At the Origin of the Constitution of Russia: Subjective Notes

The aim is to understand the actual meaning and content of the Constitution, to reveal its conceptual understanding as a strict legal document of the highest rank, corresponding to its original purpose - to be a force capable of limiting and streamlining political power in a society, to ensure human rights and freedoms. It is shown how the frantic enemies of the institution of the constitution itself can use it for their own purposes, fundamentally deforming the very essence of this inadequately used state-legal institution. The current Constitution was created as the Constitution of Human Being - with its high dignity and inalienable rights, in order for it to rise above power and become the center of the State legal life of the country, and the state power would be subjected to a fundamental qualitative regularization, which could put an end to the practice and ideology of Soviet omnipotence, the so-called Great Power, and thereby drastically reduce its volume, for this, a strictly permissive procedure for the operation of state bodies and the principle of separation of powers was introduced. Moreover, separation not only horizontally (legislative, executive, judicial authorities), but also vertically - between the "center" and the subjects of the Federation; It also provided for the separation of municipal self-government from state power, which should gain full autonomy on issues of local life, which is designed to sharply reduce the amount of state power in the country as a whole. When developing the project, the goal was to put an end to the true curse of our society, the eternal imperial-sovereign, tsarist tradition, according to which the "first person" (tsar, emperor, secretary general of the party) is the owner of unlimited power, the master of the Russian land, the supreme ruler of the country. However, the subsequent hardware development of the draft Constitution led to the fact that, along with the fundamental democratic foundations and the corresponding legal and constructive principles (separation of powers, parliamentarism, etc.), fragments reflecting state-power priorities were "introduced into it." As a result, at the beginning of the new millennium, the regime of centralized power ("soft authoritarianism," and in some ways - and not only "soft") was established in Russia - a regime in which a certain "sovereign" or "managed" democracy prevails, the supremacy of the vertical of power with a strict order of subordination of state affairs to one official – the President. Nevertheless, the current Constitution of Russia has the necessary grounds to become a pillar and hope for the democratic development of society in difficult Russian conditions. These grounds are human rights provisions designed to determine the state and legal structure of Russia. Therefore, the need to amend the current Constitution is not yet ripe. It is necessary that in society, on the basis of the current Constitution, the main democratic transformations, and above all those related to the affirmation in the public life of a mood for the priority of human rights and respect for the dignity of the individual, become a reality. It is then that a favourable environment for other democratic innovations will re-emerge, and then constitutional changes can be successfully implemented that, in all its characteristics, will correspond to its consistently democratic foundations, its quality and the Human Constitution. It is noted that at popular referendums, the staging and decision on the "yes-no" scheme of a small number of fundamental provisions are justified – key formulas, amendments, the essence and meaning of which - at least in principle – are clear to any referendum participant. And only when a person with his high dignity and inalienable rights will take a central place in all public legal life, reliably protected by law and court, there will be grounds to argue that a kind of Rubicon passed and Russian society from an endless strip of glorious deeds and, at the same time, adversity, violence and unbridled power passed into modern civil society, which is dominated by Law, which Russian society has not yet achieved.