Russians’ attitude to the constitutional nihilism

Abstract

The subject of the research is the problem of constitutional nihilism in views of Russian citizens.The purpose of the article is to confirm or disprove a hypothesis about a strong influence of constitutional nihilism in the Russian Federation on people mind. The research was made to identify the most and least dangerous forms of constitutional nihilism existing in the territory of the Russian Federation also.The methodology. The public opinion poll was conducted in Google Forms. The research consists of 15 open and closed questions. 1078 respondents from 28 constituent entities of the Russian Federation took part in the poll. They represent all eight Russian federal districts.The main results, the scope of application. Over 70% of respondents have a negative stance on constitutional nihilism especially after the approval of the last Constitutional Amendments in 2020. According to the public opinion poll, the majority of respondents evaluate the Russian Constitution of 1993 as positive. 67,1% of respondents agree that constitutional nihilism came from western countries and only almost a quarter of respondents stated the nature of constitutional nihilism as native Russian. 64,4% of respondents choose constitutional reform as the most dangerous form of constitutional nihilism. 62,1% of respondents choose the forming of unconstitutional legal awareness as the most dangerous form of constitutional nihilism and 49,8% choose authorities’ discredit as it. The least dangerous forms of constitutional nihilism according to public opinion pall are a civil war (39,7%) and constitutional fiction (31,6%).Conclusions. The results reveal a high level of unconstitutional legal awareness in Russian society. The author has confirmed its hypotheses and discovered the most and the least dangerous forms of constitutional nihilism. The author plans to repeat the research the next year and cover people from more Russian constituent entities.