Individual and State-Protective Principles of the Institution of Cultural Rights after the 2020 Constitutional Reform

The article argues that after the 2020 constitutional reform, the institution of cultural rights combines two principles. Article 44 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation confirms them as individual freedoms and claims. The introduced Article 67.1 and Articles 68 and 69 as amended entrust the State with protecting cultural heritage, historical truth, and the originality of peoples, which presupposes defining the value content of culture. Formal legal, systemic, and comparative legal methods are used. The conclusions are tested against judicial practice of 2016–2025. It is demonstrated that the inconsistency between the two groups of norms has a conceptual cause. They apply the concept of culture in different meanings – narrow, a sphere of individual activity, and broad, a value characteristic of the people. And their dividing line runs along the subject entitled to judge the content of culture. Their relationship is assessed as a collision of constitutional values added by a gap in the criteria for its resolution, which predetermines the way of overcoming – the values balancing establishment. The scientific novelty of the study lies in substantiating that the 2020 amendments consolidated not collective rights of communities but a State function capable to serve as a ground for limitations of individual rights, which is not noted in the doctrine of collective rights. The paper proposes the author’s criterion for assessing the protective function by its orientation, derived from a comparison of judicial practice.