ABSTRACT
Already in 1997, stressing the growing significance of the differences across Russian regions, Philip Hanson exclaimed: ‘How many Russias?’ 2 Since then, these differences have significantly accumulated. Today, with Moscow, St Petersburg and a few resource regions dominating Russian economic and political life, the disparities between the regions have reached the point when researchers stress the existence and significance of three or four economically and politically distinctive parts of Russia. Arguably, the inequality of economic opportunities and expectations of the population in these distinctive parts of Russia determine inconsistent political demands and political actions across the nation. We argue that an important factor of regional inequality in Russia is the low quality of governance and view the process of globalization as an intermediate mechanism. Thus, the combination of globalization and low quality of governance in Russia is going to sharpen interregional inequalities and, as a consequence, the level of political polarization in Russia.
