Boris Ebzeyev

Boris Safarovich Ebzeyev was born on 25 February 1950 in the village of Janga Jere, in the Frunze Region of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, now part of the Sokuluk District of Kyrgyzstan. He was a Karachay. Like many Karachay families, his had been forcibly deported to Central Asia in 1943, and it was only in 1957 that they were able to return to their homeland in the North Caucasus.

He finished secondary school No. 3 in Karachayevsk and then worked there as a carpenter and concrete worker for a construction organisation, earning the work record he needed to apply to law school. He graduated with honours from the Saratov Institute of Law in 1972, holding a Lenin scholarship as a student, and completed his postgraduate studies there ahead of schedule. He received the degree of candidate of legal sciences in 1975, with a dissertation on the constitutional foundations of personal freedom, and the degree of doctor of legal sciences in 1989, with a dissertation on constitutional problems of human rights and duties. He became a professor in 1990.

Between 1975 and 1976 he did his compulsory military service in the internal troops of the Soviet Interior Ministry.

From 1977 Ebzeyev worked at the Saratov Institute of Law, rising from lecturer to professor in the department of state and constitutional law, and later heading its department of human rights and constitutional justice. His research dealt with constitutional law, sovereignty, power, and the freedom and rights of the individual. He took part in drafting the 1991 constitution of Karachay-Cherkessia and the draft constitution of the Russian Federation.

On 30 October 1991 the Fifth Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR elected him a judge of the Constitutional Court, on the nomination of representatives of Russia's republics. In 1993 he was a member of the Constitutional Conference and of its commission that finalised the draft of the Russian Constitution adopted that December, and he co-wrote the federal constitutional law on the Constitutional Court. He served on the court for almost seventeen years and often wrote dissenting opinions. In the 1992 Communist Party case he argued that the court had been too quick to uphold the presidential decrees dissolving the party and that human rights should be a central test of whether a party was unconstitutional. In 1995 he dissented when the court upheld the presidential decrees on military doctrine and on restoring constitutional order in Chechnya, arguing that their aims could not justify the severe consequences of carrying them out.

Ebzeyev stood for president of Karachay-Cherkessia in 1999 but was eliminated after the first round. On 30 July 2008 President Dmitry Medvedev put his name forward to the republic's People's Assembly, which confirmed him on 5 August 2008, and he took office in September. In 2010 he served on the presidium of the State Council. He resigned at his own request on 26 February 2011. Reports at the time linked his departure to concern that the republic's social and economic situation and the measures taken by its leadership fell short of the goals set by the federal president, and later commentators pointed to pressure from local clans and from Moscow.

In March 2011 he became a member of the Central Election Commission of Russia, where he served in three successive compositions of the commission. He oversaw complaints against the decisions of election commissions, relations with regional authorities, opinions on whether regional laws matched federal law, and the commission's official publications. On 25 December 2017 he presented the commission's decision refusing to register the initiative group nominating Alexei Navalny for president. From 2013 to 2016 he chaired the law panel of the Higher Attestation Commission, a period in which the Dissernet project accused him of overlooking plagiarised dissertations. In 2019 the Anti-Corruption Foundation accused him of illegal enrichment through property registered to his young grandson.

From December 2022 he was under United States sanctions, and from December 2023 under European Union sanctions, for the commission's part in organising the 2022 referendums and the 2023 elections in occupied parts of Ukraine. Switzerland, Australia, Ukraine and New Zealand imposed similar measures. He left the commission on 30 March 2026, having said in February that he would not join its new composition.

Ebzeyev wrote more than 200 scholarly works, including about 25 monographs, textbooks and commentaries, among them a commentary on the rulings of the Constitutional Court. His honours included the Order of Friendship (2011), the Order of Honour, the titles of Honoured Scientist of Russia (2000) and Honoured Lawyer of Russia (2004), and the Stolypin Medal, second class (2025).

Ebzeyev was married. He had a son, Boris Borisovich Ebzeyev, and grandchildren. He was a Karachay, and his family's home village was Kumysh in the Karachayevsky District of Karachay-Cherkessia, where he was later buried.

Boris Ebzeyev died in Moscow on 23 August 2026, at the age of 76. The Central Election Commission announced his death the same day, saying that his former colleagues and election organisers across the country mourned him and would try to continue his work. The cause of death was not made public. The Russian State University for the Humanities described his death as sudden, and Kommersant reported that he had been suffering from serious health problems by the time he left the commission earlier in the year.

At a commission meeting on 24 August, deputy chairman Nikolai Bulayev said Ebzeyev had treated the Constitution as his own creation. The commission's chair, Ella Pamfilova, recalled that he had kept a permanent pass to the commission's building after leaving it. Condolences also came from judges and staff of the Constitutional Court, the State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and the head of Karachay-Cherkessia, Rashid Temrezov.

His body was flown from Moscow to Karachay-Cherkessia on 24 August. Funeral prayers were held in Cherkessk, and he was buried that evening in the village of Kumysh in the Karachayevsky District.

Ebzeyev is remembered as one of the authors of Russia's 1993 Constitution and as a member of the first Constitutional Court, where his dissents on the Communist Party case and the Chechen war decrees are still cited in discussions of the court's early years. His textbooks and commentaries were used in Russian law schools for decades.

His later career was more contested. As head of Karachay-Cherkessia he left office early, and as a member of the Central Election Commission he was associated with the refusal to register Alexei Navalny and was sanctioned by Western governments over the referendums in occupied Ukraine. For the Karachay people, he was also a prominent example of a child of the 1943 deportation who rose to the highest levels of the Russian state.