Authors

Discussion

This paper presents intermediate results from the ongoing PhD project on the cultural legitimation of exceptional law-making in contemporary Russia. The research employs discourse analysis of selected constitutional, administrative and criminal legislative acts from 2020–2022 and asks how legislators frame exceptional measures that stretch or suspend international and domestic norms in ways that appear, internally, not as disruptions but as morally justified and historically grounded acts.

The theoretical framework combines Blumenberg’s and Bottici’s conception of myth with insights from legal narratology (Olson, Fludernik). To situate these dynamics in the Russian case, the paper also draws on Geertz’s notion of extra-legal values, Lotman and Uspensky’s analysis of binary oppositions and the logic of temporal return in Russian culture, Stepanov’s notion of cultural constants and extra-legal values, and Zorin’s account of the genealogy of national mythopoesis in state discourse. These perspectives make it possible to examine how elites selectively re-appropriate long-standing cultural tropes and mobilise them within legislative practice.

In contemporary Russian political-legal discourse, five cultural myths appear with particular persistence: meta-law (law subordinated to higher moral imperatives), sacralisation of personal power, messianism, antagonism with the West (sovereignty through opposition to the threatening Other), and the enemy within (internal dissent as foreign-inspired subversion).

The presentation will illustrate the mechanism of mythologised narrative construction in legislative practices through a discourse-historical reading of the 2020 constitutional amendment that reset presidential term limits. In the absence of formal legal reasoning, the reform was framed as the “will of the people” and as a response to “historical conditions” demanding stability. The incumbent’s behaviour of humility and hesitation shifted initiative onto the collective subject, creating the impression that it was society itself calling the leader to remain. The narrative rhetoric encompassing legislative amendments reactivated the cultural myth of sacralised power, portraying authority not as a procedural office but as a bearer of destiny and salvation. By invoking continuity, mission, and collective appeal, the amendments were cast not as a breach of legality but as an exception aligned with a higher moral purpose.

In this way, the paper connects cultural-semiotic insights with socio-legal inquiry, demonstrating how cultural myths are re-appropriated as building blocks of legal narratives. It contributes to wider debates on law and narrativity by illustrating how legality operates discursively—through cultural references rather than procedure alone. Although focused on Russia, the findings invite comparative reflection on how cultural narratives may similarly inform extraordinary law-making in other contexts.