Oleksiy Tolochko’s Concept and the Origin of the Short Pravda Russkaia

A wide circle of historians, lawyers, and secondary school teachers are interested in the Pravda Russkaia. This review analyses the historiographical situation around the study of this important artefact after the publication of The Short Pravda: The Origin of the Text (2009) by Oleksiy Tolochko, in which the author develops the opinion that the Short Pravda appeared later than the Expanded Pravda, which was expressed by prominent linguists and historians (E. F. Karskii, S. P. Obnorskii, A. I. Sobolevskii, etc.) in the first half of the twentieth century but later discarded by Soviet scholarship. By combining various methods from source studies, the author proves that the Short Pravda did not originate as a legal document in the eleventh century, but as a fragment of The Chronicle of Novgorod in the early fifteenth century. The review shows that specialists’ responses to Tolochko’s book are limited to a few journal publications, each of which criticises one or two of separate arguments but does not systematically consider the proposed holistic theory of the artefact’s origin (articles by K. Zukerman, P. V. Lukin, A. A. Gorskii, A. Y. Degtyarev, etc.). Any attempt at summarising the results of the controversy leads to the belief that the discussion is methodologically unsound. The analysis of an article from the Pravda that is taken out of context can lead to opposing interpretations depending on the choice of the parameters preferred by a given author at a given time. Considering the fundamental nature of the Pravda Russkaia for the history of medieval Russia, the reviewer concludes that it is necessary to make an effort (probably a collective effort) towards a systematic analysis of Tolochko’s hypothesis: the traditional isolated study of this most important legal document should be placed within the broader framework of a comprehensive study of the collections in which the short and expanded versions of the Pravda have been preserved.