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Article Excerpt
REGIONS AND REGIONALISM HAVE BEEN KEY FACTORS IN POST communist Russia's state building. The Yeltsin-era's "hyperfederalism" is credited with preserving Russian nascent statehood as much as are the centralist reforms of Vladimir Putin and his successor, Dimitri Medvedev. Territorial integrity is regarded as essential to the existence of the Russian state itself--more so perhaps than in democratic nations with a longer history of statehood. The effort to keep such an enormous and diverse country together, however, is a Sisyphean task that has not been made easier with the clumsy, haphazard, and incompetent policies of the successive presidential administrations. While democratic process may inject some oil into the functioning of even the most rusty and poorly designed schemes, the system is prone to slow corrosion and decay absent democracy and the scrutiny and feedback mechanisms that come with it. Globalization-related external influences from regional political and economic players such as the European Union (EU), other Western donors, or multinational corporations may impinge upon authoritarian tendencies. But these influences too are only bound to increase regional socioeconomic and political divergence given their spatially uneven nature.
This paper surveys Russia's regional developments and their wider implications for the country's political, economic, and territorial futures. Section one sketches out the Yeltsin-era center-regional dynamics that provided the context for President Putin's ambitious regional reform agenda. Section two discusses Putin's federalism and local government reforms in some detail. Section three takes stock of the outcome of these and other relevant federal reforms. Section four discusses the broader implications of postcommunist federal and regional developments for the country's social, economic, and territorial cohesion. Section five focuses on globalization-related external influences on regional economies and politics and highlights the significance of the hitherto largely neglected variable of geography in shaping the nature and intensity of these influences. Using examples from China and India, it shows how globalization may have highly uneven economic and political regional effects, especially in territorially large countries.
THE SOVEREIGNTY INFLATION OF THE 1990S
It is now common to attribute to the Putin presidency the recent return to the Soviet era in terms of the incorporation of its symbols, rituals, and institutions. Yet Soviet legacies profoundly influenced Russia's early postcommunist center-regional dynamics and regional development. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin was a defining factor in the disintegration of the USSR. A champion of democracy and sovereignty vis-a-vis the Soviet monolith, Yeltsin faced an uneasy task trying to hold his own country together when Russia became an independent state in 1991. Even with the USSR's collapse, Russia found itself as the world's territorially largest country populated by a plethora of minority ethnic groups. Many of these groups were concentrated in ethnically defined republics and autonomies that Joseph Stalin created in the context of Soviet nationalities policies.
In what became known as the "parade of sovereignties," the Russian republics were quick to demand greater powers and resources from the nascent Russian state, adopting all the symbols and rituals, albeit not substantive rights, of sovereign nations. Powerful and resource-rich republics like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan declared sovereignty, adopted their own constitutions, elected presidents and parliaments, and pursued paradiplomacy with foreign nations. Other ethnic republics were quick to follow their lead. Sovereignty became cheap as it was now easily available to everyone--from tiny semifeudal regions with populations of a few hundred thousand people, to larger, more powerful and viable entities.
Yeltsin's position toward the independent-minded regions--summarized in his 1990 statement "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow"--is credited with saving Russia from a USSR-style collapse along ethnic lines. The inflation of sovereignty indeed pacified threats to secession, but also provided the republics with rights over the management of natural resources, the revenues that they generated, and the design of their internal political institutions. The biggest threat to state integrity form this profusion of difference was the adoption of regional laws and policies vastly at odds with the federal constitution and federal legislation. Rather than loudly trumpeting their desire to secede, as they had done before, some regions in the course of the 1990s proceeded to quietly slip out of Russia's "constitutional space."
Chechnya went the furthest among regions with sovereignty aspirations. It declared independence and in 1994 was subject to federal military intervention that became known as the first Chechen War. The Khasav-Yurt peace accords, which were signed in 1996 after heavy losses on both sides, did not mean however that Moscow acquired substantive control over the breakaway region. Instead, it was then largely left to its own devices--so far in fact that one day, in 1998 ordinary Russians woke up to sharia (Islamic law)-sanctioned public beheadings of an adulterous Chechen couple broadcast on national television.
Underlining efforts to appease the ethnically defined entities--which, barring Chechnya had been largely successful at keeping the country together--were legacies of the Soviet nationalities policies. The Soviet state obsessively "institutionalized" ethnic groups, reinforcing identities and nationhood aspirations (Brubaker, 1996). Soviet anthropologists are credited with some of the earliest efforts at categorizing and classifying ethnic and linguistic groups worldwide--the Atlas Narodov Mira (Populations of the World Atlas) indices are still widely used by American and West European economists and political scientists despite the availability of more recent alternative categorizations (Alesina et al., 2003). Even in the postcommunist period, the Russian federal Ministry for Nationalities notably influenced federal policies toward the regions, boasting some of the USSR's top ethnographers as its ministers.
Just as in the Soviet Union, however, the more immediate perceived threat of secession or ethic violence in the ethnic regions fostered perceptions of the marginalization of the main ethnic group, the ethnic Russians and the nonethnically defined "Russian" regions, oblasti and kraya, many of which had been denied special privileges or received fewer economic concessions from the center. In contrast to the republics, few of the "Russian" regions enjoyed the privilege of signing powersharing agreements with the national center and of possessing the same trappings of sovereignty. Until 1996, governors in the regions were federal presidential appointees, while the republics could elect their own chief executives. This was in fact reminiscent of the Soviet state under which the RSFSR and its provinces were perceived as poor relations to the other 14 republics that received more developmental resources.
The major jewel in the crown within the RSFSR itself that did indeed receive vast resources and privileges, inviting the envy of other regions, was Moscow. The capital city's privileged position and stark socioeconomic contrast to other regions have only solidified in the postcommunist period. The economist Phil Hanson notes that "if Moscow were an independent city-state it would be a roaring postcommunist success; huge tracts of Russia, however, more closely resemble the Middle Ages" (Hanson, 2005).
However imperfect the federalism-related institutional architectures and policies of the Yeltsin presidency, they were pursued in the context of a more pluralist, open, and competitive political system at a national level, and in many regions, at a regional level as well. Regional elite was represented in the second chamber of the federal parliament, the Federation Council. Two popularly elected members from each region sat on the council, which had been set up in 1993 to serve as a counterweight to the Duma and as a channel for the representation of regional interests. From 1996 to 2001, governor and legislative elections were introduced across the board and the second chamber became fully composed of regional governors and heads of regional legislatures, whose positions would be automatically renewed. These officials were allowed to hold two posts simultaneously--in their regions and in the second chamber, thereby ensuring that specifically regional interests would be represented in federal decision making. With the exception of some notoriously oppressive regimes, intraregional politics were also characterized by a degree of competitiveness and pluralism. It was manifested in the proliferation of independent regional media and in some regions, the development of regional parties or opposition movements and even a vibrant civil society.
The early years of Yeltsin's presidency have been associated with the suppression of local government. In 1993, following the protracted gridlock between the president and the federal parliament and its intransigent speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin ordered the shelling of parliament. The body was disbanded and so were the local soviets or the Soviet-era local government bodies that were, often wrongly, accused of support for forces associated with the anti-Yeltsin parliament. Subsequently, local government bodies were set up pursuant to a new 1995 law.
The 1995 law on local self-government has been much criticized for its vagueness with regard to powers of various levels of authority yet it also allowed for the kind of flexibility in the design of local institutions that most theorists of local democracy consider appropriate. Such flexibility would appear to be particularly desirable in a country as diverse as Russia, where the local communities might have distinct locality-, culture-, or ethnicity-specific preferences with regard to municipal boundaries, institutions, and revenue generation and allocation. The system...
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