Saturday, November 1, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Consolidation of Rural Institutions Will Accelerate Death of Russia Beyond City Limits


Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 1 – The budget-driven, top-down, authoritarian consolidation of the institutions of rural Russia will accelerate the demise of Russia outside of its major cities, transforming the country in negative ways and creating problems that Moscow has not yet been willing to face, according to Lev Shlosberg.

 

            In remarks to the Pskov Oblast Assembly of Deputies on Thursday, Shlosberg, a member of that body, said that this danger is very much in evidence in the announcement by the Pskov oblast authorities of “an ultimatum” to society and especially to its rural members, an ukaz prepared without any input from local officials (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54533F70381F1).

 

            If the regional government’s plans go forward, Shlosberg pointed out, the number of rural settlements will be reduced by several times over the next two years, there will be a unification of many of the existing districts, and the future of Pskov oblast as a federal subject will be put in doubt.

 

            Invoking budgetary shortages, the oblast authorities are seeking to impose “a radical simplification of the administrative-territorial division” of Pskov and “the liquidation of a significant part of the carcass of local self-administration,” a move that will open the way to “the destruction of the region” as a whole.

 

Over the last century, Pskov kray has been subjected to several administrative reforms. Many of them have destroyed the infrastructure of the region to the point that one can say, Shlosberg said, that “where local self-administration has been liquidated, life itself burns out” because the people perish.

 

In 1958, Velikii Luki oblast was liquidated and part of its territory was transferred to Pskov. Dozens of regions were “quickly and insanely liquidated,” and “he former regional centers which were not given that status [in the newly expanded oblast] were reduced from worker settlements to villages.”

 

That is because, Shlosberg said, there were almost no hospitals, schools or libraries or even banks and post offices in the downgraded regional centers, and as a result, they rapidly lost population.  Life became ever less attractive and people fled to the cities. “This was a cleansing of the territory from people,” he argued.

 

In 1961-63, Moscow artificially experimented with creating larger industrial and agricultural districts in Pskov and elsewhere, and the number of districts in Pskov oblast fell by almost half.  Fortunately, Shlosberg said, the mistaken nature of these Khrushchev reforms was recognized and over three years reversed.

 

Since that time, the administrative-territorial map of Pskov has been stable. “No one over the course of half a century thought to touch it,” he said, and it withstood the rise and fall of the USSR, the turmoil of the 1990s, and the illegality and indifference of the last 15 years. But now, officials are playing with fire once again.

 

What they do not seem to recognize, the deputy continued, is that this latest destruction of local self-administration may prove in Pskov oblast to be the last.

 

In order to block this move, Shlosberg said, he is establishing a public Resistance Movement to consist of all those who are “ready to fight for their small Motherland” and to provide “the necessary legal, informational and human assistance” in an unselfish way to those who will work against what the authorities are trying to do.

 

Everyone needs to remember, he said, that “according to the Russian Constitution, organs of local self-administration are not part of the system of organs of state power.” Instead, they are “defined by the population independently and a change in the borders of the territory in which local self-administration occurs are allowed only if the opinion of the population of that territory is taken into account.”

 

Clearly, Shlosberg said, “someone wants to rewrite not only history but also the Constitution.” But they won’t get away with it easily if “the citizens of their own kray” stand up and insist on their rights.  Tampering with the existing districts is not something anyone but the people has a right to do.

 

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