Staunton, May 22 -- “Moscow is not
prepared to offer [Russia’s] regions freedom analogous to that which it is demanding
for [Ukraine’s] Donbas,” despite the fact that Russia is nominally a federation
and Ukraine is constitutionally a unitary state, according to a lead article in
today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta.”
In an editorial entitled “Is the
Russian Federation Federal?” the editors note that Moscow is demanding Kyiv
offer broad rights to its regions – although few in the Russian capital talk
about extending such rights to regions of Ukraine other than those
Russian-speaking ones in the east (ng.ru/editorial/2015-05-22/2_red.html).
Kyiv has consistently responded that
there isn’t going to be any federalization at all, the editors say. For the
Ukrainian authorities, it is a matter of principle that “Ukraine is a unitary
state and that it will agree only to decentralization, that is, to the
delegation of part of the authority from the Center to the regions.”
Moscow considers that “insufficient,
unconstructive, a dead end, and something which will lead to the escalation of the
conflict between Kyiv and the Donbas,” although such an approach is exactly the
one Moscow has adopted in its dealing with its own republics and regions.
And that is the case even though “Russia
in distinction from Ukraine is a federation” by its constitution and is much
larger and more diverse ethnically, linguistically, culturally and historically
than is Ukraine.
Indeed, at the present time, the
Moscow paper continues, “it is impossible to imagine that any of the regions of
Russia” could have an independent foreign policy. They cannot even have
political parties based on ethnicity, something that in a genuinely federal
state would be “completely normal.”
The
real as opposed to constitutional nature of the Russian state is shown, the
paper suggests, by the reaction to Chechnya’s proposal to allow polygamy. Russian
anger on that score is completely logical if Russia is a unitary state but it
would be illogical if Russia were a federal one.
This is
not to say, the editors continues, that polygamy is “a sign of federalism.”
Rather, it is to insist that “under conditions of de facto unitarism, a region
will talk about its rights and freedoms by means of the most challenging jests,
which demonstrate the radical difference,” something that it would not be as
inclined to do in a genuine federation.
“Kadyrov’s
Chechnya has thus in fact declared that it has won the right to be distinctive,
even though by form it is part of a unitary model, with a single language,
flag, educational system, branches of United Russia and even a Putin Street.
But [Moscow] considers that Chechnya has not won anything” and that its efforts
in this direction have been defeated.
Many in
Russia argue for a unitary approach because many regions and republics, including
Chechnya, receive subventions from Moscow, forgetting of course that that could
have been avoided at least in the case of that republic if the center had
agreed to allow Grozny to keep the profits of its oil industry.
But that
is a lesson Moscow has not learned at least for itself, that it might have been
possible to avoid the worst “polygamist excesses” by allowing the development
of genuine federalism.
The “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” editorial is important not only for the logic it outlines and for the
way in which it underlines the Kremlin’s hypocrisy but also because it shows
one of the ways in which Vladimir Putin may unintentionally bring the Ukrainian
conflict back into the Russian Federation itself.
While Kremlin
propagandists and many others in both Russia and the West will have no
difficulty maintaining these two contradictory approaches in their own minds or
at least discourse, others in Russia, Russian and non-Russian alike, will see
Moscow’s push for federalism in Ukraine as an occasion for them to push for it
in their own country.
To the
extent that happens – and there is evidence among both ethnically Russian
regions and the non-Russian republics as well – the most serious consequence of
Putin’s campaign for the federalization of Ukraine may be demands for real
federalism in a country that is constitutionally supposed to have it already,
his own.
And if
as seems certain the Kremlin leader opposes such efforts, the outcome could be
truly serious indeed. After all, as many seem to have already forgotten, the
USSR did not fall apart because Mikhail Gorbachev allowed power to flow out of
Moscow to the republics but rather when, after having done so at least
rhetorically, he tried to take it back.
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