Elected Mayors Remain in Only Two Capitals of Federal Subjects and They Will Disappear in 2029, but Elected Mayors Will Continue in Many Smaller Cities

Paul Goble

            Staunton,  Oct. 6 – Putin’s campaign to strengthen governors whom he appoints against the mayors of cities that until 2010 were mostly elected is succeeding, with only two of the capitals of federal subjects – Abakan of the Khakass Republic and Anadyr of the Chukotka AD – remaining.

            In 2029, the terms of these two mayors will run out; and elections will no longer be held to fill them. As a result, the heads of these cities will be effectively reduced to “deputy governors” who won’t challenge the Kremlin-appointed heads of the regions and republics (svpressa.ru/politic/article/534984/).

            But this Putin effort has not yet reached all of the smaller cities in the federal subjects. There in many cases, elected mayors remain in place and are likely to do so in the future. And that in turn means that these urban centers could be where real campaigns and even protests will emerge and from which politicians with popular support could come.

            Because such places are small and distant from the centers of power, neither politicians nor opposition figures have focused on the possibilities this survival of Russia’s otherwise all-too-brief experiment with elected mayors; but because these places feature the closet thing to real democracy Putin’s Russia now has, those thinking about the future should focus on them.

            Putin likely will try to reduce the possibility of meaningful elections there not only by the manipulation and falsification of results but also by combining electoral districts and thus making it harder for opposition groups to organize even at that level. But because the Kremlin leader likely doesn’t view this effort as a priority, some cities will likely continue to have votes.

            These are places where prospects for democracy in Russia are still the object of real struggle; and they can be tracked because many of these smaller cities have their own websites that outsiders can access. What is going on won’t be as dramatic as mass protests in Moscow, but it may be that such places will become the seedbeds of democratic change in Russia.