Leksin Ivan Vladimirovich

The article is dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of the Russian President o ce to be celebrated in 2021. Besides, in 2020, his immediate predecessors, the office of the USSR President, on the one hand, and the office of the Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Council, on the other hand, would celebrate the same anniversary. the latter office is in its turn relative to the office of the USSR Supreme Council Chairman, first elected in 1989. Thus, three decades ago, our country was in the middle of the chain of events and measures aimed at transferring the functions of the head of state back to a sole leader.

The initial concentration of powers in the office of the President had been followed by a long sequence of constitutional and statutory amendments that involved significant expansion of his powers. Numerous changes had been proceeding in parallel through the following three decades. The transformation of the original concept of presidency manifested primarily in the shift of the RF President’s position within the system of separation of powers, as well as in the set of legal liability measures applicable to the President. However, in the bulk of changes in the constitutional arrangements that took place in 2020 one can see both the continuing trend to enhance the President’s position within the federal government and a recurrence to the ideas that used to be part of the original design of the USSR and of the RSFSR presidencies, but were rejected later on in the RF Constitution of 1993.

The documents reproduced below cannot be regarded as little-known or inaccessible. However, due to their high relevance, it seemed proper to reproduce their content, at least in abridged form.

The article is devoted to the conceptual foundations of the head of state problematics and is aimed at overcoming common methodological errors in reasoning about this institution, as well as at the diffi culties caused by unintentional confusion of the issues regarding formation of the head of state
concept, development of the corresponding phenomenon and the usage of the corresponding term.
The first part of the article reveals the plurality of concepts denoted by the term “head of state”, considers compatibility of headship with the basic concepts of the state, demonstrates the extralegal nature of the majority of conceptions of the head of state, highlights the few constructions of the head of state concept that can be considered as the legal ones. On this basis, common recommendations on the normative use of the word-combination “head of state” are suggested.

In the second part of the article the author analyzes the emergence and expanse of the term “head of state”, the diffi culties involved by usage of the Russian collocation “head of state” and related word combinations, the chronological and spatial spread of the heads of states in various meanings.
Besides, considering the conceptual plurality revealed in the fi rst part of the article, the problems of classifying heads of states are discussed. Based on the study of the listed issues, the article demonstrates the limitations of interlingual analogies, proposes an updated presentation of the features
that characterize the head of state in its offi cial (representative) meaning, shows discreteness and locality of the phenomena denoted by the term “head of state”, identifies high risk of substituting a perfect classifi cation of heads of state (as homogeneous phenomena) with a pseudo classifi cation that combines phenomena corresponding to the heads of state in diff erent meanings.

The article is devoted to a number of problematic issues of conceptualizing the state and is aimed at overcoming common errors in reasoning on this phenomenon, on its features, elements, functions and other characteristics, on the classifications of states, on the origin of the state and on the evolutionism in its development and in the development of its notion.

In the first part of the article the author analyzes the emergence and expanse of the term “state”, the differences in its use in different languages and the specifics in perception of the state in different cultures. He substantiates the naturalness and inevitability of problems in defining the state, analyzes typical approaches to its understanding, argues the unsuitability of legal definitions of the state for revealing its essence and the need to focus on drawing up practically functional legal constructions.