The Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, Pyotr Tolstoy, announced at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum that it is time to amend the Constitution again, as "a lot has changed" since the start of the war with Ukraine.
"It's been five years since the changes to the Constitution, and I am sure these changes are not the last, considering the circumstances under which our current Constitution was written. I am confident that more changes are ahead of us. And perhaps they will be much more significant than those we discussed five years ago," Tolstoy shared his plans. He also complained that for the last 30 years, Russia has been adopting global practices in lawmaking, but in reality, they turned out to be Western, and "few of them took root."
The last amendments to the Russian Constitution were made in 2020 following a referendum. At that time, they "reset" the presidential terms of Russian President Vladimir Putin, allowing him to run for the head of state for the fifth and sixth time and remain in power until 2036.
The Minister of Justice, Chuychenko, decided not to limit himself to the present and delved into the past, assessing the activities of the Decembrists from the perspective of modern Russian legislation on "foreign agents." He concluded that they "themselves fell under this foreign influence." "In the Decembrists, the foreign influence was of a completely different nature," the minister stated. According to him, they were "not an object of foreign influence, but a subject, meaning they themselves fell under this influence, they themselves studied Western ideas." "They, as they say, drew from Western culture, from Western ideology to form their views," the Minister of Justice summarized.
At the same time, Chuychenko called the uprising itself not progress, but regression, explaining that, in his opinion, without the uprising, serfdom in Russia would have been abolished earlier. And he considers the punishment of the Decembrists too lenient: "Unfortunately, the monarchy was very liberal and, I would say, excessively noble."