‘If All Federal Subjects Aren’t Republics, None of Them will Be,’ Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 2 – The Putin regime has made it clear that it believes all the non-Russian autonomous republics within the Russian Federation should be abolished and made equal in status to the predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays because the autonomous republics present a continuing threat to the territorial integrity of the country.

            If the Kremlin moves to abolish the republics, however, many of them will be outraged, and in at least some, the share of the population that believes that the only way to save their nationhood is secession is likely to rise, a prospect that would require Moscow to become ever more centralist and repressive to hold them in.

            Now, Vadim Shtepa, editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal and a leading regionalist writer, argues that a better future for the country would be if all the federal subjects were transformed into republics, saying that if that does not happen the likelihood is that not a single one will retain that status (region.expert/all_republics/).

            Such an arrangement would mean a radical decentralization of the country, with each of the expanded number of “republics” having a far greater say over its own affairs and Moscow profoundly limited in its powers beyond some narrowly delegated ones. That is one of the reasons the Kremlin will certainly oppose this, but it is not the only one.

            Indeed, a more important reason may be that if all the ethnic Russian areas were to become republics, many if not most of them would promote unique regional Russian identities, such as Siberian or Urals or Ingermanland,, and these not only would undermine a common Russian identity but pose an even larger threat to the territorial integrity of the country.

            Nonetheless, Shtepa’s argument is worth attending to because it highlights things many are reluctant to accept, namely that the Russian Federation, despite its name, has never been a federal state, that any equalization of the federal subjects will lead to “equality only in rightlessness,” and that to mobilize Russians on its behalf, the Kremlin is using the inequality it has created between the oblasts and krays, on the one hand, and the republics, on the other.

            The 1992 Federative Treaty had nothing to do with real federalism. It was not an agreement among the components of the country but a top-down imposition of arrangements that “in essence have continued the imperial tradition” of divide and rule by institutionalizing the inequality of the regions.

            According to Shtepa, “the Moscow Kremlin has reacted with panic to the rise of ethnic Russian republics [like that in the Urals in the 1990s] because it sees in them the threat of ‘a disintegration of Russia.’” And it uses the greater rights republics have at least on paper to suggest to Russians that their only defender is Moscow.

            This history should teach everyone that “if some subjects of the federation insist on their status privileges and consider normal a situation when others do not have these, the first in the end will lose these privileges” because the other regions will support the center in moving against the republics.

            Had the national republics at the start of the 1990s on an equal and symmetrical federal treaty, Shtepa says, the condition of the country would have been entirely different. “And it is possible that Putinism with its vertical would not in fact have arisen because federative and horizontal ties would have been stronger.”

            Stable federations are “always symmetrical,” the regionalist writer says, while asymmetrical ones, like Canada, India and Russia, are inherently unstable, a situation that Russia at least has addressed by gutting genuine federal arrangements and becoming ever more authoritarian.

            “Events in Ingushetia, Khabarovsk, Shiyes, and Kushtay have shown that when federalism remains only on paper and the country in reality ever more recalls a unitary country, demand for federative relations come namely from below, from the population” because it is in the interests of the people to have greater control.

            And because that is so, both non-Russian republics and predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays must demand “the conclusion of a new in principle accord or direct and equal relations with all other subjects of the federation.” Such an arrangement will go a long way to reduce the tensions between Russians and non-Russians that the current one produces.