Free theocracy utopia and Russian legal thought in the early XXth century (V.S. Solovyev, P.I. Novgorodtsev, A.N. Tolstoy, E.I. Zamyatin)

The article deals with a little-studied aspect of the formation and development of the Russian theocratic utopia. The author chooses the legal doc-trine of V.S. Solovyov as the starting point of reasoning, within which the gradual destruction of the triad “church-state-prophets” takes place. On the way to a “free theocracy”, the “theurgist” first supplants the “prophet”, then merges with the “church”, and finally acquires an ontological unity with the “state”. The latter moment irreversibly coincides “with the end of the entire world process” and be-comes the main reason for the collapse of Solovyov's theocratic utopia. The involvement of the critical works of S.N. Bulgakov made it possible to establish a connection between Solovyov's “black” cosmourgy and the idea of “last freedom”, which directly influenced the dystopian discourse of the 20th century. Referring to the works of P.I. Novgorodtsev and N.N. Alekseev, the author analyzes the views of A.N. Tolstoy and E.I. Zamyatin. The result of the reasoning is the conclusion that the practical implementation of the “last freedom” in the dystopian discourse of the twentieth century leads to a specific understanding of law: the will of the dominant and maximally impersonal subject raised to an absolute law.