Summary

410 Вспоминая конституционный проект А. Д. Сахарова... SUMMARY The forum “Remembering A. D. Sakharov’s Constitutional Project 15 Years Later” that focuses on the constitutional draft written by Andrei Sakharov in the late 1980s, is opened by Lowry Wyman, the lawyer who has worked since 1989 on Soviet and post-Soviet law reform, legal-education reform, and the problem of democracy building generally. Her essay was written at the beginning of 1990, shortly after Academician Sakharov’s death, and thus reflects perceptions of the Sakharov’s Constitution project during the late Soviet period. Lowry Wyman introduces the text of the constitutional draft against the background of the USSR legal tradition and US constitutional norms. As such, this essay is a valuable historical document in itself that reconstructs the intellectual context in which Sakharov’s constitution was created, and that serves as a natural link between the two epochs, the past and the present. Comments by Joshua Rubenstein, American human rights activist and scholar, offer a somewhat unusual approach to Sakharov’s Constitution. Rubenstein reads this document as an attempt by Sakharov to foster democratic changes and security of human rights throughout the republics of the USSR using the reformist potential of the central government and a rather benevolent attitude of Mikhail Gorbachev. To Joshua Rubenstein, the major concern of Sakharov as the author of this document seems to be the desire to secure human rights of the individual citizens, rather than the rights of nations aspiring to sovereignty. The German historian, Dietrich Beyrau, approaches the text of the Constitution as a historical source, a testament to the Perestroika-time worldview and mentality of the Soviet dissident intellectual. This includes the priority of moral imperatives over sober political and legal requirements, the idealization of western standards and the absence of the sense of a closure, a radical rupture with the Soviet past. Political scientist, Joanna Regulska, puts Sakharov’s Constitution into the context of post-communist constitutional process in the countries of EastCentral Europe. She points out that many alleged peculiarities of Sakharov’s project were quite typical for the societies struggling with the legacy of socialism. At the same time, Sakharov’s indifference to the formation and operation of local governments and the intergovernmental relations set his project aside from the majority of post-socialist constitutions in the region. To Regulska, this testifies to Sakharov’s adherence to the Russian/Soviet legacy of centralization. 411 Ab Imperio, 4/2004 Kimitaka Matsuzato is one of the leading experts on regionalism history and politics in Russian Empire and NIS. He argues that the constitutional project of Andrei Sakharov was built on the principle of ethno-territorial federalism that derives from the Leninist tradition. Centrifugal by nature, ehtno-territorial federalism provides a double justification for a secession, providing a national community with legitimate territorial boundaries. According to Matsuzato, this left few chances for the stability of the future Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia, while the semi-presidentialist model of political regime chosen for the new state promised severe constitutional conflicts of the type that shocked Russian Federation in 1993. Gasan Gusejnov occupies a unique position in the forum: he belongs both to the group of intellectuals who pushed the limits of Perestroika, and to the community of scholars that analyzes that epoch professionally. Hence, his attitude to the Sakharov’s constitutional project combines the concern with personal – not collective (historical) – memory, and the application of analytical models available to scholars today. The central theme of his essay – the problem of changing the society that would not lead to the ultimate disintegration of the country, how such a change was perceived in the late 1980s and how it is seen now. The final contribution to the forum belongs to St. Petersburg political philosopher, Artem Magun, who gets to the core of Sakharov’s Constitution – the idea of political representation, that can exist in a variety of forms, from a revolution of mobilized political subjects to a seemingly stable system built upon manipulation of conformist citizens. The constitutional project of Andrei Sakharov is relevant today to the extent to which the idea of – and demand for – political representation and democratic regime are alive. ...