Russia’s North-West Federal District Would Have Best Chance of Making It On Its Own, Academy of Sciences Study Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, December 2 – When Vladimir Putin created the federal districts in 2000, some warned that he might be creating the basis for the disintegration of the Russian Federation pointing out that countries with a smaller number of territorial units historically have been more likely to fall apart than those with a larger number.

            But two things have worked against such predictions. On the one hand, despite expectations Putin has not eliminated the regions and republics which were grouped within the federal districts but instead has maintained them in ways that compete with the federal districts rather than exist only as their subordinate parts.

            And on the other hand, few residents of the Russian Federation have invested much psychologically in these federal districts, preferring instead to identify primarily either with their regions or even more with their republics which reflect and are based on pre-existing identities or with the Russian Federation instead.

             However, the longer these federal districts exist, the more institutions have emerged that could support such identities. One of these is the new Radio Liberty portal SeverReal which defines as its audience as the North-West Federal District rather than that of some republics or regions (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/09/could-borders-of-russias-north-west.html).

            But something even more indicative of the centrifugal forces the federal districts have unleashed is a report that “the Academy of Sciences has considered the scenario of the disintegration of Russia along the lines of the federal districts” (finanz.ru/novosti/aktsii/v-akademii-nauk-proschitali-scenarii-raspada-rossii-na-federalnye-okruga-1028729662 and

vz.ru/politics/2019/12/11/1013078.html).

            This research, Viktor Suslov of the Institute for the Economy of Industrial Production of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences says is modeled on work done at the end of the 1980s in which the academy’s scholars considered which union republics would have the easiest and most difficult times making it on their own (kommersant.ru/doc/4154938).

            Suslov says that “the most self-standing macro-region of Russia is the North-West Federal District” given that the loss of its interactions with the rest of the country would still leave it with 85.4 percent of its current economic production.  That would mean that if it were to become independent, it would be in a better position than the RSFSR was in 1991.

            It could count on retaining only 64.6 percent of its economy on becoming independent, according to the earlier study.

            In second place now, the new study says, would be the Siberian Federal District with 54.2 percent. The worst off of the regional groupings would be the Urals FD which would keep only 22.5 percent. The others apparently ranged between those figures. Moscow and the Central FD are “parasites” on the rest of the country and so would be hid the hardest.

            According to Suslov, “’the work horses’ in the system of Russia’s macro-regions are the North-West, the Urals, the Siberian and the Far Eastern FDs. The Volga, North Caucasus and Southern FDs in contrast have a negative balance with the others although not as large as Moscow does.”

            It is, of course, “purely speculative to compare the present Russian situation with the USSR on the eve of its disintegration,” the Siberian scholar says. And he then adds that the situation now means that “the slogan ‘stop feeding Moscow’ hardly will lead to the political disintegration of the country.”

            Russia’s regions are tied together, he says, by “strong cultural historical foundations of unity.”  However, talk about this potential threat may have the beneficial effect of leading Moscow to take real steps toward real federalism in the country.