2015, Vol. 13 No. 1, 200-218 doi: 10. 1093/icon/mov003

see
Alexei Trochev, 
Meddling with Justice: Competitive Politics, 
Impunity, and Distrusted Courts in Post-orange Ukraine
, 18(2) 
d
eMokRatIzatSIya
122 (2010).
37
Dahl, 
supra
note 28.
38
S
chwaRtz
, 
supra
note 10, at 162.
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Judicialization of politics: The post-Soviet way
213
The prominence of a few cases should not mislead students of judicialization. The 
famous, or infamous, Chechnya case of 1995,
39
where the Constitutional Court of the 
Russian Federation upheld the constitutionality of the federal military invasion of the 
rebel region, may be a good example of judicialization in formal terms, while it obvi-
ously cannot offer any evidence of meaningful judicial empowerment. The fact that 
the pronounced position of the Court strictly coincided with that of the executive is a 
strong indication of a pact between the Court and the Kremlin. Yet, even without such 
evidence, no one could truly expect that the recently reopened constitutional court, 
which undoubtedly had to cope with finding a new post-traumatic identity after its 
predecessor had been shut down by the reigning President only months earlier, would 
defy Yeltsin in what was the most important political issue that the country had faced. 
Similarly, the widely discussed 1999 decision of the Russian Constitutional Court bar-
ring Yeltsin from running for his third consecutive term, hardly represents a vocal pat-
tern of judicial empowerment, even though a distant observer could well be tricked by 
the appearance of a daring resistance by the Court to the Kremlin’s pressure. In the 
late 1990s, as Yeltsin’s second term was approaching completion, there circulated talk 
of the constitutionality of Yeltsin’s third term. Russia’s 1993 Constitution allowed the 
president only two terms in office; and while Yeltsin was serving his second effective 
term, some believed that he might run again, since he first took office in 1991, before 
the Constitution was adopted. In fact, Yeltsin’s third term was never seen as a realistic 
option, and the talk about it was obviously calculated as a tactical trick to manipulate 
the shaky political landscape. Made at a time when Yeltsin’s health was far too fragile 
for him to run the country, and when Yeltsin himself had announced he would not 
seek another term, the Court’s decision cannot be reasonably seen as anything but a 
move either agreed upon with the Kremlin or clearly calculated not counter the lat-
ter’s preferences. The President’s rather easy and tolerant reaction to the decision, as 
well as his resignation from the country’s top position only months after the court 
ruling, support this conclusion.
As an unfading symbol of judicial activism, the Russian Court’s President Valery 
Zorkin, famous for his opposition to the late President Yeltsin in the years of politi-
cal turbulence in the mid-1990s, now stands as a stark symbol of the tacit alliance 
between the Court and the presidency. Brought back as chief justice by Vladimir Putin 
in 2003, the activist judge did not hesitate to make statements of an openly political 
nature, for which he garnered criticism and an unfavorable reputation in the early 
1990s.
40
In a series of articles written in the wake of Russia’s emerging protest move-
ment in 2011, Justice Zorkin embarked on a fundamental review of both global and 
domestic politics, embracing in his review such distant phenomena as the political 
39
Paola Gaeta,