SUMMARY:

In the Russian empire, the elaboration of a universal civic law code was a reflection and a factor of imperial self-modernization. Aleksei Gorin traces how the idea of building a common civic legal space was constructed in Russia’s public, professional (legal), political, and administrative discourses of the second part of the nineteenth–early twentieth centuries. He concludes that by the early twentieth century, the idea of unitary structure of the imperial legal space became dominant among the participants of these discourses, but it never became a reality in the Russian empire. Only Soviet modernization allowed for the implementation of this ideal.