Pavel Romanov

University of Regensburg

Short vita

2nd year

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (DFG-Projekt
„Korruption und Religion: Das orthodoxe Christentum in Russland und Serbien“)

Duration of the scholarship

1.10-31.12.2026

Research project

Likhoimstvo: Law and Morality in the Russian Empire, 1762–1825

In Russian legal and moral discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, practices later associated with corruption were usually described through the terms likhoimstvo and mzdoimstvo. These notions were closely connected with religious and moral categories. The project asks how and why this language changed in the second half of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it investigates how Enlightenment ideas contributed to the transformation of corruption from a sin against the moral and religious order into an offence against public order and the common good. Rather than treating corruption as a timeless phenomenon, the project approaches it as a historical concept whose meaning depended on changing assumptions about the state, public office, private interest, law, and rational