ABSTRACT

The survival of the Russian Federation is an exceptional case since all other multi-ethnic communist era federations in Europe have collapsed. Theory suggests that the Russian Federation should have been subject to the same corroding effects of Soviet ‘institutionalized multinationality’. This contribution explains its survival by examining the inherited structural constraints which limited the potential for a disintegration along ethnic lines, and the new post-Soviet institutional designs which led to the development of a stabilizing partial asymmetric federalism to manage the most serious cases of ethnic mobilization. The essay also focuses on the critical role played by Russia’s powerful presidency under Yeltsin and Putin in the redesigning of Russian federalism, and analyses why presidentialism facilitated an accommodation with the elites of some ethnic republics, while being a major causative factor in the failure to manage the secession of Chechnya.