Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 29 – In a clear swipe
at Aleksey Kudrin who has argued for making major urban agglomerations the
focus of Moscow’s policies and in an indication that any redrawing of borders
with the Russian Federation won’t be based on them alone, Vladimir Putin says
he favors developing infrastructure that connects such cities rather than on
the cities alone.
Speaking at a meeting charged with
coming up with a spatial development plan, the Kremlin leader dismissed the agglomeration-centric
plan saying that “another approach is now winning out” (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2018/04/27/768170-putin-goroda
and news.mail.ru/politics/33314182/?frommail=1).
Putin thus rejected the arguments of
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, and
especially former finance minister Aleksey Kudrin. Others restrained from commenting, supported
the inter-urban infrastructure ideas or suggested that the two approaches could
at a certain point be combined.
Vladimir Redkin, director
of Fitch Ratings in Russia, for example, took the latter position, arguing that
linking major agglomerations, such as Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, requires
infrastructure development but of a kind that is in aid of these large cities. There
needs to be a balance lest the regions are harmed.
Pavel Chistyakov, vice president of the
Moscow Center on Infrastructure Economics, says that the development of cities
and villages depends on the growth of transportation infrastructure and that
large cities and small ones must be linked together into “a single economic
space.”
What was not said at the meeting but
undoubtedly informed Putin’s decision is that a Russia of agglomerations would
be subject to far more fissiparous tendencies than even the current one and
that Russia’s national security and territorial integrity are at risk unless
the connections among the countries various parts are dramatically improved.
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