The president's long interviews on the eve of foreign visits traditionally consist of compliments to the political and economic ties between the two countries and a set of familiar lines in response to questions about Russia's slide into authoritarianism, aggressive foreign policy, the collapse of the space of freedoms and other not very democratic, from the point of view of the Western press, milestones in Russia's special path. This is a routine reason for presenting the wonderful Russia of the present to the foreign audience - and so in an interview with ORF TV presenter Armin Wolf before the start of his visit to Austria, Vladimir Putin reminded German-speaking Europe of what he has been saying for many years. "We have a democratic state, and we all live within the framework of the current Constitution," Putin said in response to the question of whether he had turned the country, which was on the path to democracy, into an authoritarian system with a tsar at the helm. This "does not correspond to any reality at all," the Russian president assured, referring to the results of the presidential elections. Russians may live "within the framework" of the Constitution, but do they live by it? And is Putin's reality the same?

The main point of any Constitution is to limit state power, recalls Ilya Shablinsky, a professor of law at the Higher School of Economics. The Russian Constitution, which is generally good, has not been very successful in fulfilling this function despite its strong bias towards presidential powers, and in fact the president understands that all power is concentrated in his hands, Shablinsky believes.

The separation of powers – in Putin’s remark, this is the difference between the government, the state and “some legal entities,” specifically his friend Yevgeny Prigozhin – is perceived from a distance as existing de jure, but not de facto. The media in Russia are free, Putin tells Wolf, but the “free” Russian media very rarely ask the president the questions and in the wording that Wolf has prepared. The Internet is free, Putin continues, and so is society: people “can always go out and declare themselves” (but not with political demands). Political competition – please, but not for unnamed politicians whose problem is not limited access to legal politics, but a “clown” rating of “hundredths of a percent.”

This is a great export option for the country – although inside Russia people do not believe that they live in such a country. There were already few citizens who were confident that the authorities fully comply with the Constitution, and since 2014 their share has decreased by half – to 5% in 2017, according to Levada polls. On the contrary, the share of those who believe that the authorities only partially comply with the Basic Law or are not burdened with it at all has grown to 54% (the share of those confident that they do not comply at all has doubled to 14%). The Constitution has become something like a formal suit that is supposed to be worn at official receptions and when traveling abroad, but not to be worn when manually governing the state.

When the President Remembers the Constitution