ABSTRACT
The difficulty of applying any one model to the scale and complexity of Russia’s territorial structure has meant that, paradoxically, debates around the role, structure and functions of local government in Russia have tended to polarise around two opposing abstract principles – the ‘state’ and ‘society’ models of local self-government (Vydrin, 2004: 36). According to the state theory local authorities are an indivisible part of the state administration and have no independent rationale or discretion, whilst according to the society theory local self-government is created by society and is wholly separate from the state (see Koveshnikov, 2002: 41-43). The opposition between the centralised ‘state theory’ and the decen-
tralised ‘society theory’ has been central to each phase of reform of Russian
sub-national government since the early nineteenth century (Heusala, 2005: 77). The main influence on the ‘society’ view was De Tocqueville’s idealised picture of face-to-face local democracy in Britain and the United States, whereas proponents of the ‘state’ theory looked to the French Napoleonic model for inspiration (see Starr, 1972: 51-109). As in Britain, where in the mid-nineteenth century De Tocqueville’s
writing inspired the view that self-government was part of a lost ‘AngloSaxon’ heritage, by its nature opposed to a ‘Norman’ principle of the centralised state (see Hunt, 2004: 196-212), so in Russia the tradition of the village commune was upheld by opponents of ‘Western’ administrative rationalisation (Vucinich, 1960). A more Western view, influenced by German ‘free commune theory’ (see Soloviev, 2003: 11-15), according to which local self-government precedes state authority, was propounded by advocates of greater autonomy for the zemstvos, the local councils established by the reform of 1864. As state institutions encroached on the powers of the zemstvos in the late nineteenth century, so the belief that civil society and the state were in opposition grew among Russian liberals, and that elected local authorities were the vehicles of society that would supplant state institutions (see Emmons, 1982: 433). The incomplete modernisation of the Russian state pre-1917 prevented the
evolution of a workable system of co-operation between state and local government, and the issue of local autonomy was effectively frozen for much of the duration of the Soviet regime. As a result much of the academic and policy debate on local government since 1991 has taken up where the unresolved debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century left off. This means that the thinking behind, and about, the local government reforms of 1995 and 2003 has been influenced by the state and society theories of local self-government, and, more importantly, by what the two theories have in common – the assumption that state and society are mutually exclusive. Romantic localism was widespread in Central and Eastern Europe in
the early 1990s (see the introductory article in this collection, and that on Poland and Ukraine). In Russia it falls into two categories – a Western communitarian type, based on a Tocquevillian reading of local democracy in the US, and a more traditional type, derived from the nineteenth century Slavophile view of the Russian peasant commune. The latter type was more influential in the early 1990s following publication of Solzhenitsyn’s (1990) pamphlet which advocated ‘the democracy of small places’ as a basis for social or national regeneration, although its central assumption – that democracy should be built from below, and that small units are free from the defects of democracy in large units because they have direct democracy – retains adherents among supporters of local self-government across the political spectrum. This view is curious in that in Russia it was the larger cities that (although not without corruption of their own), from the early 1990s emerged as centres of political pluralism and local initiative and as the main challengers to the tradition of government from above.
