12 December 2024
Ed Glezin
Source: Facebook
Aleksei Navalny: “I hate the authors of the incredibly stupid authoritarian constitution that we idi@ts were sold as democratic though it had given the president the authorities of a full-fledged monarch.” (11 August 2023)
Thirty-one years ago, Russians rejected the proposed constitution in a referendum.
“How can that be?” you ask. “Everyone knows, after all, that the constitution that has been in effect to this day was approved in a referendum on 12 December 1993.”
But no, it wasn’t! That is just one historical myth.
Indeed, 58.4% of the voters who took part in the 12 December 1993 election voted in favor. But of the total number of voters (106.1 million), only 58.1 million went to the polls, that is, less than 55%.
Thus, only around 30% of the voter roll voted in favor of the Yeltsin Constitution.
According to the Law on Referendums in effect at the time, decisions on the constitution are considered to pass only if “more than half the citizens of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic included on the lists for participation in the referendum (Art. 35, para. 4, Law of the RSFSR) voted for them.”
In 32 regions, the majority voted against, and in several regions the voting did not happen (Tatarstan) or was not held altogether (Chechnya). Nonetheless, the Constitution went into effect on 25 December.
There were also a number of questions about the voting procedure. Almost everywhere, the vote count was done by working groups formed by the regional administrations, and the TsIK [Central Election Commission] did not show anyone summary tables of the voting results, so no one could verify the count and protest them with tables in hand. In addition to everything else, on 30 November the TsIK decided preemptively and expeditiously to destroy the election documents after the referendum, which was done in April 1994.
“Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
Moreover, in May 1994, A.A. Sobyanin’s expert group under the Presidential Administration on mass falsifications in the referendum published its conclusions, which, among other things, asserted that in fact not 54.8% but no more than 46% (!) of the voter roll took part in the referendum.
In this way a constitutional coup was carried out that began with Yeltsin’s signing of illegal decree No. 1400, dated 21 September 1993, on the cessation of the work of the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies.
Provisions appeared in the constitution that were in the president’s favor. The upper age limit for a presidential candidate was removed and the State Duma’s positions were weakened. Yeltsin himself made the final amendments on 8 November 1993. He gave presidential decrees and orders the status of laws whose execution was mandatory and added the right to chair sessions of the government. A month before the referendum, the draft was finally made public.
No alternative drafts for the referendum were put forward.
The pro-presidential media did everything in their power to urge the people to vote in favor: otherwise, the TV channels and publications threatened chaos, civil war, and Russia’s collapse. Yeltsin threatened the same thing in his addresses to the people. There was no normal discussion of the draft in the media or free agitation in opposition to it.
The 1993 constitution reflected the reinforcement of the “superpresidential republic”: the right to determine domestic and foreign policy; to sign federal laws; to head up the state and the army; to propose the prime minister (virtually appoint him) and approve ministers; to appoint the Central Bank chair, the general prosecutor and judges, the supreme command, diplomats, and directors of federal departments; to fire them; to disband the parliament ahead of schedule and fairly easily in the event of conflict (whereas it is much harder for deputies to initiate impeachment); and other rights.
Already at the time, critics of the constitution were talking about the constitution’s “bias” in favor of the president as a very serious deficiency of this Basic Law; they talked about “untrammeled presidential rule” and the document’s tailoring “to a specific person” (Yeltsin).
History has proven that doubts about this model were not in vain since it violates the principle of separation of powers.
This is how the Constitution’s reinforcement of authoritarianism in Russia came to be.
To the question, “Is power in truth or truth in power?” Yeltsin boldly and decisively gave quite a definite answer.
We are suffering the consequences to this day…
….
From comments on Facebook:
Viktor Mironenko: ‘Eduard, this text could be replaced by the single sentence that, as Korzhakov recalled, Yeltsin stated in response to his comment regarding Gorbachev’s former office, which they had just entered: “Well, Boris Nikolaevich, you snatched away the office, too.” “You’re a fool, Sashka,” people say he replied, “we snatched away Russia, not the office.”
I wonder how sometimes one word conveys the essence of what is happening better and more fully than thousands of articles and books, right? 
‘
For more information and photographs, see here: https://ed-glezin.livejournal.com/1911283.html
The group ‘The liberating period of M. S. Gorbachev’s Perestroika’ [‘Эпоха освободительной Перестройки М.С. Горбачева’] can be found on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/152590274823249
Translated by Marian Schwartz
