The Citizen's Function to Protect the Fatherland and Ensure the Defense and Security of the Russian Federation

The paper is devoted to determining the citizen’s function to protect the Fatherland and ensure the defense and security of the Russian Federation. Based on the analysis of the legal nature of citizens’ participation in defense and security, as well as internal and external military threats and dangers, it is concluded that protection of the Fatherland is associated with ensuring the existence, functioning and legitimacy of the State, the functions and administrative and legal forms of such participation. The analysis of doctrinal views on the concept of the constitutional system and judicial practice gives grounds to infer that the legal institution under consideration is immanent to the constitutional system: by participating, citizens perform a legitimizing function in relation to the constitutional order and the state power, i.e. reproduce the State identity of Russia, which can be expressed both in an active and passive form. If participation involves incorporation of the State into a military organization, citizens perform a shaping function. Since such participation presupposes the existence of rights and obligations, which follows from the constitutional norms on the duty and duty to protect the Fatherland, citizens, entering into legal relations, exercise human rights protective (protecting their interests) and law enforcement (protecting public interests) functions. Participation of citizens in ensuring defense and security and acting as a form of democracy involves not only the performance of duty and responsibility to protect the Fatherland, but also implementation of the rights and freedoms of citizens and their associations, other organizations in the interests of protecting the constitutional system, ensuring the defense and security of the State. The functions allow us to classify the forms of participation depending on the functional nature, the nature of the implementation of legal rights in state administration, the nature of relations with state bodies, the degree of relevance to the result, the type of administrative and legal status, the basis of participation.