Moscow Decentralizing Responsibility but Not Resources, Leaving Regional Leaders in Ever Less Good Shape, Makarkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 19 – Having radically recentralized Russia during most of his time in office, Vladimir Putin over the last several years has decentralized responsibility but not resources or the ability to make independent decisions, something that has left the leaders of the federal subjects in an ever more precarious position, Aleksey Makarkin says.

            As a result, the Moscow analyst says, regional leaders have become little more than executors of Moscow’s policies who can be blamed or even removed at the pleasure of the center and who have been left with little or no ability to take local conditions into account (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=632564B389509&section_id=50A6C962A3D7C ).

            Unless this decentralization of responsibility is followed by a decentralizing of resources, including the ability to retain more tax revenues, and by a decentralizing of political choice, including real elections at the regional level and the ability to make choices, he suggests, there will no reason to refer to Russia as a federation.