Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 13 – Polls show
that the approval ratings of Russia’s governors have risen significantly over the
last year, while the standing of Vladimir Putin has continued to fall. If this
trend continues – and it is likely to, Abbas Gallyamov says – the governors
will soon be more popular than the president.
The reason for that is that so many
of the governors are recent appointees who do not have the baggage Putin does
after 20 years in power, the Russian commentator and former Putin speechwriter
says. And he suggests that before the Duma elections, this will restore a
situation much like that in the 1990s (facebook.com/abbas.gallyamov/posts/10215151215884316).
As a result, Gallyamov continues,
then “now-forgotten signs of a regional fronde and separatism” will return.
Voters in the provinces will be angry, and “the new heads of the regions will
at some point ride this wave.” If that
happens, “no FSB will be able to stop this process just as at one time the KGB
couldn’t.”
But the Region.Expert portal
suggests that Gallyamov is being remarkably naïve for a former Kremlin official
and that what he predicts is unlikely. That is because the governors in the 1990s
were independent political actors while the governors now are bureaucratic
appointees chosen precisely because they won’t act in the same way (region.expert/fronda/).
“The citizens of the majority of
regions of the Russian Federation,” the Tallinn-based regionalist portal says, “really
are unhappy with Muscovite hyper-centralization, but at the same time, they are
not so stupid as to struggle against it with the help of Moscow’s own
representatives.”
Gallyamov counters with the suggestion
that the leaders of the union republics in 1991 were also Moscow’s
representatives; but Region.Expert reminds that by that year, the leaders
of the republics were “freely elected presidents or presidents of the supreme soviets
(Landsbergis, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, Shushkevich and so on)” and no longer really
Moscow’s men.
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