We have written little about the ongoing vote on Putin’s amendments to the Russian Constitution, because what we wanted to say about it was already written on March 10 in an article titled «Not a Transfer, but a Coup» (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=38206).
In general, it is clear that after July 1, the dismantling of the foundations of the constitutional system of the state that Putin inherited from Boris Yeltsin will be completed in Putin’s Russia. Yeltsin can be seriously criticized for the «great criminal revolution» he sanctioned (the privatization not only of state property through connections, but also of the state institutions themselves, which merged with the mafia), the shooting of the parliament in 1993, and the unleashed war in Chechnya in 1994. From these three components of Yeltsinism, Putinism later emerged and matured within the Yeltsin regime.
However, in the state that Yeltsin built on the (rotten) foundation of the constitution adopted on December 12, 1993, there was A strong opposition, including an opposition majority in parliament; competitive (though not always fair) elections, including presidential elections; major media not controlled by the Kremlin; election of regional leaders by the population; a federal treaty and, in the case of Tatarstan, bilateral agreements between the federal center and the federal subjects on the division of powers; a high degree of religious freedom enjoyed by different confessions (although the ROC has already begun to turn into a privileged church); open discussion of the country’s history, including its problematic pages; recognition of the primacy of international law and, as a result, normal relations with neighboring and distant foreign countries.
All this will not disappear on July 2, 2020 — all this has been slowly but surely disappearing over the course of all 20 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, trampling on one aspect of an immature democratic federal state after another. On July 2, when the results of the vote on Putin’s constitutional amendments are announced, with the enactment of which he will gain the right to rule for at least another 16 years, this constitutional or unconstitutional coup will not begin, but will already be completed.
Will this change anything for Russia and the world? Perhaps only that things will now be called by their rightful names, and there will be clarity for those who did not understand what was happening until 2020. And this clarity, according to recent opinion polls, including official ones, is growing among more and more people inside the country. Clarity outside its borders, on the other hand, has long been achieved, as the recent Putin victory parade showed once again, where representatives of such «states» as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Serbian Republic of Srpska appeared instead of representatives of world powers and the planned heads of Croatia, the Czech Republic, and even Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, which are not recognized by anyone in the world.
This is how the world and a growing number of Russians view the state that Putin has created in 20 years and whose new constitution he now wants to approve. Reasonable representatives of which today either try to express their opposition or simply ignore this farce.