Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 3 – Responding to
a five-year-long campaign by residents of a village on the border between them,
two predominantly ethnic Russian regions, Smolensk and Kaluga, have agreed to
swap territory so that people living there will be formally part of the oblast
to whose officials they already report.
Kaluga oblast will give up 415.1
hectares to Smolensk and receive in exchange 386.5 hectares. The two oblast governments
have now agreed to this measure, and it will go into effect after it is
confirmed by the Federation Council (ria.ru/politics/20141030/1030984360.html,
rg.ru/2014/10/30/reg-cfo/border-anons.html,
and polit.ru/article/2014/11/02/top9/).
This
will correct a bureaucratic nightmare that the 200 residents of the Kalugovsky
settlement have been living in. That village has been located on the territory
of the Urgansk district of Smolensk oblast but administratively it has been
subordinate to the Mosal district of Kaluga oblast.
That
has meant that the village residents have faced extraordinary difficulties in
registering themselves, registering and transferring property, and ensuring
that particular plots of land are in fact respected by the authorities. Now the villagers as a result of this border
correction will find their lives eased because they will be administratively subordinate
to the oblast on which their village will be located.
Residents have been pressing for
this change since the spring of 2009 to correct the lines that Moscow had drawn
much earlier: Smolensk Oblast was formed in September 1937, and Kaluga Oblast
was formed in July 1944 largely coterminous with what had been the territory of
Kaluga Guberniya before 1929.
Three things make this otherwise minor territorial
adjustment important. First, it calls attention to the fact that borders in the
Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have often been changed because they
were all too often drawn without consideration of the needs of the local
population.
Second,
the development highlights that territorial subordination and administrative
subordination were often not identical. In this case, residents lived on the territory
of one oblast but reported to officials in another, a situation that by its
very nature creates problems and uncertainties.
And
third, and this is the most important aspect of this swap, the current shift
came about as a result of a campaign by local people and local officials. Not only does that show what such activism
can achieve, but it suggests that there could soon be more such challenges to the
existing borders of federal subjects from below, one more unintended
consequence of Putin’s regional amalgamation campaign and his annexation of
Crimea.
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