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

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse world-view and mythological expressions in Russian and Soviet Constitutional acts that implicitly or explicitly refer to any kind of idea legitimising the shape of the state, its political system or the nature of political power. The object of the argument will be exclusively such provisions of fundamental laws which: (1) having neither a purely regulatory nor a purely programmatic character, model mental representations of the world of the legal text by reference to ‘situationally transcendent’ ideas in Mannheim’s sense (i.e. ideas which refer to a reality different from the perceived one; those that sketch visions alternative to it); (2) justify the content of the legal provision by means of such imagery, without being part of the preamble or any different integral part of the Constitution, characterised by a different ontology of the text; (3) justify the content of provisions linked to political power and/or the nature of the state. The materials of the analysis are: Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire of 1906, the Constitutional texts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of 1924, 1936 and 1977, and the current Constitution of the Russian Federation. Consecutive Constitutions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic are also referred to. The analysed formulations, legally irrelevant in a conventional reading of a legal text, participate in the semiosis of both the provisions that contain them and the entire texts of the fundamental laws. In this way, the Constitutions incorporate into their complex of meanings either religious expressions, mythologised ideological figures or figures of historical memory associated with collective identity.