ABSTRACT
The re-emergence of a separate Russia out of the Soviet shell ranks as one of the great state-building endeavours of the twentieth century. Born out of the crisis attending the collapse of the USSR, the Russian state emerged with few immediate advantages. Its system of government had to be built from scratch, its constitution had to be rewritten, its legal system needed to move away from the punitive and vindictive ethos of the Soviet period, and its officialdom had to be retrained in the ways of a modern civil service. The priority for Russia was to establish the basic framework in which politics would be conducted, to establish the ‘rules of the game’, but as we have seen in the previous chapter, for two years Russian political development was stymied by a period of ‘phoney democracy’, where the constitution became an instrument in political struggle. Now at last a constitution appropriate for a democratic republic was adopted, together with the creation of the institutional foundations for the rule of law and constitutionalism.
