Russia has Never had a Constitution but Only Simulacra, Pastukhov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 12 – Russia has never had a constitution but only “simulacra,” documents which take the form of such a basic law but in fact lack the content and force such documents must enshrine, Vladimir Pastukhov says. As a result, celebrating the Day of the Constitution as Russians do on this date each year is fundamentally “an oxymoron.”

            The most effective of these simulacra, the London-based Russian analyst says, was the first because it called the tsar the tsar and did not mask how limited the freedoms it was offering in flowery and extravagant language which might seem to promise genuine freedom and equality (echo.msk.ru/blog/pastuhov_v/2950504-echo/).

And the real constitutions in Soviet times, Pastukhov continues, were not the documents called that and which offered such flowery and extravagant language but the statutes and programs of the CPSU which deprived that language of having any real application for those to whom it was supposedly extending these rights.

When the Soviet Union and the CPSU dissolved, this “hopeless simulacrum” remained, a simulacrum which “naïve residents of the country who had never seen real democracy accepted as something real, that is, as a genuine constitution.” They did not understand that a constitution is about the relations of forces in society.

Instead, Russians “supposed that the Constitution is a beautiful text in which is described how they should live well and justly,” a misapprehension they were encouraged in by the West which encouraged them to think in precisely those terms even though the new powers used force to set the stage for the adoption of the latest simulacrum.

As a result, Russia did not get a constitution, and “the simulacrum remains a simulacrum,” albeit “a very beautiful one.” The real constitution after 1991 was no longer in party rules but in the customs of thieves or “understandings” as both those who exploited them and those who were exploited by them said.

This simulacrum was made more so by the amendments of 2020 which had the effect of reducing the Russian constitution to the “shortest” in the world: “Its text,” Pastukhov said, “can be reduced to a single paragraph: ‘For the sake of victory over the enemy, the powers that be can do anything.’”

In this situation, the Russian analyst says, it would be well to combine the Day of the Constitution with the Day of the Child. “Only children in Russia still believe that there is a Constitution in Russia” and more to the point, only they at some future point will be able to come up with a real constitution.

That document will emerge not from the shots of the Avrora or the arrival of tanks on the Arbat but as the result of the work of a Constituent Assembly, one in which people will come together to define their rights and be prepared to defend the constitution, including “with arms in their hands. As has been the case earlier throughout the democratic world.”