Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 16 – Vladimir Putin’s
creation of federal districts 15 years ago at the start of his first presidential
term may have been useful to him and the Russian Federation at the time, but some
Russian experts say these institutions have outlived whatever utility they may
have had and should be radically reformed or simply scrapped.
According to URA.ru commentator
Konstantin Dzhultayev, those who say the federal districts and the presidential
plenipotentiaries who head them should be scrapped are becoming increasingly
vocal and even those who defend the institution acknowledge that it should be reformed
on the basis of a new law defining their role (ura.ru/articles/1036264786).
Leonid Davydov, an expert at the
Russian Foundation for the Development of Civil Society, says that the federal
districts may have been useful to Moscow although it is less clear how much
good they have done for the regions. “At least,” he says, they “haven’t spoiled
anything.”
He says that over the past 15 years,
the federal districts “have been converted into mega-regions connected by
economic threads alone, and their capitals have become business magnets.” That
may not have been obvious to those in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in
Yekaterinburg and Novorsibirsk, this change has been significant in terms of
investment and spending.
According to Moscow commentator
Konstantin Kalachev, the utility of the federal districts and presidential
plenipotentiaries was especially great for Moscow initially because they became
“instruments of the federal center” for restricting the freedom of action of
regional governors and suppressing “any manifestations of regional separatism.”
Aleksey
Zudin, an expert at the Moscow Institute of Social-Economic and Political
Research, says they played an even more important role: they allowed Putin to
develop “direct ties with mass groups of Russian voters without having to
involve the active mediation of the elites.”
That became “the basis for the formation” of his current high ratings.
In Zudin’s view, these institutions “gave
the chief of state the opportunity to appeal to Russian society and thus became
a real source of presidential authority and allowed it to be strengthened.”
After the elimination of direct
elections for governors, however, the role of the federal districts declined,
Kalachev says, although he concedes that they remain “the eyes and ears” of the
president in many places and notes that they can be a place for negotiations if
for one reason or another the governors do not have close ties with the
Kremlin.
If gubernatorial elections are
restored, he argues, the role of the federal districts and the presidential plenipotentiaries
will grow again. And Moscow is likely to view the tensions between the
plenipotentiaries and the governors as a good thing, the kind of competition
that allows the center to rule the country.
Nonetheless, the experts say in the words
of Dzhultayev that “the future of the institution of plenipotentiary
representatives remains cloudy.” Many have pushed for its dismantling, and now
Davydov for example says that Moscow would find it far easier to manage the
situation using federal inspectors rather than plenipotentiaries to run the
regions.
But even those who thing the
plenipotentiaries have outlived their usefulness do not expect them to be
scrapped. Not only would that be a slap at Putin but the cost of these
institutions – about three billion rubles (60 million US dollars) – is so small
that keeping them around in case of need is not a major burden.
What
is needed, they say, is a new federal law defining their role and boosting
their responsibilities for fighting corruption and supervising development
projects that are too large for any one region to handle on its own – although the
experts remain unclear as to how the federal districts will interact with the
rise of the new regional ministries.
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