RSFSR CONSTITUTION OF 1918 AND A NEW LEGAL ORDER

The study of the first Soviet Constitution is important due to both its uniqueness and constitutional continuity. The paper considers such uniqueness manifestation of the Constitution as the conflict of ideology and law. The later Soviet constitutions retained this conflict, which proves constitutional continuity and mainstreams the study of this peculiarity of the RSFSR Constitution of 1918.

The study identified that the conflict of ideology and law in the content of the first Soviet constitution was preordained by the conditions of its origin. Prepared and adopted shortly after the revolutionary events of 1917, the Constitution recognized the political platform of the party that came into power with its directive to create a conceptually different social system where there will be neither private ownership for production means with its exploitation nor the state-legal organization itself.      

The analysis of the conflict of ideology and law in the content of the first Soviet Constitution allowed identifying the non-legal elements that show the degradation of its legal nature. The paper gives the arguments for the counting among non-legal elements such constitutional statements as the establishment of a dictatorship not presenting the majority rule; different extent of political freedom for the citizens of the Russian Republic; the introduction of the category of the non-voters; legalization of class bullying; focus on bullying when destructing the former and constructing the basics of the new social order.     

The main idea of the paper is the influence of constitutional specifics on the social and legal life of after-October Russia and, in particular, on such legal phenomenon as legal order. When studying constitutional specifics and its influence on the legal order, the author used various approaches to the law and various types of legal consciousness offered by the contemporary philosophy. According to the non-positivistic approach to the law, the author, for the first time, concludes on the significance of the RSFSR Constitution of 1918 for the formation of a new legal order which is not consistent with the lawful one.