Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 19.06.2020

The action of the authorities to amend the Constitution of Russia has approached the finish line.

Both in terms of content and form, the amendments proposed by Putin to the Basic Law of the country, as well as the so-called “popular vote” are, as is well known already, unlawful (see the expertise).

Opponents of this lawlessness speak mainly about the of “reset” of Putin’s terms – granting the right to extend his powers until 2036. This is absolutely correct: such an “amendment” is a mockery of law and opens the way for the almost eternal irremovability of power. However, it is important to see that people are being pushed to a non-alternative vote with one tick [for all the amendments], putting more than 200 hundred amendments [in a package to one vote] at once, which draw up an authoritarian corporate state at the level of the Constitution, serving the interests of the nomenclature and the groups around the power. That is, the present closed antisocial political system with an adventurous foreign policy course, with extremely incompetent corrupt, semi-criminal and non-independent staff at all levels, with a militaristic and police ideology and corresponding repressive mechanisms will now be enshrined in the Basic Law of Russia.

It is possible that after the “reset” [of the presidential terms], kind of having received the right to remain in the Kremlin for another 16 years, thereby bringing his whole circle to the condition of absolute fear and obedience and nipping even thoughts of a transit [of power] in the bud, Putin will suddenly leave at some point and, as usual, will leave a “successor”. In the system that is now enshrined in the Constitution by these amendments, any successor within the framework of Putin’s political system (for example, one of the top army generals or the Federal Security Service) will be no better for the country than Putin, and, most likely, much worse. Not only because Putin chooses his environment this way, but also because of the logic of the system built for 20 years and now enshrined in the Constitution: the authorities have no other support in it except lies and fear, and other instruments of maintaining control, except repression and intimidation.

How the state will act within the framework of the already rewritten Constitution can be judged by the measures taken only over the past six months, after Putin first proposed amendments to the country’s Basic Law (see the list of officially adopted decisions and those prepared for adoption).

In recent days, the course towards repression and intimidation has become even more pronounced. In Petrozavodsk, Karelia, the trial of the historian Yuri Dmitriyev [head of the Karelian branch of the Memorial human rights society, who found mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Karelian forests] was resumed. Throughout his life, the leader of the Karelian Memorial has fought for historical truth and talked about the killings of innocent people, our compatriots, including the mass graves of victims of Stalinist repressions in Karelian Sandarmokh. So that the researchers would not seek the truth, and so that it would not hurt anyone to even think about the past, they fabricated a dirty case against the historian Dmitriyev (first – one case, and then the second) and put him in jail.

It has become known about another “treason”. Valery Mitko, 78-year-old President of the St. Petersburg Arctic Academy, is accused by the Federal Security Service of transferring “secret data to the Chinese secret services”. Recently, scholars from the Moscow Central Research Institute of Engineering have already been involved in such cases: 79-year-old Vladimir Lapygin, 76-year-old Viktor Kudryavtsev and 77-year-old Sergei Meshcheryakov, as well as Viktor Prozorov, 72-year-old designer of the Sevastopol Central Design Bureau Chernomorets. A strange list of older scientists… Is it again [like in the Stalin period] the search for “enemies of the people”?

So the point is not only in “resetting” the presidential terms. The main threat to the future of Russia is an authoritarian system based on lies, fear and arbitrariness, which they intend to consolidate in the country’s Constitution with the help of amendments.  We should not provide a turnout and vote for this.

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