How Russia's constitution came out of a fight with its parliament

How a shelled parliament produced the Russian constitution

The body the 1993 constitution replaced was the Congress of People's Deputies, elected in March 1990 in a largely free and competitive vote. Under the much-amended constitution of 1978 it was the supreme organ of power in Russia. When the republic added a presidency in 1991, the division of powers between the two was left ambiguous. Boris Yeltsin won the presidential election of June 1991 with more than 57% of the vote, and the Congress kept its power "to examine and resolve any matter within the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation". In 1992 it gained the further power to suspend articles of the constitution itself, under an amended article 185.

The quarrel of 1992 and 1993 was about the pace of economic reform and about who governed. In December 1992 the Congress refused to confirm Yegor Gaidar as prime minister, and Yeltsin appointed Viktor Chernomyrdin instead. An emergency session in March 1993 cancelled a planned referendum on power-sharing. The vote eventually held on 25 April 1993 ran on the Congress's own terms, which required the support of half of all eligible voters: Yeltsin fell short of that, and a majority of those voting approved his policies and called for new legislative elections.

Two drafts of a new constitution then competed. In June 1993 Yeltsin decreed a constitutional convention, with delegates from the 89 subnational jurisdictions and from the main political and social organisations, and it approved a compromise text in July. The parliament refused it. In late September Yeltsin dissolved the parliament and called elections for December. The Congress met in emergency session, confirmed Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy as president and voted to impeach Yeltsin. Military units surrounded the White House on 27 September 1993 with 180 delegates still inside. After a two-week standoff and firefights elsewhere in Moscow, tanks under the direction of the defence minister, Pavel Grachev, fired on the building and troops occupied it. The Constitutional Court was suspended, and it reconvened in March 1995.

The text put to voters in December came from a constitutional assembly Yeltsin had formed, and it provided for a strong executive. The turnout requirement was changed from half of the electorate to half of those taking part. On 12 December 1993 the constitution was approved, by three-fifths of voters in Britannica's account and by 58.4% in Wikipedia's. The first Federal Assembly was elected the same day, a procedure some Russians criticised as showing little respect for constitutional niceties.

What the Russian president can do without parliament

The 1993 constitution created a dual executive of a president and a prime minister, with the president as the dominant figure, and the usual comparison is with the French Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle. The president sets the basic direction of domestic and foreign policy and is Supreme Commander-in-Chief, approving the military doctrine and appointing the high command. A president may declare martial law or a state of emergency, which the Federation Council can confirm or reject. Decrees and directives carry the force of law provided they do not contravene the constitution or federal law, and Britannica notes that a president whose legislative initiatives fail in the legislature may issue decrees in their place. The president also nominates the chairman of the Central Bank to the State Duma and the judges of the two highest courts to the Federation Council, and chairs meetings of the government.

The term has changed. An amendment of 2008, which took effect with the 2012 election, extended it from four years to six. Britannica records that constitutional changes enacted in 2020 abolished the limit on terms; the Wikipedia articles on Russia and its politics still describe a limit of two consecutive terms. The text provides for no vice president, the office Rutskoy had held in 1993. If a president dies, resigns, is removed or becomes too ill to serve, the prime minister acts and an election follows within three months.

Why the Duma rarely brings down a government

The State Duma confirms the prime minister and has one week to decide on each nominee. It does not confirm ministers. Its other weapons are each matched by a reply the text gives the president.

The one serious test came in June 1995, after Chechen fighters took more than 1,000 hostages in the town of Budenovsk. The Duma voted no confidence in the government by a wide margin, and a second motion failed in early July. Chernomyrdin stayed in office, and after the 1996 election Yeltsin nominated him again. The text also binds the president. On 24 February 2004 Vladimir Putin dismissed Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov together with the whole cabinet, because the constitution allows no prime minister to be removed alone.

How hard the constitution makes removing a president

The crisis of 1993 turned on an impeachment vote, and the new text set the bar high. The State Duma may bring charges of treason or another grave crime to the Federation Council. The Supreme Court must then rule that the acts constitute a crime, and the Constitutional Court that the charges were filed correctly. A special commission of the Duma must adopt them and two-thirds of all deputies confirm them, and two-thirds of the Federation Council must vote for removal. If the upper house fails to act within three months, the charges lapse. Communist deputies led efforts to impeach Yeltsin from 1993 onwards, and he remained in office until he announced his resignation at the end of 1999.

How the Federal Assembly divides the work of lawmaking

The name of the lower house is older than the republic. Nicholas II conceded an elected legislature called the State Duma in the constitution of 1906, and Britannica records that his government then misused its emergency clauses to adjourn the Duma and rule by decree. The Federal Assembly of 1993 revived the name for a chamber of 450 deputies and paired it with the Federation Council, which holds two delegates from every federal subject. Britannica gave the upper house 170 seats in 2026, and Wikipedia's account of the 1990s gives 166.

The Assembly is a permanently functioning body, in session except for a break between its spring and autumn sittings, where Soviet legislatures had met for a few days a year. Deputies of the Duma work full time and may not hold government posts. A transitional clause exempted those elected in 1993, and after the December 1995 election nineteen government officials resigned their offices to take their seats. That first, two-year parliament passed about 500 laws in 1994 and 1995, among them the first two parts of a new civil code.

Every bill starts in the Duma, whoever proposes it, and passes three readings there before the Federation Council, which has fourteen days to put it on its calendar. Disagreements go to a conciliation commission, and the Duma can send its own version to the president by a two-thirds vote. In the mid-1990s the upper house rejected about half the bills sent to it, because many of its members were regional heads Yeltsin had appointed and the Duma held more of his opponents. Bills on revenue and spending may be considered only once the government's findings are known, which limits the Assembly's hold on the budget.

The way the upper house is filled has changed several times. A law of December 1995 gave ex officio seats to the head of the legislature and the head of the administration in each of the 89 jurisdictions, 178 seats in all. Later legislation barred governors from sitting in person on separation-of-powers grounds, and under the compromise each region sends one member from its legislature and one from its executive.

Why Russian regions bargained with Moscow for powers

The preamble opens with "the multinational people of the Russian Federation", and the internal map that people lives on came almost unchanged from the Soviet Union. The 1993 constitution enumerated 89 subnational jurisdictions: 21 republics, six territories, 49 oblasts, ten autonomous okruga, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and the two cities of federal significance, Moscow and St Petersburg. The text declared all of them equal "in their relations with the federal agencies of state power", dropped the word "sovereign" that the 1978 text had given the republics and seated each on equal terms in the Federation Council. Some difference survived. Under Article 66 a republic's status is set by its own constitution, where a territory or oblast has a charter, and under Article 68 only the republics may establish state languages alongside Russian.

Before the constitution came the Federation Treaty of March 1992, signed by Yeltsin and most regional leaders in three documents, one for each kind of jurisdiction. Tatarstan was one of two republics that did not sign it. At the elections of December 1993, Tatarstan, Chechnya and Chelyabinsk Oblast boycotted the vote, and only 170 members of the Federation Council were elected. By mid-1994 every seat was filled except those of Chechnya, which went on proclaiming its independence.

The bargaining that followed was one region at a time. In February 1994 Tatarstan gave up its claim to sovereignty and accepted Russia's taxing authority, in return for control of its oil and other resources and the right to sign economic agreements with other countries. Orenburg Oblast signed the first charter with an oblast in December 1995. In the summer of 1996, while campaigning for re-election, Yeltsin signed charters with Perm, Rostov, Tver and Leningrad oblasts and with St Petersburg, granting liberal tax treatment. Between 15 February 1994 and 16 June 1998 he signed 46 of these treaties, the last with Moscow, and Chernomyrdin said the government intended to sign them with all 89.

Regions without a treaty pressed in other ways. Sverdlovsk Oblast proclaimed itself an autonomous republic in 1993 in protest at the tax and resource privileges of the republics. Volgograd Oblast wrote its own laws on pensions, promissory notes and credit unions without waiting for the Federal Assembly. Britannica describes the regions as exercising considerable power in the years after 1993 owing to a lack of assertiveness at the centre, and the Wikipedia account of the same years finds governors and mayors had become the only relevant authorities in many jurisdictions.

How Moscow took the regions' powers back

The reversal began in 2000. Vladimir Putin, elected president on 26 March 2000, created seven federal districts above the regions that year: Central, Far East, Northwest, Siberia, Southern, Urals and Volga, each with a presidential envoy. The envoys' legal power was to pass on the president's guidance, and Britannica records that in practice the guidance worked as a directive. An eighth district, North Caucasus, was cut from the Southern district in 2010.

The treaties went next. Most were terminated in 2001 and 2002, the rest were annulled on 4 July 2003 or ran to their own expiry dates, as those of Bashkortostan, Moscow and Tatarstan did. Tatarstan's expired on 24 July 2017, the last of the 46. Governors lost their elections in the same period: Britannica dates the law allowing the president to appoint them to 2004, and Wikipedia to 2005. The state also began folding smaller okruga under neighbouring subjects in the 2000s. Regional finances stayed thin: Britannica notes that regional governments generally lack the tax revenue for their mandatory budgets, which have barely covered the wages of teachers and police.

The list in Article 65 has also changed. The English text published at constitution.ru, as fetched in 2026, names 22 republics including the Republic of Crimea, and three cities of federal importance including Sevastopol. Britannica records a ninth, Crimean, federal district created after the annexation of 2014, which Ukraine and most other countries do not recognise; Wikipedia counts eight districts. Russia proclaimed the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian regions in September 2022, which was internationally denounced as illegal, and the constitution.ru text fetched in 2026 does not list them. This catalogue records each position and takes none. The border as a whole is covered in Russia: history.

Which parties have won seats in the State Duma

Party politics grew out of a system the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had dominated, and reform in the 1980s and 1990s spawned hundreds of political organisations. Britannica counts 43 parties competing in 1995 and 26 in 1999. The Liberal Democratic Party won more than a fifth of the vote and 64 seats in 1993, and Women of Russia took 8% of the vote the same year. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which the Constitutional Court had cleared to re-form in February 1993, won the Duma election of December 1995, and its leader Gennady Zyuganov finished second in the presidential ballots of 1996 and 2000. Yeltsin had no party of his own and encouraged two, Our Home Is Russia in 1995 and Unity in 1999; both finished behind the communists.

United Russia was formed from a merger in 2001, reduced every other party to minority status at the 2003 election, and on 4 December 2011 won for the third time in a row. The official results of 2011 brought significant protests, and a number of political scientists and journalists recorded falsifications on election day. Only four parties won enough votes for Duma seats in 2011.

The rules changed alongside the results. Legislation required a party to have at least 10,000 members and registered offices in at least half the regions to stand nationally. For the December 2007 election, Wikipedia records, the old mix of half the seats by party list with a 5% threshold and half in single-member districts was replaced by proportional representation for every seat with a 7% threshold, which removed independents. Britannica's description of the Duma gives the mixed system, with separate ballots for a party and a district representative; the two sources disagree, and both are reported.

Women had held at least a third of the seats in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies under a quota. The quota went with the union, and by the mid-1990s women held roughly 10% of the seats in the State Duma and 5% in the Federation Council.

How observers and the state describe Russian elections

The Law on Presidential Elections of May 1995 was hailed by international analysts as a step towards democratisation. A candidate needed 1 million signatures, with no more than 7% from any one federal jurisdiction, so that no single city or ethnic enclave could carry a candidacy. The law set one polling station for roughly every 3,000 voters, eased absentee voting and required portable ballot boxes to be brought on demand. Turnout at the first round in 1996 was about 70% of 108.5 million voters, and almost 1,000 international observers judged the election largely fair.

The verdicts moved afterwards. Putin won the first round in 2000 with 53% of the vote in an election judged generally free and fair. In 2004 the OSCE reported that the vote had been organised professionally and criticised the unequal treatment of candidates by state-controlled media. Freedom House has listed Russia as "not free" since 2005. The Economist Intelligence Unit classed it as a "hybrid regime" as late as 2007 and has rated it "authoritarian" since 2011. Natalia Arno, who ran the International Republican Institute's operations in Russia, described candidates who "always ran into bureaucratic barriers" whenever they wanted to challenge the system.

The state's own position is written into the constitution, which declares Russia a democratic, federative, law-based state with a republican form of government, divides power among three branches and forbids a state or compulsory ideology. The Russian Federation maintains that description, and the observers above dispute it.

Where the courts stand in the Russian settlement

The Constitutional Court dates from 1991. Britannica gives it 19 judges, nominated by the president, approved by the Federation Council and appointed for life. The 1993 text lets it arbitrate between the executive and the legislature and between Moscow and the regions, and a law of July 1994 bars it from taking up cases on its own initiative. The Supreme Arbitration Court, which ruled on commercial disputes, was abolished in 2014 and its powers absorbed by the Supreme Court.

The bench of the 1990s was largely inherited. Many judges appointed under Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov were still sitting in the mid-1990s. In 1995 a judge's average salary was US$160 a month, and judges depended on the Ministry of Justice for their courts and on local authorities for their housing. Wikipedia's account holds that the Prosecutor General remains the most powerful component of the system.

The Criminal Procedure Code passed in 2001 reintroduced jury trials in certain criminal cases and moved the power to issue search and arrest warrants from the procuracy to the courts. In 2002, when the code came in, the number of suspects placed in pretrial detention fell by 30%.

Which blocs Russia has joined since the union ended

Russia assumed the Soviet Union's permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in 1991. The Warsaw Treaty Organization was dissolved the same year. Russia and NATO signed a cooperation agreement by the end of the 1990s and set up the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. Russia was a member of the G8 until its expulsion in 2014, and it was expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022 and suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council the following month.

The record lists the groups it has joined since 1991, and Wikipedia describes Russia as the leading member state of four of them: the CIS, the Eurasian Economic Union, the CSTO and the SCO.

In March 2023 Russia adopted a foreign policy concept defining it as "a unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power", seeking a "Greater Eurasian Partnership" through close relations with China, India, the Islamic world and the Global South.