On The Issue of the Place of a Loan Commitment in the System of the Russian Law of Obligations

In the current Russian civil law, the loan agreement is one of the central institutions of the Russian law of obligations, since if payment for the goods and its transfer are separated by a temporary interval, there is a loan from one party to another. The same applies to the payment deferment or advance payment for the works (services). A similar situation can arise in almost any contractual construction, when one participant in a commodity turnover transfers to another some goods, performs works, renders services with the condition of returning their equivalent and, as a rule, paying remuneration. Consequently, the scope of application of the norms of paragraph 1 of Chapter 42 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation is much broader than just a loan agreement. Loan and credit agreements refer to the "credit" concept in the economic sense. In civil law, the “credit†category is used in the narrow sense as an obligation from a credit agreement and does not cover all the above relations. Thus, the “credit†concept cannot be considered as a general concept in relation to all cases of the value transfer from one subject to another. From the point of view of the law, the “loan†category corresponds to the “credit†category in the economic sense. In this regard, the clarification of the place of borrowed obligation in the system of the Russian law of obligations is of great theoretical and practical importance.