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The handbook is a collaborative effort by 26 renowned German-speaking specialists in Russian law and runs to some 1,300 pages. The work – which follows in the tradition of the major handbooks on the Soviet Constitution by Reinhart Maurach (1955) and Martin Fincke (1983) and builds upon them – is essentially a commentary on the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, written in the style of a constitutional commentary. For this book, Prof. DDr. Bernd Wieser was awarded the 2015 German-Russian Lawyers’ Prize on 11 September 2015 in Wiesbaden.

At the heart of the work lies a comprehensive analysis of the case law of the Russian Constitutional Court. The relevant case law is not merely summarised here, but critically and dogmatically examined from an ‘outside perspective’. In addition to the case law, the entire relevant literature—including works published in Russian as well as those in German or English—is utilised and incorporated. The controversies surrounding the most significant questions of interpretation are traced, and independent solutions are presented for questions of fundamental importance that have not yet been addressed in the literature. In this respect, therefore, a comprehensive, encyclopaedic approach is pursued.

The handbook is unique and innovative in several respects. Unlike in German-speaking countries, where legal commentaries in general and constitutional commentaries in particular have a long tradition as a literary genre, constitutional commentaries only became established in Russia in the 1980s. Several commentaries on the 1993 Constitution have since been published there as well, though – with all due respect – they do not meet modern Western standards.

Even the most recent Russian constitutional commentaries pay scant attention to the now extensive body of case law from the Russian Constitutional Court. Insofar as decisions of the Constitutional Court are reproduced at all, this is done in a purely narrative and rather haphazard manner, certainly not in an organised fashion. Nowhere is there any systematisation of case law, nor is there any scholarly critique of the decisions. In these respects, the Handbook of the Russian Constitution breaks completely new scholarly ground.

The same applies to the use of academic literature. Russian constitutional commentaries pay virtually no attention to academic literature. This is evident at first glance from the fact that there are no bibliographies for the individual provisions. The text of a commentary almost never addresses positions developed by other authors on a specific question of interpretation. In contrast, the handbook aims to provide an inventory and critical commentary on as much of the essential academic literature as possible for each individual provision of the Constitution.

The work is thus intended not only to take stock of the state of knowledge regarding the Russian Constitution in the German-speaking world, but also to provide impetus for the further development of Russian constitutional law doctrine. It is to be hoped that the findings of this handbook will spark an intensive academic exchange with Russian colleagues.

In mid-2020, a comprehensive constitutional reform took place in Russia under extremely peculiar political and legal circumstances. Forty-one constitutional articles were amended, and five were newly inserted. This necessitated a revision of these commentaries, which was carried out in accordance with the standards described above in a supplementary volume to the handbook. The supplementary volume was again published by Verlag Österreich, but this time in cooperation with Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag (https://www.weltbild.at/artikel/buch/handbuch-der-russischen-verfassung_38743044-1). The project was led by Univ.-Prof. DDr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Wieser.

It is argued here that the current legal framework in international law and in theories of international relations tends to deny these entities agency, as the traditional approach to assessing secession is rooted in the prism of territorial integrity and the right to self-determination. However, it is evident that this very traditional prism is both unclear, imprecise and inadequate for precisely determining the legal consequences arising from the existence of secessionist entities. On the one hand, it is imprecise because it fails to distil the normative content of both principles in the context of secessionist entities and does not precisely define the conditions under which the achievement of secession can and should be tolerated. It logically follows that the application of this framework is equally inadequate when dealing with these entities and in resolving the underlying problem. In this context, this book discusses the underlying problems with reference to the three conflicts in the South Caucasus: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia.