Annotation

The article analyzes the polemics between Ivan IV the Terrible and Prince Andrei Kurbsky as a deliberate philosophical and legal dispute about the nature of justice and the permissible limits of transforming legal forms while preserving the traditional value core. The concept of “adaptive conservatism” is introduced and justified as an analytical category that allows us to reconstruct the logic of political and legal thinking in the 16th century. It is argued that the central subject of the polemics is the question of the separability of form from content in the legal embodiment of traditional values. The article provides a semantic analysis of the key concepts of “truth” and “justice” in the texts of the correspondence. The author concludes that the polemics of the 16th century are the first extensive reflective discussion in the Russian intellectual tradition about the mechanism of adaptive conservatism, which is crucial for understanding the nature of Russian political and legal identity.