Discreet Signs of the Supreme Idea: On Certain Transcendent Categories in Russian and Soviet Constitutional Law (original) (raw)

Amendments of 2020 to the Russian Constitution as an Update to Its Symbolic and Identity Programme

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2021

In the renewed Russian Fundamental Law, in addition to a number of provisions introducing changes to the political system, there are also statements of programmatic importance, as well as several provisions with symbolic and identity function. In this article these provisions are subject to functional and semiotic-cultural analysis. Particular emphasis has been placed on legally irrelevant content transmitted by the new regulations, on their semantic connections with the content of the preamble and on their cultural context. The research procedure carried out allows us to state that, compared with the 1993 text, the Russian Constitution in its current version participates to a much greater extent in the complex system of transmission of symbolic content, as well as the narratives that contribute to social memory, cultural and historical identity. In doing so, it goes beyond its genre limitations, opening the basic text to the functions assigned to the preamble. In the fragments I have analysed in the paper there are undoubtedly functional and genre disturbances, and with them changes the mode of semiosis of the legal text, both in its normative and programmatic form. Renewed Constitution is the case in which a legal text, by its very nature designing the possible future world, does so through ideas about the past.

Osipov I., Smorgunov L. Russian Constitutionalism. In: The Concept of Constitution in the History of Political Thought. Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz, Bogdan Szlachta (Eds.) – Berlin: De Grueter Open, 2017, p. 125-145.

Osipov I., Smorgunov L. Russian Constitutionalism. In: The Concept of Constitution in the History of Political Thought. Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz, Bogdan Szlachta (Eds.) – Berlin: De Grueter Open, 2017, p. 125-145. , 2017

In Russia, the constitutional ideas emerged in the first half of the 17th century were developed to some extent in the 18th century, in particular during the enlightened monarchy of Catherine II, and became more or less completely established in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the availability of constitutions during the Soviet period, constitutionalism developed as a theoretical movement and constitution action as late as the 1960s and thereafter, albeit its philosophical and ideological foundations had been laid by the constitutions of the 1920s and 1930s (and related debates). Some scholars refer to the “nominal constitutionalism” during the Soviet times, but the authors see this as roughening the situation and consider Soviet constitutionalism as a freestanding rather than a nominal phenomenon. In addition to the official Soviet constitutionalism, there were constitutional ideas of the dissident movement and legal liberalism during the perestroika period, which, in a sense, create a platform for the modern constitutionalism. However, the adoption and application of the Constitution of 1993 added special dynamics to the understanding of the modern constitutionalism in Russia. In a sense, the authors of the article employ the methodological approach of “path dependence,” choosing to analyze the three main periods of Russian constitutionalism, when it became not just a wish, but was put into political practice. In this regard, the article introduces the idea that Russian constitutionalism expresses a tendency of a political rather than a legal constitution.

Philosophy of law in the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies

Acta Juridica Hungarica, 2013

The fate of Marxism in the Soviet Union and the people's democracies as the former's extension owing to post-WWII occupation was from the beginning sealed by Bolshevism, that is, the politico-ideological domination and use of the scholarly domain as well, made to self-close in a merely justifi catory role. There may have been attempts at opening, even if only conceivable within-i.e. preserving at the same time-this framework function. In the present conspectus, the limiting positions are occupied by the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, completed by after-1968 Czechoslovakia, as well as Yugoslavia and pre-1968 Czechoslovakia, representing the substitute-to-religion dogmatic side, exclusively politically motivated in the former and subordinated to a humanising tendency in the latter case, on the one hand, and Poland, dedicated to a purely analytical approach, in which Marxism has simply no relevance, on the other. Hungary, treated in an earlier paper by the author, was in-between, taking Marxism seriously but mostly as a methodology, and thereby able to foster live debates. All that notwithstanding, there has been quite a few progressive moves also in Romania and Bulgaria in this specifi c academic fi eld. Turning topoi of the discussions were, chronologically but recurrent transubstantiatedly, the exclusivity of Vyshinsky's socialist normativism, the consequences ensuing from the law's superstructural nature, the discontinuity vs. continuity of law in historical development, and, in the background, the dilemma of the ontological/epistemological understanding of Marxism, the latter standing for a rigid Leninist reducibility of law to its material substratum as the product of sheer refl ection, and the former enabling to develop the law's relative autonomy as in Lukács' posthumous ontology. On the fi nal analysis, all these forced paths made a whole region's efforts to be belated as compared to international developments, the fact notwithstanding those outstanding achievements were born especially on the fi elds of legal ontology and sociology, as well as the legal methodology and particularly that of the comparison of laws.

A Sociological Approach to the Russian Constitution

This article promotes a distinctive sociological interpretation of the Russian Constitution. Much literature on Russian constitutional law is defined by the claim that the Constitution has little factual reality and limited foundation in society. This article challenges this view on two grounds. It argues that there are two deep-lying social processes that underlie the Constitution, and condition its evolution: the Constitution is shaped (a) by the importance of constitutional law for the stabilization of governance structures; (b) by the resultant relative autonomy of judicial practices, which means that legal exchanges (especially litigation) have formative impact on the constitutional order. On both grounds, the Russian Constitution is locked into cycles of societal norm construction. To understand the sociological linkages in which the constitution is located, we require a complex construction of society, and we need to observe how different practices within the legal system affect and even produce constitutional laws. Keywords sociology of constitutional law – Russian constitution – judicial politics – litigation

The Legal Status of an Individual in Russian Scientific, Political and Legal Doctrines

WISDOM, 2021

The article explores the notion and peculiarities of the legal status of the individual in the Russian scientific, political and legal doctrines in the context of Philosophy of Law. In the given research, the author, based on the study of the materials of the history of legal-political thought, not only reveals the peculiarities of the legal status of the individual in the Philosophy of Law but also implements versatile, holistic, systematic (methodical) analysis of content and of the concept “legal status of the individual”. Summing up the investigated issues, the author came to the conclusion that the scientific views and developments of Russian jurists (from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century) had a tremendous impact on the development of the legal status of the individual, and civil society, as well as the relationship between the state and the individual. Therefore, theoretical and practical research of the problems of the development of the legal ...

Critical Legal Theory in Central and Eastern Europe [Special issue of "Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica" 89/2019]

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica, 2019

The present special issue has the ambition of contributing to the further development of critical legal theory of a specific, Central and Eastern European strand, paying attention to the characteristic features of the legal life of our region. The nine papers in this volume can be divided into four distinct groups, addressing issues of our current predicament and its methodological implications (papers by Cercel, Tacik and Mercescu); questions of Central and Eastern European legal identity (paper by myself and by Nazmutdinov); theoretical and philosophical issues particularly in the contemporary Central and Eastern European context (papers by Fusco and Reid); and finally, questions of law and ideology in Central and Eastern Europe analysed through the lens of case studies from various areas of positive law (papers by Kuźmicka-Sulikowska and Rudt).The main question that we want to address is the methodology of critical legal theory as applied to the specific context of Central and Ea...

Towards a Conceptual-Historical Critique of the Essentialist and Teleological Interpretations of Russian History* ** Part 1

Quaestio Rossica, 2023

The author discusses some of the dominant assertions in the literature on Russian history. One of them is the disqualification of the myth of the benevolent tsar as “false”. This disqualification is accompanied by the formulas “naïve or popular monarchism”, which designate the “pre-scientific illusions” that would have guided the collective movements of resistance to autocracy. Given the importance of collective representations of the tsar and power in Russian history, the theoretical premises on which the above-mentioned disqualifications are based affect the general interpretation of this history, for example the conception of the Russian people as “passive”. The author proposes to abandon this positivist scaffolding and approach the sources from other theoretical perspectives, in particular conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), to pose a radically different question: what truth is contained in the myth of the benevolent tsar and to reconstruct, against the essentialist and teleological vision, the historicity of the collective resistance to power in Russia. The first part studies the genealogy of the expression samozvan/ets/stvo (self-appointment), its original meaning – individual initiative against divine appointment – and its functions in the autocratic political paradigm. The lack of heuristic value of the formulas of “popular, or naïve monarchism,the logic of which is to deprive the most oppressed segments of the population of their culture and language, is emphasized. Keywords: Resistance to power, popular/naïve monarchism, positivist historiography, essentialism, teleology, conceptual history