'It has been a long-standing parliamentary device to introduce | Екатерина Шульман

"It has been a long-standing parliamentary device to introduce key changes during the second readings of an amendment, when initiators do not want to draw too much public attention to their bill. That makes it possible to shorten the process by skipping the first reading phase that, according to parliamentary rules, needs to take thirty days and sometimes lasts longer. The accumulation and discussion of amendments take place within the parliamentary committee responsible for the bill, and these proceedings are much less public and accessible to an outside observer than the plenary sessions. This helps to divert some part of the public attention.

In 2020 we saw this practice on a much larger political scale. The first wave of constitutional amendments introduced by the president into the parliament on January 20, 2020, concerned the composition of state bodies and the checks and balances system between the president, government, Federal Assembly, and higher courts. The “first wave” of amendments also contained some of the social guarantees, like regular indexation of state pensions and salaries, which were and remained, according to polling data, the most recognizable and popular among the proposed constitutional changes.

At the end of February, parliament took on the second wave of amendments, introduced during the second reading of a constitutional bill, because, juridically, all of the numerous amendments, which increased the bulk of the Russian Constitution by 40 percent, were one amendment—one single bill. The second wave of amendments contained provisions that have since been nicknamed “biopolitical.” These concern the preservation of traditional families, the defense of children as one of the main priorities of state policy, mention of belief in God as having been inherited from ancestors, and a mention of the Russian people as a state-building (state-forming) nation. These amendments had an evident conservative slant and were, in all probability, aimed at giving more of a “human interest” to the approaching constitutional voting by reinventing it as some sort of a referendum in defense of traditional values, thus strengthening voter turnout.

On March 10 came the third, last and final amendment phase—called “the grandmother’s clause” or “Tereshkova amendment”—that entailed the zeroing-out or resetting of presidential terms, which in hindsight looks like the main reason for the whole constitutional reform. However, we do not have grounds for affirming that this idea originated from the start of this legislative campaign: the development of the amending process as delineated above rather lends itself to the logic of tactical political necessity rather than showing signs of a well-laid plan. The “checks and balances” part of the amendments were designed to legitimize the political practices and re-distribution of power of the last fifteen years while additionally guaranteeing the future successor’s position against a potentially oppositional parliament and a hostile higher court by curtailing their powers and severing the dependence between the parliament’s approval (or the risk of early parliamentary elections) and the appointment of the head of the government.