THE MECHANISM OF GOVERNMENT LEGITIMACY IN THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL AREA OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
He article analyses the process of government legitimacy in the Russian empire from the XVIII - to the beginning of the XX centuries. The author develops the argument that the source of the power in the empire was a ruling institute of bureaucracy in the frame of a class structurisation of society but not the trust of the people. Investigating the subject of scientific work dialectically, the author uses comparative legal, historic legal and systemic structural methods of perception. The author argues that in the system the empire-bureaucracy-population the functionality of the imperial state always depended on the ability of the administrative elite to understand the instruments of the government legitimacy and to keep a distance between themselves, subordinated population and local management. The evolution of the empire was closely connected with contradictory factors - with a superstructural role of bureaucracy and with its need to become part of the political sphere of a society because the state monopolised legitimate violence. The author concludes that the following ordinary mechanisms of the Russian empire's function gradually lost its importance as the main principles of the state and delegitimised the government, namely: a sacral character of the monarch's power, differentiation of the power and the system of regional government, collectivity and legitimacy of the imperial elite and the aggressive nature of its development and influence, a more developed type of civilization in the centre and the protection of poly-ethnic population's multistructurality whenever possible.