Peace be upon him

On March 16, one of the founders of the human rights movement in the USSR, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, died in Boston (USA).

Everyone who has ever talked with Alexander Sergeevich Yesenin-Volpin will say that he was a very bright, kind, wonderful person. People versed in literature will call him a gifted poet. Mathematicians will confirm his achievements in mathematical logic. Philosophers will remember him as a deep and original thinker. I want to pay tribute to Yesenin-Volpin as the author of the concept, on the basis of which in the mid-sixties of the twentieth century a civil protest movement arose in the Soviet Union, later called human rights.

Volpin's main idea, in my opinion, was that the only possible and acceptable way of conducting a dialogue between a citizen and the state is the language of law. It seems to me that Alek considered the symbolism of human rights and freedoms to be secondary. In the philosophy of law, he was an extreme positivist. The most important thing for him was the legal procedure, which, in his opinion, made it possible to communicate with state institutions and, in particular, to defend these same freedoms.

Alexander Sergeevich has always been extremely consistent in his reasoning. His philosophy logically followed from his studies in mathematics, and his legal theory was the result of his studies in philosophy. This sermon was initially met by contemporaries rather ironically, and even skeptically. Friends and associates were surprised at the assertion that such a theory could equally apply to the Soviet Union - it would seem, a completely unlawful state. However, it was Volpin's ideas that played a huge role in the creation and development of the Soviet human rights movement, which may well consider Alexander Sergeevich its founder and founder.

Another issue is that children do not necessarily resemble their parents in everything. Yes, the assertion that the state must be required to strictly comply with its own laws became the slogan under which young people protesting against political repression took to the first legendary “glasnost rally” on December 5, 1965. Yes, the algorithms proposed by Volpin for communicating with the authorities were adopted not only by human rights activists, but also after them by dissidents of all directions and persuasions. But his initial postulates, it seems to me, were not understood at all, or understood, but discarded. For his followers, human rights and freedoms were always primary, while law as such remained secondary. Although the appeal to legal norms and procedures has become an effective tool for upholding these very rights and freedoms - effective not so much in a pragmatic sense, but in terms of asserting one's own moral rightness.

I often think about whether Volpin's postulates, which became extremely fruitful for the late Soviet period, are just as fruitful today, when the Russian government has actually abandoned reliance on any kind of right, replaced the law and the constitution with criminal lawlessness - and she does not care about moral right? Alec argued that there is not and cannot be a state that would not create at least some kind of legal system. Perhaps he is right. But if so, does this mean that in today's Russia we are dealing with a political entity that is not, in essence, a state? (See also Alexey Makarov's article "An unreasonable goal is freedom" ( NT No. 40 of November 30, 2015).