«Bribe» and «gift» in Russia of the Petrine Era in interdisciplinary discourse

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of bribery in the Peter the Great era through the prism of interdisciplinary research: closely related methods of cultural anthropology, linguo-semiotics, linguistics proper, historical semantics and historical-legal approach. Such methodological synthesis is aimed at studying the words that marked the phenomena defined by the author as private rewards of officials. Private rewards of officials are a complex social phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the modern concept of a bribe. The combination of methods of philological, historical and legal sciences allowed us to obtain a more subtle optics of its study, to see how the evolution and criminalization of ancient practices of gift exchange and tribute took place in the context of the emerging modern state, on the one hand, and how difficult it was for the legal concept of a bribe to mature as a criminal variety of such rewards, on the other.