THE 1993 CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION: THE CONSTITUTIONAL IDEAL EVALUATION AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN LIGHT OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE
The paper carries out evaluation of the relevance of a liberal-democratic idea enshrined in the 1993 Constitution, constitutional goals and values and their compliance with the needs of a modern society on the basis of a 25-year-long operation of the Constitution. The author compares the "constitutional ideal" enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the reality. Evaluation is carried out in light of the international experience of constitutional development. It is noted that the value and authority of the Constitution suffer erosion under the influence of numerous objective and subjective factors due to the influence of which a significant gap between the ideal enshrined in the Constitution and the reality emerges, and the ideal itself is questioned. Trends are considered in sequence: 1) formation of constitutional axiology, humanization and socialization of constitutions, expansion of constitutional morality; 2) emergence of new doctrines of the constitutional ideal based on the constitutional compromise under the conditions of crisis of liberal-democratic and other constitutional doctrines; 3) emergence of global constitutionalism which changes the scope of constitution authority, intensifies international interventions in the constitutional design and forms universal constitutional standards. On the example of the Russian Federation, the paper highlights positive and negative consequences of the Soviet socialist state system transformation into the liberal-democratic constitutional system. The author focuses on the problem of legitimacy of the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation in the context of optimization of constitutional design that depends on the level of publicity of constitutional procedures. It is suggested that further discussion of the problems of legitimacy of the Constitution of the Russian Federation makes no sense. Otherwise, the legitimacy of the entire RF system of legislation adopted on its basis is challenged. Also, it is important to take into account application of forms and procedures of civil consent with regard to the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation as reflected in the work of the Constitutional Conference, the Agreement on Public Consent and the nation-wide Referendum. Assessing the prospects of constitutional development, the author argues that under modern threats and challenges to humanity there is an objective need to review certain constitutional and other legal standards set out in national and international law. The author proposes to apply this approach to the constitutional regulation and constitutional studies and to call it constitutional futuristic; and the doctrine forming the constitutional ideal of the future should be called constitutional futurism. The constitutional ideal determination is based on examination of the level of Constitution implementation, which appears to be measured by three main indicators: constitutional congruence, effectiveness and objectivity of constitutional provisions. The main task of the constitutional futuristic is to identify, based on the assessment of the level of implementation of the current Constitution, the potential of constitutional development aimed at improving the constitutional order. The content of this potential during the recent period should be associated with the search for fundamentally new standards of life leading to a qualitatively different level of development of a human civilization. This approach predetermines the new structuring of constitutions and, accordingly, the branch of constitutional law, the result of which will be the transformation of constitutional law of survival into its highest type, namely, constitutional law of life based on the constitutional ideal.