ABSTRACT
The relations between the federal center and regional governments have always been an integral part of the political process in Russia and an important factor in its outcomes. Russia is an authoritarian state. It is open for debate when the country underwent the shift from a very unstable and imperfect democratic regime to full-scale modern authoritarianism. This book explains the dynamics of intergovernmental relations in Russia in the 1990s–2010s by combining three dimensions of territorial governance. The territorial governance are—dynamics of political relations between the center and the subnational units, particularities of the federal government's regional development policy, and changes in the administrative system of intergovernmental control, coordination, and subordination. Federalism can be seen as a form of decentralization, one of a number of options in the arsenal of a country's policy-makers. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
