Constitution of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Constitution of Russia has its own commemorative coin. On the 10th of December 2018, a copper-nickel coin worth 25 rubles went into circulation to mark its 25th anniversary. Its reverse showed an open book. The coat of arms of the Russian Federation sat on one page, and the words КОНСТИТУЦИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ filled the other. The mint struck one million of them, a legal means of payment across the country.

  Russians had approved the underlying text by national referendum on the 12th of December 1993. It took legal effect on the 25th of December 1993, the moment of its official publication. That adoption abolished the Soviet system of government outright. Only the Soviet-era Constitution of 1937, in force until 1978, has stood longer in Russian history.

  Three threads run through what follows: who drafted the text, what power it hands to one office, and how it has changed since 1993.

• 2. Drafting a New Charter

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  More than 800 participants sat on the 1993 Constitutional Conference that produced the text. Sergei Alexeyev, Sergey Shakhray, and at times Anatoly Sobchak are named as its primary co-authors.

  Mikhail Speransky's earlier constitutional project fed into the drafting, alongside the French constitution then in force. Lawyers funded by USAID also contributed to the draft.

  The new text replaced the Soviet-era Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, dated the 12th of April 1978. That older document had already been amended in April 1992 to reflect the Soviet Union's dissolution and the Russian Federation's new sovereignty. Its replacement followed the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis.

  That crisis produced a document split into two sections, opening with a preamble describing 'the multinational people of the Russian Federation.'

• 3. A System of Supremacy

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  A 2022 analysis by Partlett gives this design a name: crown-presidentialism. Under it, the presidency dominates the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at once.

  Section One spans nine chapters. It opens with the basis of the constitutional system and citizens' rights. It then moves through the presidency, the Federal Assembly, the government, and the courts. It closes with local self-government and the rules for amending the document itself. Section Two, far shorter, holds only the concluding and transitional provisions.

  The Constitution ties citizens' rights to universally recognised principles and norms of international law. It states plainly that listing those rights inside the document does not reject or diminish any other universally recognised human right or freedom.

  Ordinary statutes rank beneath it by design. The Constitution carries the country's highest legal force, and its provisions take direct effect whether or not other laws contradict them. A special, complicated procedure for changing it gives the text its stability, and it serves as the basis for all current legislation.

  That legal weight rests most heavily on a single office: the presidency defined in Article 80.

• 4. A Powerful Presidency

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  Article 80 names the president as Russia's head of state, setting domestic and foreign policy and representing the country at home and abroad.

  The original constitution set a four-year term with a maximum of two terms in succession. The current text stretches that to six years.

  Vladimir Putin served his first and second terms under the four-year rule, and the two-term limit barred him from the presidency in 2008. He served as Prime Minister instead, while Dmitry Medvedev held the presidency for four years. Putin returned for a third term in 2012, and under the newer six-year rule won a fourth term in 2018.

  Article 81 sets the method of election, including a secret ballot, while Articles 82 through 93 detail the office's powers, responsibilities, and limits.

  The constitution calls the office a 'strong presidency' in explicit terms. The president holds the title Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, and can dissolve the State Duma outright.

  The State Duma that a president can dissolve is also the chamber that carries the most weight in passing federal law.

• 5. Making the Law

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  A bill can start in either chamber of the Federal Assembly. It can also arrive from the President, the government, local legislatures, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, or the High Arbitration Court.

  Every bill must first go to the State Duma, where it needs a majority vote before moving to the Federation Council. The Federation Council then has 14 days to vote on it. A bill the Council adopts still needs the President's signature to become law.

  If the Council rejects it, the State Duma can override that rejection by passing the bill again with a two-thirds vote in the same form. The President holds a final veto of his own, but the Duma and Council can override that too, each with a two-thirds vote.

  None of those checks reach the courts, a separate branch the constitution treats very differently.

• 6. The Courts of Russia

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  Article 123 guarantees open, fair trials and equal application of the law. Judges hold lifetime, 'irremovable' appointments and answer only to the constitution and federal law. Whether that independence holds up in practice remains debated.

  The constitution originally set up three top courts: the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Arbitration Court. A February 2014 amendment eliminated that arbitration court from the judicial system, folding its jurisdiction into the Supreme Court. The Institute of Modern Russia reported the change that September.

  The Federation Council appoints judges to each court, working from nominations the President puts forward. That process includes formal vetting, but it still bends to executive influence. The Constitution requires 19 judges for the Constitutional Court but sets no fixed number for the others. The Supreme Court had 115 members as of 2002; expanded duties in 2014 pushed that number to 170.

  Changing any of this, including the courts themselves, runs through a formal procedure for amending the constitution.

• 7. Amending the Text

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  Article 137 covers renaming a federal subject or altering which subjects belong to the federation; a presidential decree or a federal constitutional law handles it.

  Article 136 covers chapters three through eight. Changes there take the form of a special law on constitutional amendments. That law passes like a federal constitutional law but also needs ratification from every constituent entity's legislature. It takes a name that reflects the amendment's essence.

  Article 135 covers the deepest layer: chapters one, two, and nine. Changing any of those chapters counts as a full revision. It is possible only through a new constitution, adopted by a Russian Constitutional Assembly or by popular vote.

  Officials avoided the topic before 2000, according to an analysis of their speeches. In 2001, someone first suggested publicly that the constitution should stay untouched, and until 2007 any real change was treated as a bad idea. That hostility softened after 2007. In 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev addressed the Federal Assembly and unveiled changes while insisting the constitution was well established and should remain unchangeable. He stressed these were not a constitutional reform, only certain corrections.

  Proposed in November 2008, the amendments came into force on the 31st of December, the first substantial changes to the 1993 constitution. They stretched the presidential term from four to six years and the State Duma's term from four to five. Earlier changes had only touched minor things, like renaming or merging federal subjects, through a much simpler procedure.

  On the 21st of March 2014, Federal Constitutional Law No. 6 brought the Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation. It also created the Federal City of Sevastopol as a new federal subject.

  Those changes were narrow next to what followed in 2020.

• 8. Rewriting the Nation

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  The 2020 amendments strip the words 'in a row' from the article capping presidential terms, discounting every term served before the amendment took effect.

  Other changes name Russia as the Soviet Union's legal successor for international organizations, treaties, and USSR assets held outside the country. They ban ceding any Russian territory and forbid diminishing the wartime record of the 'defenders of the fatherland' in World War II.

  The amendments also write God and heterosexual marriage into the text, and declare the Russian language that of the country's 'state forming people.' A separate provision gives the State Council statutory backing for the first time.

  A nationwide vote ran from the 25th of June to the 1st of July 2020. Official results put turnout at 65%, with 78% of voters backing the amendments. Putin signed the executive order inserting them into the constitution on the 3rd of July 2020. They took effect the next day, the 4th of July.

  Russia signed annexation 'treaties' with its own occupation authorities during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The constitution's text was updated to add four new names: the Donetsk People's Republic, Kherson Oblast, the Luhansk People's Republic, and Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

  As of December 2022, Russian forces fully controlled none of those territories, and Russian law never defined their borders. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia would 'continue consultations with the residents' over the oblast borders, calling the republics annexed 'in the 2014 borders.' Oleg Tsariov, a high-level Russian collaborator, put it more bluntly: 'there are no 2014 borders.'