Word: konstitutsiya
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Demokratiya, konstitutsiya, parlament and Prezident are all foreign additions to the Russian vocabulary. And although Russians can boast of ancient proto-democratic institutions like the village mir or the veche of Novgorod, where consensus decisions were reached at a kind of town meeting, centralized rule by an all-powerful executive--whether Czar or Communist Party General Secretary--has been the political norm throughout Russian history. The country simply has no democratic culture. It experimented briefly with limited parliamentary democracy before the 1917 revolution. The present era of quasi-democratization was inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 with elections...
...word in the political debate remains impichment, impeachment, an imported term that Russians were using to mean "vote Yeltsin out." That is a mistranslation of the long legal process by which the U.S. can dismiss a President, but Russian parliamentarians are also vague about the concepts of demokratiya, konstitutsiya and zakonnost (legality). Despite much ostentatious talk of legality, post-Soviet Russia is still a place where the law and its institutions are in flux...
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