Putin’s Russia More Centralized than Russian Empire or USSR, Setting the Stage for Its Collapse, Preobrazhensky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – Vladimir Putin’s drive to create what he calls “a unified system of public power” will leave Russia more centralized than the Russian Empire and the USSR were and creating the very conditions that led to the collapse and disintegration of both of its predecessors, Ivan Preobrazhensky says.

            “The formally unitary Russian Empire after the reforms of Alexander II and the creation of the zemstvos was a more decentralized state than is present-day Russia,” the Russian commentator says. And some say that “even in the USSR, freedom for horizontal coordination among organs of power was greater” (dw.com/ru/kommentarij-putinskaja-vertikal-pridet-v-kazhduju-derevnju/a-59775204).

            “Neither before the Bolsheviks came to power nor after they were ousted did officials have to constantly ask Moscow for permission to act as will be the case” after the adoption of the new laws on regional and local administration, Preobrazhensky argues. And that sets the stage for disaster.

            According to the commentator, “there is every reason to fear that Vladimir Putin is again leading the country along its accustomed path: through centralization and the sharp growth in the ineffectiveness of administration to collapse.” And that result is far more important than “the smoke screen” of eliminating the title of president for the head of Tatarstan.

            After the Kremlin “rewrote the Russian constitution,” Preobrazhensky continues, “the adoption of a new law on ‘public power’ became inevitable,” one that already makes clear that the subjects of the Russian Federation will lose the last vestiges of the power they gained in the early 1990s.

            If the law is adopted as seems certain to be the case, the Kremlin will be able to dismiss governors without explanation and allow those it favors to remain in power forever, two steps that reduce to nothing popular sovereignty and mean that Moscow and not the regional officials will make even the smallest decisions.

            But it is not just the regional authorities who will become simply agents of Moscow. Officials at the local level will lose any ability to work independently. “But this is only the beginning. For the municipal officials, the new law is the last warning before the complete liquidation of local self-administration in Russia,” Preobrazhensky says.

            He reports that “work has already begun on a separate bill about local self-administration which will include it in the vaunted ‘unified system of public power’ – that is, in the Putin’s infinite vertical which is ever more like a web which has spread its spiritual net over all of Russia.”