Russian Statehood: From the Principle of Estate to National Representation

Abstract

The Constitution of the Russian Federation states that “the Russian Federation, united by a thousand-year history, preserving the memory of our ancestors who passed on to us the ideals and faith in God, as well as continuity in the development of the Russian state, recognizes the historically formed state unity.” This directs the historical and legal community of scientists to reconstruct the true history of the national state and law, for which it is necessary to clarify certain provisions, which determines the clarification and concretization of established definitions. We consider the genesis of Russian statehood from estate representation to national representation to be one of the little-studied problems. There are still works whose authors, analyzing the domestic policy of the Russian Empire and the USSR, distort historical reality, describing the “accursed tsarist past and the Soviet period”, and see the history of the peoples of the Caucasus under the “Russian yoke”. The author believes that at the heart of the Russian state in different periods of its existence, statehood was built in such a way as to express the aspirations of all categories of subjects or citizens, nations and nationalities. The state-forming Russian people showed feelings of fraternal involvement and contributed to their legal acculturation, which was the basis for the creation of Russia as a state-civilization.