№ 1 - 2006
Brinkman von A.
Unauthoritative Laws (To the Psychology of Russian Executive Power) (Foreword by I.L. Belenky)

The article by A. von Brinkman, a Russian jurist of the beginning of the 20th century, which originally appeared in the “Russkaya mysl” journal in 1907 (its republication is now presented for the readers of this issue of the Polis), contains the formulation of an original vision of the course of our country’s history – vision unordinary for the Russian historical science. The thesis of contrariety of the state power and the “soil” (“the people”), shared to this or that extent by many historiography schools, was amplified by the author, receiving additional complexity and being reinterpreted in consequence of the introduction into the coordinate system, of distinction between supreme power proper and executive (“administering”) one and, what is especially important, of ideas of political contradictions between certain particular strata of the power and society. In the article by A. von Brinkman, all this is conceptually, but, at that, metaphorically described through opposing the “oprichnina” and the “zemshchina”, the dialectics of whose relations exactly gave rise to such a significant phenomenon of New Time Russian history, as “unauthoritative laws”.