ABSTRACT
No single issue defines Russia, past, present, or future, more than the question of center-periphery relations. Imperial Russia faced challenges to central governance for more than a century.1 During the Soviet period, the communist regime centralized power but created disparate regional nomenclatures, which only complicated center-periphery relations. The question remains: are there practical constraints on the governance of a large geographic expanse, divided into a multitude of culturally and linguistically distinct ethnic groups? So it was notable that, when, in December 1993, Russia ratified its first post-communist constitution, Article 1 of that Constitution proclaimed that Russia is “a democratic federal law-bound state with a republican form of government” (Constitution of the Russian Federation 2009). The question, however, is how at the legal and institutional level this federalism is articulated in practice, whether it seems to fall back into traditional Russian pathways, and why?
