ABSTRACT
Within the Russian Federation the break-up of the command-administrative system and the control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) over the political system at the beginning of the 1990s saw a significant haemorrhaging of power from the central political authorities in both the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This process began before the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991. In August 1990, when in Tatarstan, Boris Yeltsin, who was then chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), told the local authorities to ‘take as much independence as you can’. In Bashkortostan he uttered his now famous statement to take as much sovereignty ‘as you can swallow’. 1
