Kremlin Bill on Local Administration Completes Destruction of Federalism by Restoring Soviet-Style Democratic Centralism, Vishnevsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 19 – A new bill proposed by two Kremlin representatives in the Federal Assembly completes the destruction of federalism in the Russian Federation by restoring Soviet-style democratic centralism in which every level of power is beholden to and controlled by the one above it, according to Boris Vishnevsky.

            The opposition deputy in St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly says that this bill, proposed by Senator Andrey Klishas and Duma deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov extends the arrangements their earlier bill set of relations between the center and the governors to the governors and heads of municipalities (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/12/20/nazad-k-demokraticheskomu-tsentralizmu).

            As a result, Vishnevsky argues, “the federation has been replaced by ‘a vertical’ of the Soviet type where power descends from top to bottom on the basis of the principle of the dependence and subordinate links to those above them.” That means “the chief source of power” in Russia is not the people as the Constitution asserts but the president.

            A year ago when Putin was pushing through his amendments, many focused on his annulling of presidential terms and left “almost without attention” the amendments’ provisions about “a single system of public power.” But now it is obvious that those provisions have opened the way for equally fateful changes in the Russian political system.

            After coming to power, Putin has worked consistently to circumscribe and gut federalism in Russia, Vishnevsky says. The law on power in the regions and now the draft bill on relations between regional heads and municipal ones completes the process by making the municipal heads as dependent on and controlled by regional ones as the regional ones are on the Kremlin.

            This is an obvious retreat “’back to the USSR’” and will usher in a new set of old problems because a highly centralized and de facto unitary state is “an extremely ineffective instrument of governance for an enormous country,” the St. Petersburg regional deputy continues.

            And no digitalization and computerization “about which they dream in the Kremlin” will make that system effective, Vishnevsky says. Instead, the problems democratic centralism created that led to the destruction of the USSR will now reemerge and threaten the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, however much the Kremlin likes this old-new system.