The paper contains an analysis of the key amendments to Chapter 8 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The author emphasizes the fact that the constitutional foundation for the establishment of municipal government in the state is based not only on the principle of the unity of the public government system, which is now directly consolidated by the Constitution (Part 3 of Article 132), but requires a combination with the principle of independence of local self-government (Articles 3,

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... 2 of the Constitution); this combination leads to building of a new system of interrelations between the state and local self-government. An important role in building of these interrelations within the framework of the transformed constitutional model of municipal government is allocated to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the legal positions it has expressed earlier, during the pre-reform period.