ABSTRACT
Boris Yeltsin’s term as the first president of independent Russia neatly encompassed the last decade of the twentieth century. Throughout this decade, Western eyes were fixed on two aspects of Russia’s transformation from its Soviet past: the development of a multi-party system in place of the Communist Party’s monopoly of power; and the creation of a market in place of the planned economy. In both cases, generally agreed criteria and models could be found in the developed world against which to measure Russia’s progress. Less attention (other than by specialists) was paid to the attempt to create a federal system in Russia. There was anyway less certainty about what the aim should be – state systems, including federations, differ widely in the developed world. Only when conflict over the Federation went to extremes, in particular the separatist war in Chechnya, did the issue capture the headlines. Chechnya was a crucial issue in the Yeltsin era and remains so under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. But it was not the determining factor in centre–periphery relations. It is hard to pinpoint what was – centre–periphery relations evolved as one of the many conflicts and solutions that marked the emergence of the new Russia. For this reason, as good an approach as any to characterising centre–periphery relations in the Yeltsin era is to tell the story and pick up the common threads at the end.
