Sharped with one breath

Lecturer Free University Ekaterina Mishina - about why power in Russia does not obey the law

Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 22 years without evidence of guilt. Power, citizens, and the court workers do not respect the law and law. For centuries, publicists, philosophers, writers, and public figures say this. Everyone knows the proverb: "The law is what it is drawn: where you turn it out there." The twentieth century has become a century for the country, but regarding the law, on the contrary, approved the vicious principles of the monarchical past. Candidate of Law, a Lecturer of a Free University and the invited professor of the University of Michigan in 2012-2016, Ekaterina Mishina, explains what has happened with the right in Russia over the past hundred years.

The time of Soviet rule -making

The Bolsheviks understood that it was impossible to create a whole legal system from scratch, therefore, from the very beginning, Soviet legislation was a melange of tsarist regulations and the Marxist-Leninist ideology, according to which the right as such is an instrument of approval of the supremacy of the capitalist class. That is, any law, from the point of view of the Bolsheviks, is, of course, suppressing, but during the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism (and after this-to communism) the right cannot be canceled, and it is better to use it as a temporary tool in the interests of the working people to suppress the exploiters.

After the construction of a non -class society, the need for law should have automatically disappeared due to the completion of its historical mission along with the state, family and other institutions that became unnecessary. And since the institute is temporary and doomed to death, what respect can we talk about?

The function of Bolshevik law as a class of class struggle was especially clearly manifested in criminal law. If you open the modern Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, you will see that first of all, it is aimed at protecting the rights and freedoms of man and citizen, then - property, public order, environment, and only then - the constitutional system of Russia. The most important task of Soviet criminal laws was the protection of the state. The first Soviet Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1922 distinguished two categories of crimes: a) the foundations of the new law and order or recognized as the most dangerous against the workers and peasant authorities; and b) all other crimes (Article 27). So the key Marxist-Leninist formula about the priority of the interests of the state over the interests of an individual was enshrined in law and became the fundamental principle of Soviet criminal law.

The main provisions of the first Criminal Code, and in the tightened version, were also included in the second , adopted four years later. Crimes against the Soviet system were punished much more strictly than any others - so, if you do not take into account aggravating circumstances, the death penalty was provided only for illegal actions aimed against the state.

At the same time, the formulations of the norms of both codes were vague, they established the principle of analogy (if the crime is not provided for by applicable law, then another, maximum suitable norm is applied) and the principle of retroactive. That is, the state directly said to its citizens: the norm of law is not an absolute, and if a person has not violated any of the existing laws, then you can always find the norm on the basis of which he will be guilty. What is the respect for the right?

The creators of revolutionary justice were new Soviet judges who were ordered to pass the sentences, based on the “revolutionary conscience” and “socialist legal consciousness”, and in the Regulation on the People’s Court of the RSFSR of 1918 it was noted that the court “was not constrained by any formal evidence” and decides what evidence to recognize as acceptable and which to reject. Vladimir Lenin, the main task of the Soviet court, formulated very unequivocally: “The court should not eliminate terror; To promise this would be self -deception or deceit, but to justify and legitimize it fundamentally, clearly, without falsehood and without embellishment. ”

The state was incomparably more important than personality, but a person is often more important than actions. The Criminal Code obliged the judges to first take into account the degree and nature of the danger of the defendant himself (“on the basis of his lifestyle and the past”) and only then crimes. Belonging to the class of exploiters was one of the most important aggravating circumstances, working or peasant origin was, on the contrary, the circumstance of the mitigating.

In Soviet law, the image of the enemy clearly appeared, both internal and external. The relevant provisions also contained the first Constitutions (RSFSR of 1918 and the USSR of 1924). Class enemies, enemies of the people, parasitic layers of society, traitors of the Motherland should have been identified, exposed, brutally punished, or, at worst, amazed in rights. By the beginning of the 1930s, it became obvious that it was not worth abandoning the law, contrary to the original plans. This is too an effective tool.

Yes, in the first years of Soviet power, progressive legal transformations have been adopted, but from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, almost all of them have been canceled. Once again, abortion that Soviet Russia was the first in the world legalized in 1920, which previously existed the equality of registered and actual marriage was canceled. The previously existing equality of illegitimate children and children born in a registered marriage was liquidated - the greatest achievement in the field of family law. The establishment of paternity was canceled both in the registration and in court, and at the same time the right of a single mother to apply to the court to recover alimony for the maintenance of an illegitimate child. The divorce procedure was again complicated, the divorce function was returned to ships focused on the need to preserve each individual family. If earlier the registry office simply recorded divorce, now the judges were actively trying to convince the spouses to preserve the marriage, for which they at least twice set the so -called period for reconciliation. The divorce became a state affair, and the state now did not actively approve of divorces.

The farther, the more people were convinced that, contrary to the assurances of propaganda, laws do not exist to protect the interests of citizens, but to protect the Soviet system, and primarily from the citizens themselves.

Thaw

The result of the XX Congress of the CPSU was, among other things, some liberalization of criminal law, but it was evolution from terrible to very bad. The priority of the interests of the state has not disappeared, at the same time the politicization of legal education and law as a whole intensified. The principle of partisanship of legal science was hampered by student heads from the first days of study.

I entered the Faculty of Faculty of Moscow State University under Brezhnev, graduated from Gorbachev, so that my classmates and my classmates had a chance to study such exciting objects as “scientific atheism”, “Marxist-Leninist ethics and aesthetics”, in addition to the classical set in the form of the history of the CPSU, the political economy of socialism and scientific communism. During the studies at the legal faculty, we all learned perfectly that the decisions of the party elite are more important than the letter of the law. Citizens who are not burdened with legal education received this knowledge from their own experience. The popular Soviet joke “Tell me, am I right? - Yes, sure. - Tell me, can I? .. - No, "was completely not funny in the first place because it completely reflected reality. The constitutions and laws were perceived as some declarative acts applied as the party considered correct. Respect for the law did not add this state of affairs.

1990s

After the collapse of the USSR, the most important factor in legal transformations was desovetization. This is how this process is described in the concept of judicial reform in the RSFSR, approved even before the formal termination of the existence of the Union: "The state, ceasing to be an instrument of violence in the hands of a totalitarian regime, is democratized in order, in the end, to commit a courageous act of self -negative, turning from political into legal."

The authors of the concept with wide strokes outlined key problems that were supposed to solve the judicial and legal reforms: justice is not independent, the legislation is politicized and contains not legal, but at best sociological concepts and definitions.

The beginning of Russian reforms was for a very difficult time. And of course, it would be at least naive to expect that the transition from Soviet power to a more democratic regime will be easy and calm. The collapse of the Soviet Union was similar to an emergency surgical operation, which inevitably accompanied by pain, suffering and complications. There was no chance to avoid her, and the recovery period was to follow her. It was this period that came in the 1990s.

At that time, I had a chance to work in the State Duma and the Constitutional Court, so I always watch with great interest, read and listen to the so -called dashing nineties. A rapid fall in the standard of living, painful economic transformations, “gangster capitalism”, criminal showdowns, an increase in street crime - all this was. But not only that. It was then that in our life the unknown appeared: freedom of speech, freedom of movement, political pluralism, political competition, freedom of the media. In 1993, a new constitution was adopted, proclaiming a person, his rights and freedom of higher value.

The division of powers, the legal state, the ban on state ideology, the priority of international law became the foundations of the constitutional system of our country. The leitmotif of legal transformations was democratization, the transition to the market, desovetization and humanization. The 1996 Criminal Code, based on democratic principles, symbolized the departure from the Soviet past. A huge achievement was the decriminalization of such crimes inherent in the Soviet system as anti -Soviet agitation (it theoretically could be replaced by anti -Russian) and propaganda, speculation, illegal foreign exchange operations, vagrancy, and sodium.

These were the best years of Russian judicial reform: the courts became an independent branch of the authorities, recently created institutions successfully worked - and primarily the Constitutional Court, as well as arbitration courts specially designed to consider economic disputes in the changed economic conditions. In the lists of committees of the State Duma of the first and second convocations, the Committee on Legislation and Judicial Law Reform was the first to be listed. I was lucky - for more than six months I visited the duty of the meeting of this committee in 1994. What I saw there will forever remain for me an example of effective lawmaking and constructive interaction of people with different political views.

Putin

In 2000, the country entered with the new acting President of the Russian Federation, and the changes started much faster than it could be represented. Already in January, the phrase “forensic reform” disappears from the list of names of the State Duma committees. The transformation that began under the new president in the economic sphere impressed and inspired optimism: the income tax rate was reduced and the issues of private property on land were finally settled.

In the field of legal transformations and human rights, everything was far from being so well. The situation with the Kursk submarine became an alarming signal to return the era of state lies.

In 2003, in post -Soviet Russia, according to most experts, the first political prisoners - Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev believes. The case of Yukos revived one of the features of the Bolshevik criminal law - when determining the punishment measure, the personality of the offender is more important than what he did. The revival of this bad tradition is known - November 12, 2003, when the deputy prosecutor general Vladimir Kolesnikov, speaking at an anti -corruption event in the State Duma, uttered significant words. Setting that under the current Criminal Code the maximum punishment for the crimes of which Mikhail Khodorkovsky was accused - up to 10 years in prison, Deputy Prosecutor General Kolesnikov said the following: “Unfortunately, we can’t give more.”

What is the meaning of these words? Firstly, Kolesnikov with confidence indicates what kind of punishment Khodorkovsky will be imposed at the moment when a criminal case is at the stage of a preliminary investigation. Thus, the Deputy Prosecutor General of the country declares guilty to a person whose case has not yet considered the court, openly ignoring the presumption of innocence. Secondly, “we can’t give” is a Freudian reservation. According to Article 49 of the Constitution, the guilt of the person accused of committing a crime must be proved and established by the court verdict that has entered into legal force. It was the courts, and not the General Prosecutor's Office, about which Kolesnikov, who has not only a legal education, but also the degree of a doctor of legal sciences, would have been supposed to know. And thirdly, I will repeat the initial thought-these words of the representative of the General Prosecutor's Office indicate that the personality of the defendant is more important than the deed to him: “They say, Khodorkovsky did not kill. Yes, he did not kill, with a club he did not go on a big way. All this is really. However, in this case, there should be a different logic in the assessment of the situation; And above all, it is worth seeing how the majority of the Russian population lives in conditions when a small part has superpituals. ”

As in Soviet times, in the course of the process, almost all the basic principles of criminal law were violated: a fair trial (Fair Tial), the presumption of innocence, the principle of “in dubio pro reg” (“doubt is interpreted in favor of the accused”), the right to effective protection, contest, equality of accusation and protection, and the proportionality of the applied measures. And that was only the beginning.

Very quickly, politicization returned to the right, the quality of lawmaking has decreased. The farther, the more noticeably the principle of legal certainty was violated: the norm is formulated so vague and streamlined that it creates unlimited possibilities for the arbitrariness of the law enforcer. Take at least the editorial office of Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on Stateizer, the gutta -perch formulations of which create unlimited possibilities for interpretation and selective use.

Here is an approximate list of the most dangerous “traps” of the new edition of the article about the Stateizer:

1) The wording “hostile activities to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation” was replaced by the streamlined definition “Activities aimed against the security of the Russian Federation”. The exclusion of the definition of “hostile” makes the concept of “activity directed against the security of the Russian Federation” actually dimensionless;

2) it is obvious that according to the plan of the legislator, the new formulation includes not only external, but also internal safety. There is no clear and detailed definition of both concepts in the Criminal Code;

3) the concept of “providing financial, material, technical, consulting or other assistance to a foreign state, an international or foreign organization or their representatives in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation” due to the streamlines of this wording can be applied to almost any type of activity;

4) as potential recipients of information constituting state secret, as well as the above types of assistance, international organizations are indicated. The list of such recipients becomes open, and any international organization can be included by default.

Such a vague formulation of the article on stateisms deprives citizens of the opportunity to properly fulfill this legislative order, because the norm is incomprehensible (which is a violation of one of the essential conditions of the legal state). What is even worse - on the basis of the provisions of Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a criminal case on charges of committing a treason can be initiated for providing almost any information and committing almost any actions by any citizen of the Russian Federation.

In the 2010s, the revival of the worst practices of the Soviet era began. The image of the enemy again appears in norm -making. In July 2012, the Federal Laws “On Non -Profit Organizations” and “On Public Associations” returned the already forgotten phrase “Foreign Agent”. The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in his decision of April 8, 2014 tried to explain that this term is good and not involving a negative assessment, but somehow did not believe in these excellent words.

The next enemy was “undesirable organizations”, for participation in the activities of which according to Art. 284.1 of the Criminal Code threatens to four years in prison, and up to six for organizing the activities of such an organization. The disproportionately brutal punishment is also provided for the infamous “Dadin” article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“repeated violation of the established procedure for organizing or holding a meeting, rally, demonstration, march or picket”) - up to five years in prison. Для сравнения: такое же максимальное наказание Уголовный кодекс предусматривает за убийство двух и более лиц, совершенное в состоянии аффекта. Еще более показательно, что максимальное наказание за истязание без отягчающих обстоятельств (ч.1 ст. 117) — до трех лет лишения свободы.

Иными словами, с точки зрения российского законодателя XXI-го века, истязание человека менее опасно для общества, нежели неоднократное нарушение правил организации либо проведения митингов, шествий и демонстраций, которое уже начинает рассматриваться как преступление против государства. И в этом еще одно сходство с нормами раннего советского уголовного права, согласно которым преступления против государства были более общественно опасны, нежели преступления против личности.

Включенная в УК РФ в 2014 году статья «Реабилитация нацизма» содержит формулировку «распространение заведомо ложных сведений о деятельности СССР в годы Второй мировой войны, совершенное публично». Как было сказано в знаменитом фильме «День выборов», «ради нее все и писалось» — к уголовной ответственности по этой статье российские граждане привлекаются именно за «фальсификацию истории», и количество приговоров медленно, но последовательно растет .

В 2020 году появились дополнительные риски для тех, кто критически высказывается о российской и советской истории. Поправки к Конституции РФ устанавливают, что «Российская Федерация чтит память защитников Отечества, обеспечивает защиту исторической правды. Determining the meaning of the feat of the people when protecting the Fatherland is not allowed. ” Той же осенью в Следственном комитете РФ решили создать специальное подразделение по расследованию преступлений, связанных с фальсификацией истории.

Установление уголовной ответственности за «фальсификацию истории» — еще один признак возрождения оборонительного (от граждан) характера уголовного права, который был закреплен в первом советском УК: «Являясь мерой оборонительной, наказание должно быть целесообразно и в то же время совершенно лишено признаков мучительства и не должно причинять преступнику бесполезных и лишних страданий».

Сейчас, к сожалению, вернулось время нецелесообразных и несоразмерно жестоких наказаний, когда блогер получает пять лет за твит (дело Владислава Синицы), а муниципальный депутат Алексей Горинов приговаривается к семи годам колонии общего режима за то, на заседании совета муниципальных депутатов указал на неуместность проведения конкурса детского рисунка, в то время, когда в Украине каждый день дети гибнут или становятся сиротами.

Практика последних лет свидетельствует о том, что российские правоприменители стали рассматривать наказание как способ запугать осужденного. Подобный подход — классика феодализма, при котором наказание всегда носило характер устрашения. Кстати, в современном российском правоприменении есть еще одна феодальная черта — сословный характер наказания. Принадлежность к определенному сословию определяется степенью близости и лояльности существующему режиму. Именуется этот феномен избирательным правоприменением, но сути дела это не меняет — в России XXI-го века правовые нормы применяются по-разному в отношении разных социальных групп.

Начало новой эры охоты на ведьм, в роли которых теперь выступают оппозиционеры, «иностранные агенты» и сотрудники «нежелательных организаций», возродило наихудшие черты советского революционного правосудия — право судей самим решать, что является доказательством, а что — нет, персонификацию наказания (когда наказание назначается не за содеянное, а в зависимости от того, кем является подсудимый), вынесение необоснованно жестоких приговоров.

Время «подмахивающей юриспруденции»

Этот хлесткий термин появился в день, когда КС признал поправки к Конституции и порядок их вступления в силу. Мартовские иды-2020 ознаменовали не только смерть КС как независимого органа конституционной юстиции, но и начало эры той самой «подмахивающей юриспруденции». Обгоняя друг друга, ученые, законодатели и правоприменители стремятся уловить малейшие изменения политической воли. Известные российские конституционалисты наперебой нахваливали поправки-2020. Юристы, сохранившие смелость и независимость суждений, зачастую лишались работы. Вспомним хотя бы разгром кафедры конституционного права факультета права «Вышки», моей любимой кафедры, где я проработала почти 10 лет.

Мои коллеги, блестящие профессионалы и замечательные преподаватели, отказавшиеся вливаться в ряды «подмахивающей юриспруденции», были либо уволены, либо отстранены от преподавания. Подписанные президентом в апреле 2021 поправки к закону «Об образовании» стигматизировали независимые учебные проекты и поместили просветительскую деятельность под жесткий контроль. Нормотворчество периода, упорно именуемого «специальной военной операцией», — это классическое нормотворчество агрессивного тоталитарного государства со всеми его атрибутами: попранием основных принципов права, цензурой, преследованием инакомыслия, непропорционально жестокими наказаниями и вопиюще неправовыми законами.