Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 5 – Over the last
15 years in Russia, there have been two competing proposals about redrawing borders
of the federal subjects: Vladimir Putin’s amalgamation program that has sought
to join smaller non-Russian regions to larger Russian ones, and Aleksey Kudrin’s
suggestion that the country should be reorganized around urban agglomerations.
Putin’s program, launched in 2003,
ran out of steam by the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev when most of the so-called
“matryoshka” republics were combined with Russian krays but then effectively
reconstituted as special regions with special powers within those regions.
As a result, the experts of the pro-Kremlin
Institute of Contemporary Development concluded in 2010 that “the process of
unifying regions has not given the results the authorities expected,” a
conclusion that put a stop to the Putin program although some politicians continue
to talk about it (bbc.com/russian/russia/2010/04/100407_insor_report_russia_critical.shtml).
In 2013, Federation Council head
Valentina Matviyenko told Tatarstan parliamentarians that “sooner or later”
Moscow would revisit this program and move to combine at least some of the
regions, a position she reaffirmed as recently as 2016 (vz.ru/politics/2016/4/27/807577.html
and azatliq.org/a/27695139.html).
As
Ayrat Shamilin of Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service points out in a
commentary today, despite all the talk of changing the administrative
arrangements within the Russian Federation, Moscow really doesn’t take the
interests of the non-Russians into consideration (idelreal.org/a/moskva-boitsa-obyedineniya-tatarstana-i-bashkortostana/28897826.html).
And that is especially true, she
argues, in the case of the Middle Volga where “Moscow fears the unification of
Bashkortostan and Tatarstan,” two closely related Turkic Muslim republics that
Stalin in his first act of ethnic engineering divided in 1920.
Shamilin also points out that the advocates
of urban agglomerations also ignore non-Russians and their interests because “the
population of the [proposed] agglomerations would be only a quarter of the
population of all Russia.” The other 75 percent includes most of the non-Russians
who would thus be left out and presumably left in existing federal subjects.
There are two major additional problems
with this approach, she says. On the one hand and unlike the rules about changing
existing federal subjects by referenda, there is no procedure in place to make
this happen. And on the other, it would put
another layer of bureaucracy in place and make development even more difficult.
But it is surprising that the
advocates of both amalgamation and agglomeration do not did into consideration “the
ethnopolitical factor, the federal constitution or the desire of the regions themselves.”
Instead, they proceed with programs in spite of the national characteristics”
of the country and show that “the republics for a long time have not been
considered state formations.”
Efforts to introduce a discussion of
ethnic considerations by proposing either the combination of Bashkortostan and
Tatarstan or the formation of an urban agglomeration based on Kazan,
Naberezhnye Chelny and Ufa have generated an immediate and extremely negative
reaction from Moscow’s plenipotentiary on the scene.
Mikhail Babich says that there is no
basis for combining the two republics because “the effective path of
amalgamation always involved the unification of a weak region to a strong one,”
all the evidence to the contrary (idelreal.org/a/28896051.html).
And the same thing is true, he suggests, regarding an urban agglomeration that
would link the two.
“It might seem,” Shamilin comments, “that
the followers of Zhirinovsky and the liberal economists don’t have anything in
common.” But in fact, both proceed in the same way: they “ignore the nationality
basis of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation,” something that points to
more trouble ahead if either program goes forward without support from
below.
These discussions, she suggests,
recall the sovnarkhozy Nikita Khrushchev introduced, which combined regions,
divided autonomous republics, split up urban and rural party organizations and
more. “The reforms didn’t survive, but the
country lost a decade.” That could happen again.
Experience shows, Shamilin
concludes, that “a renewed structure of power cannot change the quality of administration
and resolve the old problems of the country.” And at a time of economic crisis,
engaging in such harebrained scheming would have “political consequences”
Moscow certainly wouldn’t like.
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