The Constitution of Russia in the Focus of Comparative Law

The 30th anniversary of the Constitution of the Russian Federation provides an opportunity to reflect on the path travelled by the Russian constitutional system and outline the directions for its further development. The Constitution of the Russian Federation is a unique model of constitutional regulation that proves its effectiveness in the context of globalization and large-scale crises. At once, it obviously contains principles and norms that reflect the trends of world’s modern constitutional law. The guarantees of human and civil rights manifest the concept of natural human rights and express principles and norms proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international covenants. At the same time, it contains wordings, which declare certain rights as a negation to the Soviet practices in the past. Chapters “The Fundamentals of the Constitutional System” and “The Federal Structure” contain a bunch of original formulations. Human rights are proclaimed as the highest value; a single state ideology and a single religion are denied. The Constitution consolidates the historically established system of various types of federal subjects. Concurrently, there is an obvious need to create a model of a more simplified structure, taking into account the experience of foreign federations. With regard to the principle of separation of powers, there is an original innovation, as the constitutional lexicon introduces the concept of “Public Power”. The unified system of public authority includes state power and local self-government. This requires further comparative studies on separation of powers models that move further away from the traditional three powers model. Finally, the new tasks of the country’s legal development involve the introduction of the fundamentals of comparative law and its methodology into the educational process.