Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 4 – The remnants of autonomy that cities like Yekaterinburg had enjoyed are
being undermined by the powers that be at the regional level and by powerful
economic interests with friends in Moscow, all of which want to make decisions
that city governments had been allowed to make on their own earlier, Aleksey
Shaburov says.
“The
existence of a city as a self-standing political formation,” the Yekaterinburg
commentator says, “is almost always a challenge for the central and regional
authorities … The city resists as it can,” but its options are limited given
that the attack on city autonomy is coming from both directions (politsovet.ru/62000-ekaterinburg-pod-pryamym-upravleniem.html).
Yekaterinburg is “no
exception” to this pattern. “Having received its autonomy in the early 1990s, the
city for more than 20 years has held on to it,” Shaburov says. The Sverdlovsk oblast officials were the
first to go after its independence: with the fight between Rossel and
Chernetsky reflecting this deeper conflict rather than just the clash of two
powerful politicians.
The last year has seen “a radical
change,” not only because a new mayor, loyal to the governor, has been elected,
but because “Yekaterinburg has been stripped of many of the instrument swhich
allowed it to resist in the past, including direct elections of the head of the
city and the city Duma which was under the control of the administration.”
“But at the decisive moment,”
Shaburov says, “the forces which wanted to take Yekaterinburg under their
control turned out to be more than one.” Sverdlovsk oblast succeeded in
installing its man as mayor and getting him to do its bidding on ever more
issues no matter how minor.
But the oblast, the Yekaterinburg
analyst says, “would never have obtained control over the city had it not had powerful
allies” in the form of businesses involved in the city’s operations and
economy. They too want to have freedom
of action and have allies not in the oblast but in Moscow who can help them
gain and defend that.
The
combined efforts of these three different but related forces mean that as of
now, “even that relative political autonomy which Yekateirnburg had has ended.
The city and its authorities no longer are an independent political subject.”
But at the same time, no one outside force is in control.
Instead,
there are three whose appetites “sooner or later will grow” and bring them into
conflict with one another. Consequently,
while the Yekaterinburg city government has lost autonomy and is set to lose
still more, it is still far from clear that any one of these other centers of
power will be in a position to enforce its will.
And that
in turn suggests that there will be more fights about the city but that these
fights will occur over it rather than with it as a participant.
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