Impact of Constitutional Changes on Russian Laws Likely to Be Signaled by New Legislation on Cities

Paul Goble

Staunton, July 4 – Prior to the adoption of the constitutional amendments, many commentators debated how much and how fast they would affect the laws of the Russian Federation, with some suggesting the changes would be relatively small and appear only over time while others argued that the changes would be massive and rapid.

Less that three days after the final vote on the amendments, it appears that those who took the latter position are going to be proved right. According to URA news agency journalist Oleg Toploukhov, the government won’t revise the 2003 law on cities but instead replace it with an entirely new measure (ura.news/articles/1036280581).

If Moscow adopts a similar approach to other sectors, that could point to radical change in the very near future, perhaps even before the September elections. Should that occur, it could simultaneously create new classes of winners and losers and transform the nature of political debate in the Russian Federation. 

One newly approved constitutional amendment specifies that local self-administration are part of a single system of public power and not separate from government power. Vladimir Putin called for this, and most analysts assume this means that governors will assume greater control over cities and that mayors will cease to be elected.

The cities will have few chances to resist this trend as the new law is written, Roman Smirnov, president of the Association of Political Lawyers; and that will mean that a law specifying that will have “far-reach consequences also for the nature of relations between the federal center and the territories.”

“Judging from the way in which the term ‘public power’ is used in the amendments,” Smirnov continues, “this will lead to a continuation of the construction of a single power vertical” and the further centralization of the country away from the federal system the previous version of the Constitution called for.

Another analyst, Nataliya Shavshukova of the School of Local Self-Administration says that the logical next step in this direction would be the doing away with elected mayors, although she said it was not clear whether that would be in the new law now being developed or would occur in yet another one later.