ABSTRACT
The Russian empire grew through a process of overland expansion. Rather like the United States, it occupied territories across a vast continental mass, a type of colonisation that is largely irreversible. The emergence of these two continental states overshadowed the traditional nation-state and each, as Alexis De Tocqueville foresaw, seemed ‘called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world’.2 The major difference, however, between the two is that whereas America some two hundred years ago devised an effective political system and a sturdy relationship between individual states and the federal authorities, Russia is still in the process of building a viable relationship between the centre and the regions. Although the 1993 constitution establishes the framework of Russian federalism, its ambiguous formulations and provision for further laws delimiting powers between the centre and the regions stimulated a repeated although more muted version of the ‘war of the laws’ that had brought down the USSR.
