Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 4 – “The tragedy
of Russian Federalism is that it wasn’t able to form itself during the years of
Perestroika” because the Soviet authorities, the dissidents, and the democratic
movement focused on ethnic territories and their rights rather than on the
rights that predominantly ethnic Russian regions should have as well, Andrey Degtyanov
says.
The Russian historian says that “the
social-political agenda in 1987-1991 was formed by dissidents, human rights activists
and political informals who were little interested in the issue of Russian federalism”
but instead focused on the rights of Soviet citizens as a whole or on the
rights of ethno-national units like union republics (region.expert/russian_federalism/).
Among the few people who did focus
on predominantly ethnic Russian regions at that time were the authors of
ruralist prose, “but in the literary-ideological dispute which occurred between
‘progressive Westerners’ and ‘Soviet defenders,’ the ruralist writers were not
able or did not want to become ‘a third force’” – and so split among the other
two.
There was as a result little
discussion of the problems of the political standing of Ryazan, Kuban or the
Urals. Instead, activist focused on “the struggles with communists and Zionists”
depending on their other preferences, Degtyanov continues. Moreover, the increasing
nostalgia for the Russia destroyed by the Bolsheviks worked against the Russian
regions as well.
And the combination of this
inattention to ethnic Russian regions and the growing influence of the idea of “’a
great return’” to the pre-1917 situation effectively killed off any first
shoots of federalism while opening the way for ethno-national particularism and
even separatism.
As a result, the historian
continues, “today’s Russia is just as much as federation as was ‘the power of the
Soviets’ in the Soviet Union – nothing more than a decoration for the power
vertical.”
Degtyanov points out that the June
1990 Declaration of Sovereignty did recognize “the need for an essential broadening
of the rights of autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts and autonomous
districts as well as those of krays and oblasts.” But it gave the RSFSR authorities the right
to decide the latter rather than making it a principled consideration.
As a result, the historian says, “the
substantively ethnic Russian regions were allocated not a nation-state role but
[only] an administrative-territorial [one], typical of guberniyas in a unitary
state” as was the Russian Empire before 1917. And the Congress of Peoples
Deputies reinforced this attitude, focusing on the ethnic republics rather than
ethnic Russian regions.
Six months earlier, in January 1990,
Degtyanov continues, Galina Starovoitova, a leader of the Interregional
Deputies Group, delivered an address on “The Future of Our Federation” in which
she said that she foresaw “a single type of national-state formation in our
country, the union republic, independent of the size of its territory or
population and independent of its having or not having external borders.”
“The RSFSR,” she continued, “as a
federation within a federation, will be liquidated because the autonomies will
leave it as sovereign republics with equal rights. Russia will remain which
must rethink its new historical functions … [and] create full-fledged organs of
state administration.”
Thus, the historian says, she and others
like her at the time, saw “Russia in place of the RSFSR [with] a unitary state
in place of a federation.” Even
Academician Sakharov’s proposal in November 1989 for a Union of Soviet
Republics of Europe and Asia ‘did not foresee any role for ethnic Russian krays
and oblasts of the RSFSR as subjects of the Union state.”
Such leaders were focused on “the
problems of overcoming the inheritance of Stalinism, democratization and
glasnost, a Union treaty and international relations,” Degtyanov says. They
weren’t focused on “the status of Russian regions in ‘a renewed Union.”
The only major exceptions were the writer
then in emigration Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Moscow philosopher Mikhail Epshteyn. Solzhenitsyn wanted to see a Russian Union of
the three Slavic republics plus Kazakhstan in which predominantly Russian
regions would enter on the same basis as non-Russian entities.
And Epshteyn saw a Russian future in
which the country would exist as a union of “unique regions” rather than as “a
classic European state.” (His most important essay on that point from the early
1990s has now been reposted by the Region.Expert portal at region.expert/o-rossiyah/).
“Perhaps,” the Moscow philosopher
suggested, “the only salvation of Russia would be in a community of various
Russias” including Muscovite and Far Eastern, Petersburg and Ryazan, and so on.
But the impact of such ideas paled
in comparison with the influence of the former CPSU leaders who in fact took
over in the course of the collapse of the USSR.
Boris Yeltsin, a former candidate member of the Politburo, in July
1991 in his inaugural address as Russian
president, declared his position, one that marked “the start of the process of
imperial restoration.”
The August 1991 putsch and the
Beloveshchaya accords “put an end both to the process of Perestroika and to
arguments around the future of ‘the renewed Union.’ Before the Russian
authorities now stood another task: to keep the national authorities which a
year earlier had declared their autonomy within the borders of the Russian
Federation.”
The 1992 Federative Treaty “was not the
result of disputes and the search for consensus.” Indeed, it was not an
agreement as such: “It was concluded not between the Russian regions but
between the federal center and individually, republics, districts, oblasts and
krays of the Russian Federaiotn.”
Russian federalism reflected the
efforts of some regions to play a larger role, but they were always having to
play catch up – and that allowed the Kremlin to be “several moves ahead, to
establish ‘a power vertical,’ and in the end, to disband the regional Soviets
elected in 1990 after the Russian parliament was fired upon by tanks.”
That ended whatever positive
features the 1992 Federative Treaty had and left Russia in the state that it
continues to be up to now, the historian concludes.
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