Concept
When someone dies without a valid will, an inheritance contract, or a foundation, the estate passes by operation of law. Part Three of the Civil Code (Articles 1141–1145) sorts relatives into eight classes and calls them in a fixed order. It is the fallback the state writes for you, and it rarely matches what the deceased would have chosen.
🍓 With no will, contract, or foundation, a Russian estate is split among eight statutory classes, and the first — spouse, children, and parents — takes equal shares. Any of those three planning tools lets you override the order.
Lines of Succession
The first class is the spouse, children, and parents (Art. 1142). If none survive, the second is called: full and half siblings and grandparents (Art. 1143). The third is aunts and uncles (Art. 1144). Classes four through six reach further out strictly by degree of kinship, from great-grandparents to more remote collaterals (Art. 1145). Stepchildren and stepparents form the seventh class, and disabled dependents the eighth. A later class inherits only when no one in an earlier class does, and within a class all shares are equal.
Spousal Share
Marriage comes first. Half of the spouses' jointly acquired property already belongs to the survivor and never enters the estate (Art. 256). Only the deceased's half is inherited, and the surviving spouse then shares in that half too, as a first-class heir. A widow or widower often ends up with well over half of the couple's combined assets.
A simple case shows the arithmetic. A man dies with a wife, two children, and both parents living, leaving 12 million rubles of jointly acquired property. The wife first takes her own marital half, 6 million, outside the estate. The remaining 6 million is the inheritance, divided equally among the five first-class heirs — wife, two children, two parents — at 1.2 million each. The widow walks away with 7.2 million in all, while each parent receives 1.2 million.
Right of Representation and Dependents
If an heir dies before the deceased, their own descendants take that place by right of representation (Art. 1146): grandchildren for a predeceased child, nephews and nieces for a sibling. Representation runs only through the first three classes. Disabled dependents sit apart (Art. 1148), inheriting alongside whichever class is called, and on their own as the eighth class when no closer relatives remain.
⚙️ An heir has six months from the death to accept (Art. 1154), either formally before a notary or by actually taking over the property. Miss that window and the only routes left are a court application or the written consent of the other heirs.
Obligatory Share and Escheat
Even a will cannot fully override the order. Minor or disabled children, a disabled spouse, disabled parents, and disabled dependents keep a compulsory share of at least half of what they would have taken on intestacy (Art. 1149); this is Russia's forced-heirship floor. It matters most when a will tries to cut out a dependent relative, because the notary must carve out that share first. At the far end, if no one in any of the eight classes accepts, the estate becomes escheated property (Art. 1151): housing passes to the municipality or city where it sits, and everything else to the Russian Federation.
Which Law Governs a Cross-Border Estate
For anyone holding assets in more than one country, the first question is which law applies. Russian conflict rules split the estate (Art. 1224): movable property follows the law of the deceased's last place of residence, while real estate follows the law of the country where it sits, and anything entered in a Russian state register follows Russian law. A non-resident who owns a Moscow flat therefore triggers Russian intestacy for that flat, whatever their domicile elsewhere.
🧭 Residence decides the movable assets; the location of real estate decides the rest. One person can leave two estates governed by two different laws.
How the Rules Have Evolved
The eight-class ladder itself dates from Part Three of the Civil Code, in force since 2002, which widened the narrow Soviet scheme. The sharper change has been in the tools for stepping outside intestacy: the hereditary fund arrived on 1 September 2018, the joint spousal will and the inheritance contract (both modelled on German practice) on 1 June 2019, and the personal fund on 1 March 2022. Unlike the post-mortem hereditary fund, a personal fund can be set up during life, though it requires assets of at least 100 million rubles.
What links these tools is timing and control. Intestacy freezes management for the six-month acceptance period and then hands a business to co-owners in fixed fractions. A fund keeps the assets running under chosen managers from the first day, and a contract or joint will settles who receives what before death rather than after.
When Intestate Succession Does Not Fit
🔗 Related
Personal and Hereditary Foundation · Personal and Hereditary Foundation · Inheritance Agreement and Joint Will · Forced Heirship and Compulsory Share · Succession Planning
The statutory ladder ignores how families actually work. An unmarried partner inherits nothing. A company is split into equal fractions among people who may never have wanted to run it together. The heir you would have chosen can sit several classes back, behind relatives you barely know.
💡 A business that should stay in one pair of hands is usually moved into a foundation, which holds it whole instead of fracturing it among heirs.
🍓 Intestacy is a blunt default: eight fixed classes, equal shares, a six-month clock, and a forced-heirship floor underneath. A will, an inheritance contract, or a fund replaces it with a distribution you actually chose.
🧭 Check your case: Inheritance Navigator — an interactive map of your case: applicable law, forced heirship and taxes for your country pair.
This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute individual legal advice.