Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 1 – Vladimir Putin
has spent his entire time in office recentralizing Russia believing that this
is the natural state of Russia and the only way it can prevent the country from
falling apart as a result of actions by foreign powers, and consequently, he is
not going to refederalize the country, Moscow experts say.
But Russia will ultimately have to
refederalize and on an ethnic basis if it is to have any chance of economic recovery
or remaining in its current borders, these same experts suggest; and
consequently after Putin Russia will either become a genuine federation or it
will slip into decay and even disintegration (kommersant.ru/doc/3585452).
In a major article on how Russia
emerged as a federal state in the 1990s and how Putin has destroyed federalism
since 2000, Kommersant journalist Natalya
Korchenkova says that in many ways Putin has simply moved back to the Soviet
model without any recognition of the ways in which that system was itself
doomed. She spoke with various experts on this issue.
Oleg Sysuyev, former head of the Congress
of Municipalitis, says that “under conditions when all regional leaders are appointed
and all tax payments are converted into 100 percent government money, people
understand that the local authorities do not decide anything and place all
their hopes on the good tsar” who will talk about local issues at his press
conferences.
Anatoly Lisitsyn, a member of the
Federation Council, says that “the leadership of the country consciously moved
toward centralization because ‘the conflict in Yugoslavia showed that we had
nothing to oppose NATO with and given that we could be converted into a colony”
of the West.
But now, he continues, “the country ‘has
recovered its defense capabilities, political stability, and authority in
international politics’” and so “’the time has come to think about the people
as well.’ The situation in the regions is very bad: ‘It is shameful to listen
when television reports’” that smaller cities can’t even pay for paved roads.
Andrey Kolyadin, the former head of
regional affairs in the Presidential Adminstration, says that the country has
been turned into “85 factories” led by young technocrats. For the moment, “there are no problems with
centralization and unification,” but that won’t last because without
competition “the regions have simply become impoverished.”
Abbas Gallyamov, former deputy head
of the presidential administration in Bashkortostan, adds that Tatarstan “de
facto was long ago deprived of all special privileges” because Putin and his
team, “politicians formed in the 1990s,” are hostile toward all the regions and
especially the non-Russian republics.
For the moment, “the Tatar
intelligentsia isn’t protesting, but ‘the national question has a long memoray
which stretches out for centuries,” Gallyamov says.
But despite Putin’s centralization
program and his destruction of the Russian federalism that emerge in the 1990s,
the experts say, “tehre are signs that a new kind of federalism is emerging.
Some regions – Chechnya, Moscow, Crimea, Sevastopol and partially Tatarstan –
are permitted far more autonomy than others.
Andrey Zakharov, a specialist on
federalism at Moscow’s Russian State Humanities University, says that in any
federation, there are going to be advanced and lagging regions. What is
intriguing in the Russian case, he says, is that despite the traditional link
between federalism and liberalism, “in a paradoxical way,” some of the newly
powerful regions are conservatives.
The Kremlin is quite prepared to
tolerate this even when some of the leaders of these few to challenge Moscow’s
prerogatives, Zakharov says. But there are other reasons why Russian federalism
survives: it allows non-Russians to feel important even if they are within the system,
and it opens the way for Moscow to absorb new territories as in the case of
Crimea.
Gallyamov notes that Russians are
taugh tin school that “federalism is the ideology of the enemies of Russia” and
that only a strong centralized state has allowed Russia to survive. It is certainly
true that centralization can give temporary benefits, but over the longer term,
it leads to stagnation economically and politically.
There are good reasons for that
Kolyadin says: “In the regions, they calculate in the following way: why should
we develop industry if Moscow will take every away from us? We should we build
factories, if we are forced to register them in Moscow? A new generation of leaders must appear,” he
says, who will work to develop their regions and thus the country.
And Zakharov adds: “there is no
alternative to federalism if one speaks about the preservatwion of Russia in
its current borders,” adding that “we are doomed not simply to federalism but
to its national-territorial form.” However, that won’t occur until there is systemic
change at the center.
That is because, he says, “federalization
must be accompanied by the rebirth of democratic institutions, including free
elections, a non-vertical party system, independent courts and a broad
selection of civic freedoms. If those
things don’t happen, then “the changes can generate serious turmoil, the
consequenceds of which are unpredictable.”
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