Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 2 – Despite the
travails of his first days in office, Mikhail Degtyarov, Moscow’s appointee as
new head of Khabarovsk Kray, represents the harbinger of a new generation of
regional leaders, one very different than their predecessors and likely to have
unexpected consequences for both Moscow and the regions, Andrey Ivanov says.
The Svobodnaya pressa commentator
says that since 1991, “each decade has been characterized by its own
distinctive type of regional leaders, reflecting both the situation in the
regions and Moscow’s aspirations to retake control over the entire country (svpressa.ru/politic/article/272408/).
In the 1990s, regional leaders emerged
from among Soviet economic managers and some of them, like Moscow Mayor Yury
Luzhkov, Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaymiyev, and Sverdlovsk Governor Eduard
Rossel became what was known as “heavyweights” not because they wanted
separatism but because they wanted control over their own regions.
Given the chaos in the country,
their success in that regard was important both for the regions and for Moscow,
Ivanov continues. But in the first decade of the 2000s, the situation had
changed. The political skills such people brought to the table were no longer
needed, and Moscow replaced them with “governors general” obedient to the
center.
Since 2010, those often still-powerful
figures have been replaced by a generation known as “the technocrats,” men who
had not distinguished themselves by anything and seemed interchangeable with
one another who would simply do Moscow’s bidding. At the same time, both Moscow and they
promised that conditions would get better.
But conditions haven’t, and “it isn’t
surprising that in certain regions, people began to vote for representatives of
opposition parties who do not agree with the Kremlin” and even take to the streets
as they have in Khabarovsk and other cities.
Sergey Furgal epitomized this revolt by the population against Moscow’s
diktat.
Khabarovsk residents rejected the
argument that only the party of power could maintain stability and guarantee
growth given that as far as they could see United Russia and its Moscow
representatives could do neither. As a result, they were prepared to take the
risk of voting for someone else.
The Kremlin not surprisingly was not
prepared to tolerate such disobedience and removed Furgal, but it quickly saw
that it couldn’t simply replace him with some interchangeable United Russia man
from somewhere else. Consequently, it decided to plunk for someone from Furgal’s
party but not a local.
The population of Khabarovsk doesn’t
appear to be prepared to accept this, but Degtyarov who is a politician
represents an effort by the Kremlin to find a way out of the current impasse, giving
the Moscow opposition its day in the sun in order to avoid allowing the people
to choose their own rulers.
That is unlikely to please everyone
in Khabarovsk or elsewhere, but the
Kremlin has made its choice; and it is likely to try to impose it
elsewhere even in the face of increasing popular opposition not so much to this
or that party but to Moscow as such, a challenge that Putin clearly feels he
has no choice but to suppress.
Degtyarov represents his effort to calm
the situation without using force that might create martyrs or making too
obvious concession that might spark new
protests elsewhere. The Kremlin leader is thus acting in a new way, trying to
pass through the Scylla of the one and Charybdis of the
other.
