Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 15.01.2020

Vladimir Putin has spoken with an Address to the Federal Assembly. People want change, the President said. And he proposed to amend the Constitution. So that no international courts, no international law would any longer interfere with the Construction of an isolated authoritarian (that is, sovereign, as Putin thinks) state. So that the State Duma (in the condition it is now) would approve the government, which the President will be able to dismiss at any time. So that the court would look independent from everyone and everything except the President. Well, and changes, obviously, mean the transfer of [now ex PM] Medvedev from the government to the Security Council.

Putin’s Address [to the Federal Assembly] is annual. However, the President did not even mention the events of the past year, which were significant for the life of the country: systematic planting of drugs by the police to inconvenient citizens; helplessness of the authorities in the fight against forest fires and floods in Siberia; the death of fourteen sailors in a fire at a nuclear submarine; the use of the amnesty of capital by the Federal Security Service against business; the killing of soldiers by a fellow soldier in Transbaikalia; a new law under which every citizen of the Russian Federation can be considered a foreign agent; removal of Russia from the Olympics due to doping; the wars in Donbass, Syria and now also in Libya.

These developments demonstrate that the Russian political and economic system has become dangerous for the citizens of the country, has lost effectiveness and is critically lagging behind the world.

The proposed changes to the Constitution have nothing to do with this main Russian problem and will not improve life in the country. Introduction of the State Council into the Fundamental Law and redistribution of powers between the President and parliament is aimed at solving a completely different problem – providing formal transit of power without real changes. These are “checks and balances” that do not lead to a real separation of powers, but create opportunities for manipulations on the top. The mechanism for the removal of judges of the Supreme and the Constitutional Court, as well as the introduction of a special provision that international law, corresponding treaties and obligations are not obligatory for us, reinforce the already existing features of Putin’s authoritarian self-isolating system – exactly what has led to the crisis and the extreme inefficiency of the present system.

A certain “vote of the citizens of the country” for the amendments proposed by Putin in his Address is yet another manipulation that will make it possible to peremptorily refer to “the will of the people” without a real constitutional referendum. Moreover, as the Presidential Press Secretary has explained, “there is no talk about a referendum and actually this doesn’t even imply any kind of adoption by voting”. That is, in fact, this is another plebiscite for Putin, for his personal legitimation.

In his Address on 15 January, 2020, Putin, in fact, proposed not only to preserve this system, but also to make it even more authoritarian, more closed, and finally ineffective. This is the main meaning of the Address to the Federal Assembly and the result of the past two decades of Putin.

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