentality which can be helpful in explaining the dissimilarities between legal and political developments in Russia and the West. They place particular emphasis on the development of legal language and productively analyze many current issues of Russian law through the lens of history of concepts. These books are evaluated as important contributions to comparative analysis of Russian and Western legal cultures. The key events of Russian legal history are considered in a perspective that sheds light on the current challenges faced by Russian law.

This contribution analyses the features of Russian legal culture that – in the author’s opinion – prevent this culture from acceptance of human rights in their liberal reading. These features are examined through the lenses of the conceptual history. The positivist intellectual tradition of conceptualising law in terms of state power led to the priority of state commands over natural rights: the former define the extent to which the latter are legal. With this, human rights defined by the international community or by civil society cannot work as checks and balances against the state and its arbitrary power. This perception of rights fits the political autocracy very well, which is conceptualised in Russian legal scholarship in terms of sovereignty. The author argues that sovereignty, as it is perceived in the epistemic community of Russian lawyers, conceptually excludes the priority of human rights. Because of this, the argument of sovereignty unsurprisingly became one of the cornerstones of the current ideology in Russia, and continues to feed interpretative controversies about human rights between Russian and other epistemic communities.

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This paper deals with the book "The Art to Be a Jugde" by the Canadian author Louis Le Bel. This author demonstrates that judicial decision-making cannot be taken as a mechanical one - a judge has to understand the nature of the contentious situation and to evaluate consequences of her decision not only for the parties to the process but also for the entire society. 

The article is a survey of the Russian translation of “Laws of the Great Ming dynasty” in four volumes published since 1997 to 2019. The introduction of this legal monument to the Russian scientific society is of great importance as it substantially expands contemporary idea on Chinese traditional legal system and meets a lack in the history of law of China in 14th–17th cc. To survey the legal monument there special legal scientific methods were used. Historical legal approach allowed to trace the creation and acting of this codification in the specific historical circumstances, value its urgency for the epoch of Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Comparative legal method gave an opportunity to compare this legal monument with other codifications of traditional Chinese law since the ancient times to the legislation of Qing, last dynasty of the imperial China (1644–1911). Formal legal approach provided the analysis of the legal technique of the document, specific features of its structure and content, characteristic of legal terminology, etc. The analysis allowed to appreciate the “Laws of the Great Ming dynasty” at its high value as a source on history, state and law of medieval China. It had similarities and differences with other sources of traditional Chinese law. Besides, it is of great importance for the further development of legislation of imperial China. The codification is an important document on statehood and law of the Ming China as it contains valuable information on power system and competence of authorities, basic fields of legal relations in the medieval Chinese society. Its structure is traditional (based on the example of codification of Tang dynasty, 618–907), at the same time it has larger volume and regulates new fields of legal relations, takes into account changes in the internal and externaln status of China after the expelling the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and foundation of “national” Ming dynasty. Some principles of domestic and foreign policy of Qing dynasty were legally fixed during the epoch of Ming. The analyzed legal monument is of great interest for researchers of the history of China, its state and law. In fact, each chapter as well as specific articles and supplement statements could be a subject of investigation. “Laws of the Great Ming dynasty” also could be used by lecturers of history of state and law and for students who study this discipline.

Abstract: Research objectives: This article contains a characteristic of the jurispru-dence in the Golden Horde (Ulus of Jochi). The author considers basic stages of develop-ment of the Golden Horde’s jurisprudence and uncovers its scholarly centers located within its territory. Research materials: This research was carried out on the basis of the classical and most recent works on the history of the Golden Horde and its specific aspects (including those that began to be studied by specialist only recently). It was also based on the sources including those which were introduced into scholarly circulation relatively recently; for example, works of medieval eastern authors that were not previously known to a wide range of researchers or were not typically employed as sources on the history of the Golden Horde. Novelty of the research: Following the example of specific scholars (specialists and lecturers in law), the author characterizes basic directions of the development of the Golden Horde’s jurisprudence, while analyzing academic contacts of the Golden Horde’s scholars and the process of “academic mobility”. Also, the author pays attention to the Golden Horde rulers’ support of jurisprudence and the reasons behind its flourishing in the first half of the fourteenth century and its decline by the beginning of the fifteenth century. Research results: The author has found that the Golden Horde’s jurisprudence was undoubtedly part of jurisprudence of Islamic Eurasia in general, but at the same time had specific “Golden Horde” features. These determined the basic stages and directions of its development and even had an influence on the life and activity of specific scholars. It pro-vides justification to speak of the original character of the Golden Horde’s jurisprudence and perspectives in regard to its further research: the study of the Golden Horde’s written monuments (legal and non-legal), biographies of specific scholars, etc.

One of the urgent problems requiring special research is the comprehensive crisis of legitimacy that accompanies globalization, and one of the manifestations of which is the fragmentation of the phenomenon of legitimacy due to the fragmentation of the mechanisms of legitimation associated with different aspects of legitimacy being: power legitimacy, religion legitimacy, moral legitimacy, etc. State power legitimacy crisis has political and communicative grounds, such as: problematization of state sovereignty existence and state power existence; expanding political and non-political actors will to power; partial or complete lack of political will among citizens, which in turn is caused by a low level of public involvement in politics, which in turn is due to the usual functioning of political communication. The rules of language games (political, legal, cultural) are not created by the participants themselves in the result of a consensus-communicative discourse, but are set from the outside and are no longer shared by all members of a particular communicative community. The shaking of habitual traditions and norms of behavior leads to the imposed rules rejection and disruption of the consensus-communicative public discourse mechanisms functioning. These circumstances require a rethinking of the very phenomenon of power and the development of strategies for overcoming the crisis. From the point of view of a deliberative strategy (J. Rawls, J. Cohen, J. Habermas, S. Benhabib), the organization of a communicative power could become a way out of the crisis. This process requires all interested in the decision parties consensus expression. According to the agonistic strategy (C. Mouff), power is not interpreted as a purely external relation that develops between two given identities, but as something that establishes these identities themselves. According to J. Rawls and J. Habermas, it is necessary to fi nd a way to eliminate power, because the more democratic a society is, the less power is present in its social relations. But according to C. Mouff, power relations are the basis of social relations, and the main issue of democratic politics is not how to eliminate power, but how to create such forms of power that could be more compatible with democratic values. Both approaches have the ability to bring the legitimacy of power out of the crisis, as long as the authorities will demonstrate its creative potential , which consists in protecting the fundamental rights of citizens; harmonious combination of public and private spheres; freedom realization.

Objective: A study of the Golden Horde historical sources of the midfourteenth century containing information on the history of law and trials in the Golden Horde, providing a comparison of the actions of the Golden Horde authorities with similar actions taken in other countries of that time. This includes a general assessment of the standards of the Golden Horde proceedings in the period under study. Research materials: The Golden Horde historical sources, namely, legal documents from the so-called “Venetian collection”, along with other sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries related to the proceedings of damages at the international level, including acts of the Venetian colonies of the Black Sea and medieval Rus’ian charters. Novelty of the research: This study is the first attempt both at a historical and legal analysis of the Golden Horde sources containing information about trials, as well as a comparative analysis of the actions of the judiciary at different stages of civil litigation which included international participation in the Golden Horde and contemporary states. Research results: The author reconstructed the main stages of the civil process in the Golden Horde (from filing a lawsuit to a court decision) and revealed the specifics of a particular case in connection with the participation of a foreign element, in addition to its public and legal nature (the lawsuit was not against private individuals, but against the state, i.e. the Venetian Republic). The author established that all procedural actions performed by the Golden Horde authorities in the course of the proceedings, as well as those to ensure the enforcement of the decision, had analogues in the procedural practice of other states that had interests in the Black Sea in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Accordingly, the author concluded there existed a high level of judicial practice in the Golden Horde, including elements which derived from foreign experience.

One of the first stages of the knowledge of law in the history of ideas was the realization that the world, both physical and social, is ordered in a certain way and that the way in which this ordering occurs is not accidental. Whether the ordering comes from the will of gods or rulers, whether it is the result of a natural or social law, whether it is a manifestation of the moral nature of man, etc. - These questions have been discussed in one way or another in connection with the basic question of the philosophy of law about the conditions of the binding power of law. In this connection, it is not surprising that the notion of "order" is one of the central concepts in the philosophy of law.

The article analyses the views of Russian researchers on the questions of the evolution of the statehood and law of the Khanate of Sibir. The authors note that the fifty years of studying this problem saw a transition from the efforts characteristic of the Soviet historical science to transfer the theory of feudalism to the Siberian realities to the understanding that the analogies of the state institutions should be searched within the framework of the Horde heritage and its inertia in the post-Horde world (V.V. Trepavlov, D.М. Iskhakov). Despite this positive shift of research focus, the analogy method has led to the situation that some of the proposed schemas lack the understanding of the Siberian specifics, whose detection is difficult because of the poor source base. The efforts to solve these contradictions were made by using neo-evolutional theories in the study of nomadic societies, including archeological studies on the monuments of the Khanate of Sibir used as the materials (S.F. Tataurov, А.V. Matveev). The proposed new approaches allowed reconstructing the administration apparatus as a whole (khan, land assembly, prime minister (bek), qarachi or qarachi union, princes and murzas) and revealing the specific origin and fates of the representatives of the Siberian aristocracy (V.V. Trepavlov, D.N. Maslyuzhenko). Different schemas of interrelations of the central and local powers and their manifestations in the distribution of fortified fortresses were revealed (S.F. Tataurov, А.V. Matveev, S.А. Chernyshov). A new trend in the research was the determination of the composition of the courts of the Kuchum dynasty that happened to be in Muscovy by capture or departure (А.V. Belyakov). In these conditions, Siberian tsarevitches became the center of attraction for other natives of Siberia; this gives new opportunities in the study of the statehood of the Khanate of Sibir when doing micro-historical work with unpublished sources from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. It is this direction that is the most perspective for further work. Within the studies of the law of the Khanate of Sibir, the range of sources has been detected that can be used to conduct a deeper study of legal institutions, in particular, the question of the importance of the real detection of the balance of ordinary and sharia law on its territory has been raised. A special role in the reconstruction of legal institutions belongs to the study of tax relations and the institution of Tarkhanate, connected with it, as well as trade regulation which obviously played a significant role in the history of the Khanate. The historiographical errors revealed during this research give reason to revisit some studied questions taking into account the latest groundwork in the field of the usage of interdisciplinary approach.

The book analyzes the legal aspects of the interaction between the Russian empire and the states of Central Asia since the early 18th century to 1917. The author describes the main stages of Russian influence on the legal development of the Central Asian khanates, outlining the main directions of this influence. He focuses on the ways and methods of the Russian legal policy employed in the Central Asian khanates placed under the Russian protectorate. He also explores the problem of the Russian legal policy implemented in the Central Asian regions with special legal status as well as under conditions of martial law, revolutionary situation, etc. The research undertaken by the author allows understanding of the historical experience of the integration within the Eurasian space of which the next stage is being actively realized today as well as evaluating the efficiency, strengths and weaknesses of the legal means of this integration in the 18th through the early 20th centuries.
The book is designed for specialists in the fields of history of state and law, Russian history, Eastern studies, political science, as well as for undergraduate students majoring in the aforementioned specialties.