ABSTRACT
A legal (positivist) state is not necessarily a democratic one, but a democratic state is by definition governed by the rule of law. The task facing the Russian legal system was nothing short of revolutionary. The old Bolshevik system of jurisprudence, and the principles on which it was based, were clearly inadequate for a democratic marketbased society, and thus a new system in its entirety had to be created. Even though the constitution-adopting process was marked by crisis, the reform of the legal system was far more evolutionary and in the event judicial reform moved slowly. Freed from communism, criminality rose to the surface, while the traditional meta-corruption (of the system) took radically new forms during the grand privatisation of state assets in the 1990s. The security apparatus lost some of the prominence it had enjoyed in the communist years, but remained a significant presence. Progress towards the defence of human rights was patchy, with security agencies pursuing some high profile persecutions of civic activists.
