Russia, a Fake Democracy, Rapidly Becoming an Even More Fake Federation, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 8 – According to the 1993 Constitution, Russia is both a democracy and a federal state, but most people have long recognized that it is not a democracy – and it is no longer a federation either but rather an ever more highly centralized imperial state, according to Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev.

            That makes all the talk in Moscow about “’a new wave of regional elections’” provoked by Vladimir Putin’s replacement of numerous governors absurd. “There are no elections in empires: they appear only after such states fall apart and then not everywhere and not immediately either (t.me/kremlebezBashennik/6894).

            “Russian democracy has long been considered in the world as fake – and there exists every reason for that (in contrast to many of our neighbors, since 1990, a democratic change of the power group in Russia has not occurred even once). However no less important is another issue: the issue of the fake character of Russian Federalism.”

            “For the country to be considered a federation, it is quite insufficient to send to Buryatia a Buryat and to Bashkiria a Bashkir,” Inozemtsev says. “The mark of a federation is self-administration of territories and their chance to exert a significant influence on the federal center.”

            If those things don’t obtain, he continues, then “the state is unitary; and if to this is added a powerful center with a dominating ethnos surrounded by a multi-national periphery, then this, forgive me, is an empire.”

            From its very beginning, the Putin regime was driven by a desire to maximize the imperial elements of the Russian state. Among its early steps were the creation of federal districts and the appointment of officials from the center to head them in 2000 and then the elimination of elected governors in 2004.

            But Inozemtsev says, even that early Putin system was less unitary and imperial than it has become in recent years. The Kremlin now ignored the terms of governors and appoints or fires them with “kaleidoscopic speed,” something that makes a complete mockery of the idea that Russia is or under Putin is ever likely to become a federal state.