Which Regions Get What from Moscow Depends on Lobbying Not Needs, Zubarevich Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 12 – Instead of allocating aid to the regions on the basis of need, Natalya Zubarevich says, Moscow is distributing it on the basis of which ones have the most effective lobbyists and which do not and thus sometimes giving money to regions that don’t need much assistance a lot while giving those in desperate straits little or nothing.

            That approach is failing to address Russia’s greatest needs and in some respects exacerbating differences between the better off and less well off regions, differences that affect inter-regional migration as well as the ability of the latter to meet basic needs, the Moscow State University regional economist says (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/2657664-echo/).

            Lobbying and the ability to lobby in one way or another, Zubarevich says, is increasing “an administrative resource,” although it is seldom thought of in that way.  But the ability to lobby is so unequally distributed because it depends so heavily on personal ties that Russia as a whole is forgoing both economic justice and overall development.

            Moscow welcomes this dependency because it gives it leverage to order regions about if the latter hope to get anything, the economist continues. Because the Kremlin says that the peak of the pandemic is past, regional leaders are forced to say the same thing even though that isn’t the case.

            And many of them are forced to hold Victory parades even though in their regions people are still getting sick in ever larger numbers. They simply have no choice if they want to extract more money from the center.  It is a mistake to think that the cities who are going ahead had a real choice. Those that have cancelled parades have decided they still do.

            But in the Kremlin’s calculus, the vote on the constitutional amendments on July 1 is now much more important than the Victory parades.  Regional leaders are having to scramble to make sure the vote is the way the Kremlin wants it to be, and their task is especially difficult because of the pandemic and because the rescheduling was so late in coming.

            Zubarevich makes an intriguing comment about Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. She suggests that he deserves credit for raising the general issue that the regions haven’t been able to cope with the pandemic.  “And he spoke not for himself,” but for others far less well-situated and with far less ability to lobby on their behalf.

            Whether this is “altruism of the highest kind,” as she suggests, or part of a new political game designed to put the regions in play, which she doesn’t, of course, remains very much an open question, one that will be answered only after July 1 when the referendum returns come in and the Kremlin rebalances relations with the regions.