Constitutional Amendments of 2008 and 2020: A Comparative Legal Analysis

The article is concerned with the comparative legal analysis of the amendments made to the Constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993 by the Laws of the Russian Federation on amendments to the Constitution of the Russian in 2008 and in 2020. Special attention is paid to the amendments of 2020. The paper draws attention to the insufficiency of legislative justification for the application of superstructural stages in the procedure of amending the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 2020, as well as to the problem of identity or similarity to the extent of confusion of the name "all-Russian voting" with such a name of the form of expression of the will of the people as "popular vote" (referendum), which could lead to misleading citizens about the form of voting that actually took place. In addition, the adoption of these amendments in a special order, different from the constitutionally prescribed one in such cases, calls into question the legitimacy of the latter.