Russian Liberalism and the Rule of Law: Notes from Underground

This essay aims at examining the development in Imperial Russia of the scholarly debate about the concept of pravovoe gosudarstvo, usually understood as the counterpart of the notions of the rule of law and Rechsstaat. The time span taken into consideration covers the years following the judicial reform of 1865 up to 1915. In fact, the crucial moments of the debate came immediately before and after the introduction of the 1906 Constitution. Since the notion of pravovoe gosudarstvo is developed much more in the legal scholarship of the period, rather than in the practice of law, this chapter is based largely on the scholarly works of that time. Over time, however, the notion has aged and withered away. Even before it was fully developed in the political sphere, con!dence in the Western model of a state based on the rule of law was undermined by new doctrines such as the sociological analysis of law and Marxist scienti!c materialism, which resolutely attracted the Russian intelligentsia at the turn of the century. The impossibility of setting the doctrinal concept of pravovoe gosudarstvo into action because of the !asco of the 1906 Constitution, led to a rapid impoverishment of liberalism. At the turn of the century, the faith of old liberals, such as Boris Chicherin, in the pravovoe gosudarstvo was replaced by hopes for a state that was not only pravovoe, but also, and above all, fair (spravedlivoye).