Spiritual and moral values in Russian constitutional acts: normative consolidation and practical implementation

Abstract

The 2020 constitutional reform introduced into the Basic Law a number of provisions fixing the spiritual and moral foundations of Russian statehood; however, the correlation between these provisions and the category of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, consolidated in strategic planning acts, remains doctrinally undefined. The subject is the body of constitutional norms and subordinate acts mediating the recognition and protection of spiritual and moral values, together with the practice of their application by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. The aim is to establish whether the constitutional prescriptions on spiritual and moral values form an autonomous normative layer or derive from the values expressed in the National Security Strategy and the Fundamentals of State Policy. The methodology relies on formal-legal analysis, teleological and systemic interpretation, and the generalisation of constitutional justice practice. It is established that constitutional consolidation is fragmentary and predominantly referential: the text of the Constitution names individual values (family, historical memory, children, the state-forming people), whereas their systematised list is contained in a subordinate act, Decree № 809, which produces a hierarchical inversion. It is shown that law-enforcement concretisation occurs mainly through the positions of the Constitutional Court, which precede legislative formalisation. The divergence between the scope of constitutional and subordinate consolidation means that the protection of spiritual and moral values is achieved by reorienting the interpretation of existing constitutional norms through the prism of strategic planning acts, without creating a separate legal institution.