The problem of the supreme political authority in the Ancient Rus’ in the works of russian émigré legal historians in harbin

Abstract

The paper deals with the views of Russian émigré historians of law in Harbin (G.G. Telberg, K.I. Zaitsev, N.E. Esperov) regarding the supreme authority in the Ancient Rus’. The author analyses supreme authority institutes, such as princely power, veche, boyar (princely) duma, and quite a broad range of related historiography problems, demonstrating what those historians, who taught at the Faculty of Law at Harbin University in the 1920–30s, had in common and in what ways they differed in their approaches, as well as finding in their works traces of prerevolutionary historiographical agenda and outlining their own ways of thinking that were brought to an end by the WWII. The conclusion is that, even though they belonged to different schools of thought and generations, the Russian historians of law who ended up in Harbin agreed on the tripartite structure of the supreme authority in the Ancient Rus’. Refs 18.