ABSTRACT
Russia, as the world’s newest multiethnic federation, is unique among federations in having been born out of the collapse of a federation, the Soviet Union. This raises questions not only about why one form of federation collapsed only to be replaced in the one-time metropole of the Soviet empire by another, but about whether a post-Soviet Russia can succeed in keeping together what was the USSR’s ‘inner multiethnic empire’ through a federal arrangement when Moscow was eventually unable to secure the territorial integrity of its one-time ‘outer empire’. The chapter is divided into three parts. Firstly, it explores why the Soviet federation disintegrated. What in particular are teased out here are the complex federal institutional structures of territorial control which although facilitating the maintenance of ethno-regional stability for over seventy years, proved ultimately incapable of adjusting to the resurgent aspirations of sub-state nationalisms of the late 1980s. Secondly, we consider the emergence of defederation on to the political agenda during the last few years of the Soviet Union’s existence, examining the tensions between the centre and the union republics over the question of ethno-regional sovereignty. Finally, the chapter explores how the new Russian state has attempted to refederate its own multiethnic society following the defederation of the Soviet Union in 1991. Here it is argued that the federal project, although more democratic than its Soviet predecessor, none the less faces similar obstacles in its associational relationships with its ethno-regions, most notably the lack of a federal culture of associative democracy to generate a sense of coexistence and well-being.
