ABSTRACT
Soviet and Russian federalism in practice The spatial element in Russian politics is a political fact, but the scope and nature of regional autonomy and its role in the development of a democratic polity is less clear. While federalism has been used as a way of managing internal diversity, it has not been a guarantee of democracy. In the 1990s the old hyper-centralised Soviet state gave way to the fragmentation of political authority and contesting definitions of sovereignty, but whether a viable federal system was established remains a matter of considerable debate. Under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s a complex and unstable balance was drawn between the claimed prerogatives of the centre and the normative and de facto powers of the regions. The tension between central and regional claims concerned not only practical issues of governance and finances, but also focused on fundamental competing sovereignty claims. In that context the evolving practice of ‘asymmetrical federalism’ affected the very definition of the state. A distinctive type of ‘segmented regionalism’ emerged, whereby Russia in effect had 90 governments – the 89 so-called ‘subjects of the federation’ and the central federal authorities. The federal government entered into asymmetrical bargaining relations with the other 89 federation subjects, one of which (Chechnya) claimed outright independence. This was the situation facing the incoming president, Vladimir Putin, on coming to office in early 2000. His response was to appeal to the principle of ‘the dictatorship of law’, and in particular the unimpeded flow of constitutional and juridical authority throughout the territory of the Russian Federation. In practice, despite the appeal to the normative validation of constitutional authority, a ‘power vertical’ was established based on political rather than constitutional authority. The reassertion of the constitutional prerogatives of the central state rendered sub-national sovereignty claims illegitimate, but the scope of the federal constitutional rights of the regions remained undefined. Russian federalism no longer practised shared sovereignty, but the proper powers to be exercised by the regions remained contested. Fundamental issues were raised by Putin’s attempt to reconstitute the state, above all the question of the form of state sovereignty. Would Russia become a genuine federation, in which law
would be defined in accordance with the normative spatial division of sovereignty; or would it take the form of de facto regionalism, where an effectively unitary state grants rights to devolved units, in which case a very different definition of sovereignty would operate? Russia continues to find itself in a period involving, in Robert Jackson’s words, the ‘reshuffling of the title to sovereignty, even major redistribution’.1 The disintegration of the USSR represented a major shift of sovereignty away from the former ‘sixteenth republic’, the federal Soviet centre, to the 15 union republics to the point that the Soviet Union disappeared in its entirety. The shadow of Soviet disintegration was the nightmare that hung over Putin and his government, and it is clear that he would do anything to prevent the Russian Federation being cast into the dustbin of history along with the USSR and so many other federations. Russia is one of the 25 federations in the world today (including eight of the largest countries), covering half the world’s territory and encompassing 40 per cent of the world’s population.2 Although there is a tendency towards federalisation (Spain, Italy, United Kingdom), the salutary lesson of the experience of federations has not been lost on Russia: 27 of the 44 federations created in the last two centuries have disintegrated or become centralised, unitary states.3 However, while this concern is a legitimate one, the danger was that the government would over-react by imposing excessive centralisation, and in so doing ultimately provoke the outcome that it sought to avert. Under Putin a ‘new federalism’ emerged, characterised by the rolling back of regional privileges and a type of closed but repeated negotiating process dubbed ‘co-operative federalism’, while at the same time the resurgent state weakened pluralism in its entirety. The nature of Russian federalism and the role of the regions in the constitution of the state is at the same time a question of the type of state that Russia will become. The extent to which power, if not sovereignty, will be shared with the subjects of the federation will determine whether Russia develops as a democratic polity.
