Moscow Takes Another Step Away from Local Control toward Destruction of Russia’s Villages and Chances for Rise of Democracy

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 2 – Russians have long left villages to seek greater advantages in the cities, but this exodus has been exacerbated in the Putin years by the Kremlin leader’s “optimization” programs that have seen the closure of small schools and small medical points in the name of saving money.

            Now, Moscow is on the verge of taking another step that will simultaneously lead more villagers to leave by stripping them of one of the last vestiges of local control and handing it over to regional governments. If the Duma approves, villages and small towns will lose their voice in the running of schools there (newizv.ru/news/society/02-12-2022/smena-nachalstva-zachem-shkoly-perepodchinyayut-regionalnym-vlastyam).

            Instead, it will be handed over to officials at the regional level, perhaps a half way house to handing it back entirely to Moscow. Not only will that likely mean the death of still more Russian villages but it will simultaneously eliminate one of the few remaining areas where officials chosen locally will have effective power.

            And that in turn will eliminate one of the most important schools of democracy in Russia, making the continuation of the authoritarian culture the Putin regime has been promoting more rather than less likely. But even Russians who don’t object to that are likely to complain about the deaths of villages, long viewed by many as the heartland of Russia.

            The author of these lines comes from a small town and has watched many other small towns in the United States die out, sometimes because of the closure of schools, sometimes of post offices, and sometimes of stores as improved transportation and communication links and the advantages of scale have worked against them.

            This process, which is generally viewed by urbanites as natural and inevitable, may indeed be both in part; but it is fraught with consequences, some of them negative – and it has been drive by political decisions and not just economic forces. The same is true in Russia, and this latest Moscow move is thus particularly worrisome.