Circumstances of the 19th century drew attention to the issues related to the regulation of emergency situations. The success of the state in solving its tasks is often determined by the effectiveness of the legal regime employed. This is especially clearly demonstrated in the case of emergencies and situations that, as modern practice has shown, can be caused not only by socio-political factors and natural disasters, but also by the spread of a viral or infectious disease acquiring the status of a pandemic and endangering the lives of not only citizens of a certain state, but of humanity as a whole. The implementation of the emergency legal regime is always associated with a number of restrictions on the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens: the introduction of additional administrative and legal obligations and prohibitions; granting emergency powers to authorities to maintain the regime; the introduction of special administration of the territory on which this regime is established, including the creation of temporary special agencies; suspension of the activities of certain state authorities and local government, etc. This article analyses the heritage of theoretical studies regarding the limits of the state restriction of freedom of speech in the conditions of an emergency legal regime. A historiographic analysis of the role of censorship in ensuring national security in Russia under the emergency legal regime indicates that issues related to the possibility and necessity of applying censorship under the emergency legal regime were the subject of research by the most prominent Russian legal scholars at the end of the 19th century: I. E. Andreevsky, N. N. Belyavsky, E. N. Berendts, V. M. Gessen, V. F. Deryuzhinsky, A. I. Elistratov, V. V. Ivanovsky, I. T. Tarasov, P. N. Sheimin and others. In their works, lawyers in the end of the XIX century recognized the important role of the media in the development of society and emphasized the importance of freedom of thought, speech and the press as necessary conditions for social development. However, under the emergency legal regime, they justified the need for state-supervisory regulation of the activities of print publications as one of the ways to neutralize the socio-political situation. The measures taken by the state in relation to censorship during the state of emergency, despite their rigidity, were assessed positively by Russian lawyers, since they made it possible to avoid unnecessary unrest among the population and the dissemination of seditious information. The main methods of scientific research were general scientific methods namely: historical and systematic, as well as special ones: historical-legal and comparative-legal. The author applied a method of reconstruction and interpretation of legal ideas as well. As a result of the study, the author concludes that in the modern conditions in order to govern effectively consistent with the principles of the rule of law, both researchers and authorities should pay attention to the theoretical heritage of domestic political and legal thought and properly analyze the past practice of applying emergency legal regimes, comprehending the effectiveness of the application of the mentioned measures, since this is of great importance for determining the prospects for the development of the state-legal system of Russia, and for determining the optimal model of the state mechanism obeying the principle of legality.