Legal progress in theoretical and law and cultutal measurement
The article examines various approaches to the concept and nature of legal progress using the most appropriate tools for this: comparative legal and comparative-historical methods, which enabled the authors to disclose its doctrinal and substantive foundations in a broad right-cultural domestic and western field. The authors in the article show different approaches to understanding this category in the context of the evolution of ideas belonging to both Western European and Russian thinkers. At the same time, the main focus is on the branch of ideas about legal progress within the framework of the domestic state-legal field. In the course of the research, the article reveals the factors that influence the understanding and assessment of legal progress in the history of Russian law and the state. The authors proceed from the hypothesis that legal progress should be viewed as a process of development of legal forms, institutions, relations, during which the subjects of the national legal life strive to achieve stability, balance of all components of the legal system, to its effective functioning, to achieve the primary objectives of the legal regulation. The author substantiates the position according to which in the history of the national law and the state several breakthrough moments, a kind of «pain points» can be underlined, which nevertheless stimulated the further development of both legal and political institutions, led them to new qualitative characteristics. These include the adoption of Christianity in 988, the formation of the Moscow kingdom on the idea of «Moscow is the third Rome», a church schism in the mid-17th century, the reforms of Peter the Great, the revolution of 1917, and the stage of the post-Soviet development of the state.