The search for federalism in the Russian Federation

The Russian Federation (RF) is the biggest territorial federation in the world, with the largest number of regions. ¹ In ten years of regime transition, it experienced a radical territorial transition from a highly centralized Soviet Union into a highly decentralized Russia in the 1990s and then returned to a highly centralized, almost unitary, territorial structure in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Diversity is a hallmark of Russian federalism and touches upon every single aspect of its politics and society. Social, economic, geographic, climatic, ethnic, linguistic and demographic differences across Russian regions have been widely addressed in literature. ² Moreover, by the beginning of the twenty-century, this regional diversity was enriched with a diversity of sub-national political regimes – different regions exhibited distinct political regimes, ranging from more the democratic ones (e.g. on the north-western border) to the autocratic. ³