Constitutional and legal regulation of economic relations in Russia: historical aspect

Each state has constitutional acts that regulate the foundations of public-state relations, including in the economic sphere. The article provides brief information on how state power has defined this sphere in Russian history, but the main attention is paid to an overview of the relevant norms contained in Russian acts of such a high level. It is noted that the document called "constitution" was first adopted under the Soviet regime (the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1918), however, even before that, at the final stage of the Russian Empire, the new version of the Fundamental State Laws (1906) also represented a constitutional law in content, and in legal literature it is often called the first Russian constitution (for the imperial power, the very word "constitution" for official documents was unacceptable in principle). In addition to those indicated, the norms on the economic component of statehood in other Soviet constitutions, as well as in the current Constitution of Russia of 1993, are analyzed. All these acts were issued in the twentieth century and reflect the unusually contradictory nature of the constitutional and legal regulation of economic relations in our country (the transition from a bourgeois-capitalist economy to a planned-socialist one in 1917 and back after the collapse of the USSR seventy-four years later). The greatest volume of economic regulation took place in the USSR Constitution of 1977; in the current Russian Constitution there are only four special norms, which seems clearly insufficient.