Solidarity and Mutual Assistance as a Centuries-Old Moral Basis of Russian Sovereignty

Abstract

The article discusses the issues of reliability and completeness of political and legal knowledge exemplified by Russia's implementation of solidarity and mutual assistance principles as a centuries-old moral basis of the country’s sovereignty. The author distinguishes the imperial, socialist, Soviet and modern civilizational types of Russian solidarity and mutual assistance. Modern interpretations of the events in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 are provided as an example of an ideological distortion of Russia’s (the USSR’s) civilizational stance. The moral and legal correctness of the Soviet troops deployment in Afghanistan in 1979 is argued. The study concludes that justice and mutual assistance should be attributed to legal values, which in the traditional Russian legal understanding have a transcendental, cultural and historical status, internal consistency with religion and morality, with an emphasis on the dominance of morality over law.

 Funding: The research was carried out within the framework of the scientific project "Creation of a Russian historiographical model of political and legal knowledge and its application for the development of promising means of countering ideological distortions of the civilizational development of Russia", carried out with the financial support of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation (Agreement No. 075-15-2024-639 dated July 12, 2024).