ABSTRACT
The traditional Russian attitude toward the law was ambivalent at best. From the time of Peter the Great the tsars established a governmental system designed to serve the will of the center.2 Law was identified with the head of state rather than with legal precepts.3 Although during each reign the failure to codify the law was recognized as a problem, the tsars drew back from permitting the establishment of an overarching theory of law. To acknowledge any principle of authority higher than the autocracy itself was unacceptable. Having refused to build a codified law based on a general theory oflaw (pravo), the autocracy resorted to the solution of issuing regulations (zakony) to deal with every problem. Thus Marc Raeff has described the nineteenth-century Russian Empire as a Reglamentstaat, with a multitude of separate written regulations.4
