ABSTRACT
The post-Soviet design of the complaint mechanism combines both Soviet and Tsarist features. The post-Soviet complaint mechanism has a Soviet-type structure involving multilevel bureaucracy at all government levels. The transformations of recent years clearly reveal a progression towards a strengthening of the procuracy and deliberate weakening of the Ombudsman’s position. The judicial reform and strengthening of legal institutions left to the mechanism of complaints the role of a marginal, weakly effective administrative way of solving problems. The post-socialist judicial reforms were launched to strengthen juridical instruments and to restructure the entire Soviet judiciary on the model of European justice. The first post-Soviet innovations in the field of administrative justice showed definite signs of legal modernization. As post-Soviet Russia took measures to build a system of administrative justice, so the concepts of “complaint” and “complaint procedure” resumed their special position in legislation. There was no system of administrative courts established in post-socialist Russia.
