Potkina I.V. New Approaches to the Study of Legislative Sources during the Period of the First World War

Abstract: The article's research object is the body of normative-legislative acts from the period of the First World War, published by the Senate press in the official volumes entitled "the Collection of Laws and Government Regulations". On the basis of this body of sources, counting 9297 regulations, the yearly lists of new laws on national economy were created, brought about by wartime circumstances. Their total number was 1279 documents, which were systematized into eight areas of the state's regulation of the economy: finances, prices, taxation, social sphere, internal market, foreign trade and enemy nationals. The article together with the traditional methods of historical research also uses statistical analysis, for the first time applied to these legislative documents. The scientific novelty of the results obtained is due to the unconventional approaches used on the studied material. Treating normative-legislative acts not as a single source but as a mass source has allowed to avoid the illustrative tendency in analyzing the particularities of economic regulation under emergency circumstances. Furthermore, this has given the opportunity to obtain new knowledge and to formulate conclusions on the substantial corrections to the management model and on the formation of a socially-oriented internal policy.

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