High Treason and Political Espionage

The aims of present paper include studying the compositions of such crimes as high treason and political espionage, as well as coverage of the least developed and relevant law enforcement articles 275 and 276 of the criminal code. To achieve the goals there are the following objectives: a) analysis of socio-philosophical and legal concepts in the theory of public goods and, in particular, in connection with the issues of security of society and the state; b) analysis of the Russian pre-revolutionary experience of law enforcement articles on espionage and high treason in connection with the formation of the theory of the struggle against treason and espionage in Soviet scientific literature; c) the identification and analysis of objective evidence of these crimes; d) consideration of subjective signs of structure of the specified crimes and examination of their qualifications.The paper consists of introduction, two chapters, conclusion and list of references. The first Chapter is devoted to determination of the definitions of treason and espionage, as well as external security considering protection under the criminal law and the definition of treason and espionage in pre-revolutionary and Soviet criminal law. In the second Chapter the author examines the issues of criminal-legal characteristics of high treason and political espionage. Basing on the analysis, there are the following conclusions: Firstly, permanent monitoring of political and economic processes in the country, the introduction of new special security, sufficient subsidies from the budget to the security sector may be considered as a good catalyst for the counter providing foreign intelligence services. Secondly, such measures are caused by the need of confront terrorist threats, political and religious terrorism.