At the origins of the Russian constitutionalism: spiritual and moral values in P.I. Pestel's «Russkaya Pravda» («Russian Truth»)

The relevance of the topic is related to the need to comprehend the value turn of actual public policy and to search for the civilizational foundations of the Russian statehood. The purpose of this article is to identify the spiritual and moral values that had a decisive impact on the formation of the foundations of Russian constitutionalism, in particular, on the concept of normative regulation of public interests even in the Soviet period. Pavel Ivanovich Pestel's “Russian Truth”, a legal historical document of 1824, which can rightfully be called the first act of public policy in Russia, was chosen as a research object. Despite the extensive scientific, journalistic and popular literature devoted to the legacy of the Decembrists, experts limit themselves mainly to either a formal legal analysis of their documents, or an assessment only of the political practice of this movement. Moreover, in modern scientific discourse, opinions about the Decembrist movement as a historical myth are widespread and, consequently, opinions about the absence of its real contribution to socio-political processes and philosophical and legal thought in Russia, which clearly does not correspond to the principle of scientific historicism. At the same time, the spiritual and moral component of the Decembrists' worldview remains generally outside of the modern experts’ investigations, which narrows their research optics and leads to a distortion of the objective role of the Decembrists in the formation of national constitutional thought, its spiritual and moral orientation, as well as placing security concepts and public interests as the main legal constructs of independent statehood thought in the center of the future legal policy of our country. The theoretical significance of the article is the systematization and classification of spiritual and moral values embedded in the norms of the "Russian Truth". The axiological approach was chosen as the conceptual framework. The main research methods are general scientific methods, including classification, analogy, induction and deduction, as well as analysis and synthesis. Additionally, special methods were used: political-textual analysis and the formal-legal method. The practical significance of the article lies in the fact that the conclusions can be used in teaching courses on the foundations of Russian statehood, the history of political doctrines, as well as for the development of special or auxiliary political science courses.