How Russia Was Always Meant to be a Dictatorship | Constitutions Explained

When I first started researching Russian history, I kept running into the same popular narrative: that Vladimir Putin single-handedly destroyed a healthy young democracy. But the deeper I dug into the legal text of the Russian Constitution, the more I realized that the foundation was broken from the very start. Yeltsin already laid the foundation and created a hyper-presidential that suited his own authoritarian understanding of a post-soviet Russia. In doing so, he built an executive office so dominant that it almost invited an autocrat to take the wheel. When Putin came to power, he simply inherited a legal blueprint that was very easy to exploit. In this video, I wanted to walk you through how that legal architecture evolved over thirty years. I look at how the 1993 crisis shaped the presidency, how the 2008 term swap exploited constitutional loopholes, and how the sweeping 2020 reforms stripped away the rest of the few checks and balances that were left. This project took a lot of reading and historical cross-checking to put together. If you enjoy breakdowns like this, subscribing to the channel is the best way to support my work and help me keep making independent long-form video essays. I would love to explore all constitutions of the world. And you can help me with that! Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:37 Collapse of the Soviet Union 01:23 Russian Federation 02:10 The Crisis of 1993 02:34 New Constitution 03:29 Executive 04:39 State Duma 05:25 Federation Council 06:33 Judiciary 07:00 Power of the President 08:28 Super-Presidentialism 09:00 Rise of Putin 10:25 Putin and Medvedev 11:02 2008 Amendments 11:51 2020 Amendments 14:04 Restrictions on Candidacy 14:57 Yeltsin's Original Sin 16:03 Summary of Russia's Political System