These Russian constitutional reforms sound… sane

So, in the midst of the uproar in the Western press about how the new changes to the Constitution of the Russian Federation allow Putin to stay in power until 2036, and the somewhat lesser uproar about how it attacks the rights of homosexuals by defining marriage in the highest law of the land as the union between a man and a woman, a lot of the other reforms in the constitutional package were kind of left to the wayside in the commentary. To be quite blunt, a lot of these reforms sound fairly… well, sane and humane.

One of the things that stood out to me in the data on the vote was how heavily the reform package was supported by Russian ethnic minority groups, including the (mostly-Islâmic) Chechen, Ingush and Bashkir peoples, and the (mostly-Buddhist) Tuva people.

A quick reminder about the Bashkir people. They have historically been some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the communal self-help œconomy, including credit unions and producer and consumer coöps. They were also influential in self-organising the zemstvo for political action, and Bashkirs like Shähit Hoźayberźin contributed heavily to the SRP and the RSDRP in their formative years, and like General Tahir Kusimov to the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. They follow a long tradition of agrarian revolt going back to Pugachev: they are not political quietists.

This initially didn’t quite make sense to me, given how strongly the reform package was also supported by the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, and how it was presented (as it turns out, inaccurately) in the Western press as being a nakedly authoritarian power grab, with a veneer of traditionalism in its appeals to popular homophobia. In short, I’d bought the propaganda along with many other people to believe that the constitutional reforms were actually about consolidation of Putin’s power, under a veneer of concern about ‘God and gays’. But it made much more sense to me when the items were shown to me in translation, from a friend of mine, Fr John Schroedel, who did the digging into the text of the constitutional amendments. They are as follows:

§67: ...united by a thousand-year history, preserving the memory of the ancestors who transmitted to us the ideals and faith in God... Children are the most important priority of the state policy... The state creates conditions conducive to the comprehensive spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical development of children, the education of patriotism, citizenship and respect for elders in them. The state, ensuring the priority of family education, assumes the responsibilities of parents in relation to children left without care.

§69: ...guarantees the rights of indigenous peoples in accordance with generally recognized principles and norms of international law... The state protects the cultural identity of all peoples and ethnic communities of the Russian Federation, guarantees the preservation of ethnocultural and linguistic diversity.

§71: nature management; agriculture; environmental protection and environmental safety; specially protected natural areas; protection of historical and cultural monuments... coordination of health issues, including ensuring the provision of affordable and high-quality medical care, maintaining and strengthening public health, creating conditions for a healthy lifestyle, creating a culture of responsible citizens’ attitude to their health; social protection, including social security... protection of the family, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood; protection of the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman; creation of conditions for a decent upbringing of children in the family...

From this, I can see exactly why so many ethnic-minority groups in Russia would vote in favour, given the explicit protection of the rights of indigenous communities as communities, including language rights and rights over cultural output! Protection of communal rights for indigenous communities is something that has historically had no precedent in American constitutional law, for example, which treated the ‘Indian tribes’ as distinct from both foreign entities and states. It took as late as the ‘Indian New Deal’ under FDR for the American government to guarantee any sort of cultural or communal rights for indigenous nations here, and even these rights have not been honoured by subsequent administrations. On the other hand, the protection of indigenous communal and cultural rights is something that has been intrinsic to Patriarch Kirill’s worldview as well, for much of his career – including from before he became Patriarch of the Russian Church.

Many other of these reforms seem quite benign and unobjectionable. Constitutional guarantees of free public education, of pensions for the elderly indexed to inflation, of a minimum wage indexed to subsistence level, and of medical care for all Russian citizens: all of these are solid, baseline decent social-democratic demands within the mainstream of European centre-left politics. Other items are a bit more aspirational and value-oriented but nonetheless welcome – advocating for healthier lifestyles, patriotic education, citizenship and respect for the elderly; in short, calling for a certain civic responsibility on the part of Russian citizens and Russian families. The state is now considered, in an interesting twist on a Keynesian idea, a parental authority of last resort. And lastly but not least: there’s a lot of language in here about the rights of the child, deliberately echoing the language of the OHCHR convention to which most of the countries on earth are signatories.

In short, the bulk of these constitutional reforms seem to be oriented toward the development of certain positive rights. These include positive rights – including œconomic rights – for the elderly, for children, for indigenous people, for the working class. Indeed, it looks like a lot of this language is tailor-made to undo a lot of the damage that Russian society incurred in the bad old days of the nineties.

The explicit reference to God in the revised constitutional language is worthy of mention, though. The fact that this reference was supported even by Muslims and Buddhists in Russia attests to its œcumenical character. The constitutional reforms do not create a religious establishment in Russia or an official patronal relationship for the Orthodox Church. However, Russia is now officially a confessional state, one where belief in God is reflected in the highest law of the land. This is an important step in the development of a national consciousness that is explicitly not Soviet. It is also indicative of the developing postliberal character of the Russian state, which now more than ever appears to be angling after some form of symphonía.