At 31, Oleg Rumyantsev must be one of the youngest founding fathers in history.


He wears a watch with Boris Yeltsin's portrait on its face, listens to rock music, and has written the first democratic constitution ever approved by a Russian government.


Rumyantsev, who is a specialist on Eastern Europe, says he was inspired to write a constitution by watching the transformation of the Soviet Union's former satellites into market-oriented democracies in the late 1980s.


"During perestroika, it became clear that the communist system had to be replaced with a democratic system, with a rule of law", he said in an interview. "Watching the transition of the socialist countries, I realized that the only way to make this happen in Russia without causing widespread social turmoil was through constitutional reform".


In 1989, Rumyantsev, then a little-known political scientist with no formal education in law, proposed the first draft of his constitution to progressives in the Soviet legislature.


In 1990 he was named by Yeltsin to head Russia's Constitutional Commission. After a trip to the United States "where my concept was born", he and a group of democratic-minded legal experts, human-rights activists and former dissidents worked his ideas into a document endowed with the principles and freedoms of Western-style democracy. This fact is a source of no small pride for Rumyantsev.


"We were the locomotive of change", he said. "We created a document that was completely new - in its language, in its principles, in its spirit. It was the crowning achievement of the dissident genre".


But in the old Soviet Union, even in the days of perestroika and glasnost, few Russian legislators were prepared for such a document. Rumyantsev described the reception his constitution got at its first hearing in Russia's supreme legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies, in December of 1990.


"It was our small group of Moscow intellectuals against the huge, 1, 000-member congress, for whom our group was the enemy", he said, laughing.


"They called our draft anti-Soviet, anti-people, anti-socialist - a draft constitution of thieves and robbers. A lot of people told me, 'Oleg, drop it, now is not the time for a new constitution'. But I am glad I stayed with it. We finally got through to them".


Although Rumyantsev's constitution still faces final ratification by the Congress of People's Deputies, Russia's highest legislative body, his proposal has already triumphed in a way:


Parliament is currently enacting legislation in accordance with his draft, rather than the Soviet-era constitution that is still the official law of the land.


"Attitudes towards the constitution are changing", Rumyantsev said. "What used to be unacceptable is more and more acceptable".


He added, "This document is not a new ideology to replace the old one, it is simply a collection of normal, civilized values that are widely accepted. Even conservative deputies are beginning to realize that".


Rumyantsev's draft has also been criticized as a legal document by well-known reformist lawyers, such as Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, and Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin's personal legal adviser. Both Sobchak and Shakhrai have penned their own draft charters. But this July, Rumyantsev got a vote of confidence from Yeltsin when the president finally threw his full support behind Rumyantsev's draft.


Rumyantsev acknowledges certain legal deficiencies in his document, and to shore up that side, he has been studying law at the Moscow Law Institute since 1991. But he remains convinced that his approach was the correct one. "I began work on a new constitution as a political specialist, not a legal expert", he said. "Events have justified this approach".


His current political philosophy reflects a desire to remain above the factional struggles between "radicals" and "conservatives", and if anything, he would like his draft constitution to do the same.


"It has both the idea of a strong, sovereign government, which is important to national patriots, and individual rights and freedoms, which are important for democrats. If we create the conditions for its implementation and execution, then maybe the chasm separating the world views between these groups will grow narrower".