Russian Regions Not Coterminous with Federal Subjects and Must be Recognized, Mikhail Nemtsov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 9 – The federal subjects into which Moscow has divided the country are in almost all cases smaller than the regions which residents identify with, a fact of life that makes talking about regionalism difficult and the future of a genuine federal division of the country even more so, Mikhail Nemtsov says.

            The Russian poet and philosopher who comes from the Altai region gives as an example Siberia. That region “in fact does not exist; instead, there are two or three or even four Siberias,” with residents in one place defining their region one way and those in another in quite a different one (nemoskva.net/2024/09/09/pomozhet-li-nam-mestnaya-identichnost/).

            The federal subjects of which these mental regions are a part, such as Altay Kray or Kemerovo Oblast are too small to constitute the basis of a regional identity, all the more so because these were created from the outside by Moscow to address its needs rather than those of the peoples living in them.

            Nemtsov gives as an example the creation of Byransk Oblast in 1944. It was set up not because there was any natural Bryansk region but in order to simplify the coordination by Soviet officials of Moscow’s struggle against the large anti-Soviet underground that existed there at that time.

            Regional identities, he continues, involve larger territories that have become part of the mental maps of people over a long period of time. And despite Soviet and more recently Russian efforts at ethnic engineering and redivision of the administrative territorial map of the country, “these regions exist in the minds of the people there” and must be taken into account.

            Moscow typically divides the country into three levels, the federal, the regional and the local (municipal); but in addition to these, Nemtsov argues, “there is a fourth level, that of large regions” – and this level is “perfectly obvious and quite strong,” however much it is downplayed or ignored at the center.

            If Russia is to become a genuine federation, then it must take these regions into account rather than assuming that the existing divisions that Moscow has imposed are the only ones that matter.