Five years of Putin's constitution

By abolishing the liberal principles of democracy and equality of all citizens before the law that the first president Boris Yeltsin had intended to proclaim, Vladimir Putin had already sanctioned in 2020 the transformation of institutions into instruments of the ‘vertical of power’ not to be shared with local administrations or other social bodies.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - On 3 July 2020, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the decree ‘On the official publication of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, with the amendments made to it’, after a two-day plebiscite vote that effectively sanctioned the transition from Yeltsin's law to Putin's, even though it was formally only an ‘amendment’ to the constitution of 12 December 1993.

The first president, Boris Yeltsin, had intended to proclaim the liberal principles of democracy and equality of all citizens before the law, guaranteeing freedom of expression and the fundamental rights of individuals and social groups.

In the last five years, all this has been completely reversed, many university chairs and law faculties have been closed, the legal profession has been placed under state control and the persecution of lawyers defending the rights of their clients has begun. law enforcement agencies and courts have been freed from all legal constraints, acting with total arbitrariness and establishing a repressive regime at all levels.

Beyond the principles that still remain in the fundamental law, Russia has reneged on all its commitments under international law, started a war of aggression in Ukraine, illegally annexing the territories it has conquered, been expelled from the Council of Europe and withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.

A huge number of lawyers and jurists have abandoned their profession, as working in conditions of illegal arbitrariness is not only unpleasant but also quite dangerous, and those who had no alternative “live in despair and depression”, as Elena Lukyanova, Doctor of Legal Sciences, states in Novaya Gazeta.

The turning point in 2020, which was supposed to celebrate the sacred 75th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War, was very abrupt, though certainly not unexpected. For years, Putin had reiterated the intangibility of the constitution, calling it a “sacred cow” to which one must remain faithful, but the logic of his actions already testified to the contrary, from the beginning of his presidential term at the dawn of the new millennium, transforming democratic institutions into instruments of the “vertical of power” to be shared neither with local administrations nor with other social bodies.

Parliament had been defined as a “place for decisions, not discussions”, the courts had become increasingly less neutral, and the Russian state had increasingly become a police state, or rather “mentovskij”, as it was defined by journalist Leonid Nikitinskij, from the term “ment”, which means “cop” in its most vulgar form.

From 2010, it was forbidden to include quotations from the constitution on advertising billboards, and elections produced so-called “electoral sultanates”, territories where the results of the vote had nothing in common with the will of the people.

This situation led to mass protests inspired by Alexei Navalny in 2012, the year Putin returned to the presidency. In September 2013, Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow and won 27% of the vote, compared to 3% in official polls, effectively the last faint glimmer of democracy seen in Russia during the Putin era.

Since 2014, with the illegal annexation of Crimea, Russia's international isolation began, and the now meaningless constitution moved ever more rapidly towards the inevitable upheaval of 2020.

Today, it is clear that the Federation has turned into a dictatorship without laws or freedoms, destroying science, education and even the economy, imposing frightening censorship on the media and the entire world of culture, dragging the population into war (probably planned since 2020) with hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The events of these five years have been so tragic and grotesque as to destroy all hope for the future, but “only the constitution has been amended”.