This is not a letter from the West. It is an appeal from an insight that both you and we carry: that the world you were born into — or heard about from parents and grandparents — is not the only possible one.
Between 1990 and the spring of 1993, work was underway in which the separation of powers was not technical administration but ethical necessity (the constitutional commission) — no human being should stand without oversight. Parliamentary scrutiny guaranteed that decisions could be questioned before they became irreversible. Federalism was the recognition that regions have the right to determine their own self-governance. Regional rights protected minorities. Freedom requires that every exercise of power can be met with countervailing force. This was your work. Your intellectuals. Your legislators. Your reformers. Your vision that Russia could become a place where citizens chose their leaders, and where leaders answered to citizens.
The work was interrupted in October 1993 by violence. Parliament was shelled, hundreds died. A new constitution was written by the victor. Article Three proclaims: "The bearer of sovereignty and the sole source of power in the Russian Federation is its multinational people." But this power is not interpreted democratically. Yeltsin's vertical of power was built into the constitution — power is concentrated rather than distributed. The assumption that a "good man" would hold the office became a trap. It was not a mistake. It was deliberate. The foundation was laid for what followed — an order of power in which the people formally own the state but in reality merely pay the price.
For twenty-five years, Putin then built a wall, brick by brick, around the vertical of power. Each individual step had a legal formulation, a public justification: order, security, war on terrorism, efficiency, patriotic consolidation. Together they removed every mechanism that allowed you — the citizens — to hold those in power accountable.
Gubernatorial elections were abolished and reinstated with a municipal filter that makes the opposition dependent on the ruling party's consent. Independent television disappeared between 2000 and 2003. Russia's richest man was imprisoned and ownership became conditional — yours only as long as you stay silent. The Rosgvardia was created — an internal army under the direct command of the president's former bodyguard. The constitution was rewritten in 2020: term limits were nullified, judges subordinated, local self-government subordinated to Moscow. In 2025, the last elected officials were abolished — the librarian, the tractor driver, the retired schoolteacher who decided where the water runs in the village. They were the last elected people in Russia whom citizens could physically walk up to and speak with.
You know this. You live in this.
But your own history says something else as well. It says that Russians do not have authoritarian DNA. It says that at every moment when the lid was lifted — the 1860s zemstvo reforms, the 1905 parliament, the 1989–1991 democratic mobilization — you built alternatives. And that these alternatives collapsed for institutional and economic reasons — not because of any alleged inability of the Russian people to live in freedom. That is a decisive distinction.
It is not the Russian people who bear the guilt for what has happened. It is the structure. It is the architecture of the vertical of power. It is the interrupted constitution and the system that was installed in its vacuum. Yeltsin's super-presidential constitution created the space. Putin built the walls. But the responsibility lies not in their personal qualities — it lies in the constitutional arrangement that allows one person unlimited power without just pathways to correct mistakes.
This is important: to recognize this structure as guilty is not to shame Russia. It is to tear up an alibi that the Kremlin itself has cultivated for decades — that Russia is "too big, too cold, too Asian, too Orthodox" for anything but a strong hand. It is a lie designed so that you will not look for alternatives. Your history disproves it.
Aron Trainin — a Soviet jurist whose theory of individual responsibility for crimes against peace became the foundation for Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter — showed that it is individuals, not abstract states, who bear responsibility. He was Russian. His contribution was enormous and insufficiently recognized in the West.
Rumyantsev, Zorkin, Shakhray — each carried forward a part of the interrupted project. The reformer who navigated institutional constraints. The judge who balanced idealism against political reality. The theorist who established legal precedents. They do not represent the West. They represent you.
De Beauvoir wrote that freedom requires institutional conditions that enable choice. Individuals cannot choose freedom without institutions that make that choice possible. What structures allow you to choose differently than what Putin's system permits? What constitutional order allows genuine pluralism without threatening territorial integrity? What balance between central authority and regional autonomy prevents both authoritarian concentration and separatist fragmentation?
Freedom is what you create — but no one else can create freedom for you. No outsider can make Russia free — Russia must choose freedom itself.
Similarly, no one else can force you into moral change — that you Russians must choose yourselves. These are Russian questions, born from Russian debates, requiring Russian solutions.
Oppression has always had its roots in everyday life. But it is also in everyday life — in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in community associations — that freedom grows. Russia's freedom cannot be given from outside. It must be chosen by those who are to live in it — by you.
The appeal is simple: dare to resume what was interrupted by Yeltsin and around which Putin has built walls.
Not revolution. Not Western import. Not system collapse. But the resumption of constitutional work that already exists — in the archives, in the analyses, in the living memories of those who were there. Work that contained possibilities worth reviving and ambiguities requiring correction.
Peace does not come without cost. It does not come according to anyone's plan. But the plan is already written among you. The cost is daring to rediscover it — with full awareness of what must be excluded. It has waited for thirty years. It is yours to reawaken. You have a foundation to build upon that gives you the freedom you aspire to — the interrupted constitutional work of 1990 to the spring of 1993.
Once reawakened, it opens the possibility for a just peace: "The constitution we inherited became an instrument of oppression. To that era we say NEVER AGAIN. That burden we shall free ourselves from through a just peace."