The Legal System of Ancient Russian Tmutarakan

   The study focuses on the legal system and legal relations of the ancient Russian Tmutarakan, one of the most poorly studied administrative-territorial formations in the historical and legal science of the origin of the integral Ancient Russian state.

   The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the legal system of the Tmutarakan “principality”.

   To achieve this, the Author uses the maximum number of materials available and characterizes the legal relations of ancient Russian Tmutarakan; the norms of customary law and the foundations that were built on this territory and were traditional for Tmutarakan society. The research methodology includes general scientific (inductive, comprehensive, logical) and specific scientific (formal legal, historical) methods. Inductive, comprehensive and logical methods made it possible to systematize all the information on the topic available to the Author and formulate the problem, proving no related research in the national historical and legal science. The research uses formal legal and historical methods to explore the legal system of Tmutarakan from legal and historical points of view. There is no doubt that the early feudal development determined the development of the Tmutarakan legal system as the one built on principles of customary law. At the same time, the legal system is viewed from the modern point of view in order to prove the fact that in comparison with the native Russian principalities, in Tmutarakan, the development of law was not lower, but often much higher. The results of this research can be used in educational literature, manuals on theory of state and law, and to be later developed to start a new field in historical and legal science, which is currently required but does not exist yet, that is, legal archaeology. Having conducted the research, the Author comes to the following conclusion: there was a developed legal system and legal relations in Tmutarakan. Not until the end of the 21^st century, the historical and legal records of Tmutarakan basically contained the information from the chronicles of folklore nature. Only with the development of archeology, in the late 21st – early 22^nd centuries, more information about the ancient Russian Tmutarakan and other forms of statehood on the Taman Peninsula and Hermonassa, Tamatarch in the Crimea was revealed. At the beginning of the 21^st century, the problem of legal nature of statehood was investigated in the dissertations on theory of state and law. However, up to the present, the subject has not been thoroughly explored. 

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