New Law on Local Administration Leaves Population with Almost No Way to Participate in Political Life, ‘Horizontal Russia’ Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 28 – The new law on local self-administration adopted earlier this month leaves the Russian population with “almost no levers to influence local policies,” the Horizontal Russia portal says, because it gives governors the power to disband existing rural districts and recombine them at will.
    Consequently, the portal says, people in the government of those districts are on an increasingly short leash; and the population can only “write the governor, appeal to Putin, or hope for good luck” (semnasem.org/articles/2025/03/26/samoupravlenie-bylo-s-novym-zakonom-u-rossiyan-pochti-ne-ostanetsya-sposobov-vliyat-na-lokalnuyu-politiku).
    Horizontal Russia details seven cases in which governors have already used their powers against local self-administration and then suggests that while the old system of self-administration often failed to work because of a lack of money, it at least gave citizens the ability to organize politically and act in concert to defend their rights and interests.
    That made a major contribution to the development of civic political culture, Yuliya Galyamina, a former deputy in a district in the Moscow suburbs says. But the Russian government’s “reform” means that “the authorities no longer have to be concerned about the participation of citizens in local politics.”
    Sixteen federal subjects including Moscow and St. Petersburg have already gone alone with the change the law calls for (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2025/03/04/1095775-18-regionov-ne-hotyat), and 26 more say they will do so in the near future. But this transition isn’t going smoothly, and there have been protests in several places (t.me/horizontal_russia/30444).  
    Seventeen federal subjects have announced that they want to retain the two levels of governance. The majority of these are the non-Russian republics, Horizontal Russia says. This reflects the fact that local communities there are stronger and that messing with existing arrangements could destabilize the situation.
    A less important but nonetheless significant factor is that in many non-Russian republics, particular local districts may be far from the capital and difficult for officials to reach, let alone manage on a regular basis without the help of local officials. Then they will be forced to behave in an even more authoritarian manner and work to further depoliticize the population.