Traditionally, in Russian legal science, an order is considered to be the embodiment of the method of administrative law, being one of the main instruments of imperative regulation. This is due to the fact that for a long time, public administration was associated with the so-called administrative-command system, which was characterized by strict centralization of economic life based on state ownership, the use of socialist methods of management, and the dominance of party-state bureaucracy in the absence of economic freedom.
However, the order as a method of administrative law has by no means lost its significance, not because of the statistically prevalent volume of prescriptive norms in administrative law sources, but because of the specific mechanism for making state administrative decisions. The logic of the rule-maker implementing administrative-legal regulation of certain state-administrative relations dictates a sequence in which the state initially develops a model of behavior for governed entities desired by the state, and beyond this model, a certain level of freedom in administrative interaction is allowed.
It is appropriate to discuss the characteristic features and structure of the order. The characteristic features of the order as a method of administrative law are its categorical nature, limited variability in implementation, and its priority among other methods of administrative law. The structure of the order as a method of administrative law includes the subject issuing the order; the function of the prescriptive norm; the form of expression of the order; and the nature of the interaction between orders and other methods of administrative law. One of the article's key findings is the thesis that, unlike the relationship between permissions and prohibitions, which are “two sides of the same coin”, regulations already contain a prohibition on acting in a manner other than that stipulated by the regulation and limited permission to comply with the regulations, with the provision of administrative liability for failure to comply with the regulations within the specified timeframe.