So-Called Federal Treaty of 1992 Laid Groundwork for Imperial Restoration, Shtepa Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – Thirty years ago this week, a strange document with an even stranger name, “On the delimitation of the areas of activity between the federal organs of state power of the Russian Federation and the Organs of Power of the Various Regions within It,” was signed in Moscow. Known as the “federative treaty,” it was said to be the embodiment of country’s name.

            But this document, approved only three months after the USSR formally disintegrated and the Russian Federation was established “was not federative in the original meaning of that term,” Vadim Shtepa says, “but instead laid the foundations for imperial restoration” (sibreal.org/a/nesostoyavshayasya-federatsiya-vadim-shtepa-ob-imperskom-moroke/31780644.html).

            The editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal, Region.Expert, says that should have been obvious from the outset. In classical federalism, the components which form it delegate certain powers to the center; but in this Russian version, the center shared out certain of its power but retained control on its own.

            Equally unfortunate, the treaty “created an unequal and asymmetric federation with the national republics within it having greater authority than the ‘ordinary’ oblasts and krays,” an inheritance of the Soviet system; but even with that arrangement, two republics, Tatarstan and Chechnya, refused to sign.

            (Tatarstan eventually signed a special treaty in 1994, but Chechnya, which in 1992 was not legally part of the Russian Federation, never did. Instead, after the massive use of Russian force against it, it was incorporated on the basis of the same set of rules that had been laid down in the original treaty.)

            The 1992 treaty was incorporated into the 1993 constitution which in fact completely destroyed the “treaty” nature of the Russian state, Shtepa continues. “From then on, all political questions were decided top down, and this became the basis for the creation of ‘the power vertical’ which followed it.”

            Once Putin began appointing governors and reducing regional parliaments to decorations, federalism in Russia “remained only on paper. De-federalization and unitarization of domestic policy in turn became the foundation for unleashing foreign aggressiveness,” with the largest country in the world ignoring its internal parts in favor of wars of conquest.

            If Russia is to escape from this dilemma, the regionalist-federalist says, then this will require the elaboration of a new federal treaty in a new war. Most Russian regions aren’t about to leave, making nonsense of fears of the disintegration of the country, but some will – and that has to be accepted if those who remain are to have real power.

             “Above all,” he says, “the treaty will be effective only as the initiative of new, freely elected regional powers (parliaments) and not some initiative by Kremlin appointees who often are outsiders who know little about the specific characteristics of the territories they are given to rule.”

            The new treaty must be “voluntary and equal” with asymmetries eliminated by raising the powers of the oblasts and krays to the level of the current republics rather than the other way around. After all, that is what some Russian regions did in the early 1990s, such as the Urals Republic, to the horror of Moscow.

And quite possibly, the capital of the new federation should be somewhere other than Moscow. In many federations, the political capital is not in the economic or cultural one, something that seems to help them survive and not be destroyed by economic and political “hyper-centralism.”

If all that happens, Shtepa concludes, then it is possible but only possible that a genuinely federal Russia will focus first and foremost on its domestic affairs rather than engage in any globalist messianism and aggression.