[BRIEF NOTE] The Evolution of Russian Federalism

[rfmcdonald]

simonff is doubtless aware of the events overtaking his home region. Others might not, and so I refer them to this recent article in The Guardian.

Residents of three sparsely populated Siberian regions have voted to reunite in one resource-rich territory that will be larger than Western Europe, Russian media reported Monday, extending the trend of increased Kremlin control over the country's far-flung provinces.

The Izvestia daily predicted that Sunday's referendum on reunification of the Krasnoyarsk region with the Evenki and Taimyr districts would pave the way for a series of similar votes aimed at bringing the number of Russian regions down from the current 89 to around 35 or 40.

``Reduction of the number of federal subjects will increase the level of coordination and efficiency of regional authorities,'' Izvestia quoted Vladimir Yakovlev, the minister of regional development, as saying.

Some 92 percent of voters in the Krasnoyarsk region, a vast territory with a population of some 2.9 million, 2,100 miles east of Moscow, voted in favor of reunification, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. The Taimyr region, with a population of 40,000, had about 70 percent in favor, and the Evenki region of 17,700 had 79 percent in favor.

Russia's federal system, as it exists in the early 21st century, is the product of a century of contradictory trends since the 1917 Revolution, of the devolution of power to 21 republics, 10 autonomous districts, and one autonomous province created on grounds of ethnic self-determination in the Soviet era and the centralization of Russian affair in Moscow, of the tendency of Russia's federal subjects--not only the republics and autonomous districts and provinces, but the provinces, territories, and federal cities as well--to claim substantial amounts of power from the Centre in the Yeltsin era and the efforts of Putin to reign them in (most notably through the creation of the seven federal districts).

Krasnoyarsk Territory is, in terms of territory, one of the largest federal subjects of Russia. In 1934, however, the Taimyr (Dolgan-Nenets) Autonomous Area and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area were carved from its territory and given separate representation in Russian federal institutions, in order to advance the interests of these area's indigenous populations. The territory that is now the autonomous republic of Khakassia, home to a population eight-tenths Russian and one-tenth Khakass (Christianized Kyrgyz, briefly), once had similar status but it separated from Krasnoyarsk entirely in 1991. In the post-Soviet era, Krasnoyarsk territory did relatively well.

Not so the autonomous areas to its north. When I read The Siberian Curse last February, I was impressed by the degree to which the extensive Soviet-era colonization of the Siberian North was enabled by massive subsidies from naturally more hospitable regions. Krasnoyarsk might be very northern, but it at least has a reasonably developed industrial economy concentrated in large urban centres. Not so Evenkia and Taymiria, with their combined populations of sixty thousand people scattered across hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. As Kommersant noted in the linked summary of the region, the "Taimyr Autonomous Area has been one of the least socioeconomically developed subjects of the Russian Federation in all macroeconomic indicators from the time it was formed. The area generates only 0.02% of Russia's GDP and is in 9th place in level of subsidization. The economic crisis of 1998 had a greater impact on industrial production here than in other Siberian regions. Nearly 80% of companies are unprofitable due to high freight transportation costs and dependence on deliveries of fuel and lubricants, building materials, and aviation fuel." This, sadly, is a familiar story for peripheral northern regions everywhere, whether one talks about the Siberian north or the Scandinavian north or the Canadian north.

Merging these two poor and peripheral northern federal subjects with a much larger and richer one would allow for economies of scale, at least in the provision of government services. In an interview with Itar-Tass before the referendum, Sergei Baturin, chairman of the Taimyr Duma, announced his full support for the amalgamation on these grounds.

Baturin is positive that the population of the three regions will stand to gain from their unification, because “economic relations will be strengthened, and their efficiency will be improved.”

After the regions were divided into smaller entities, “the authorities of each entity began to show off, to prove that they can manage on their own, and, as usual, it is the ordinary people who suffered from it,” Baturin continued.

As a result of all those processes, the southern areas could not sell their farm produce in the North, while the North started purchasing potatoes from Holland and canned meat from China. The quality of the imported food was lower, while the prices were higher.

“Now the situation will be improved, if we put the interests of our regions above personal political ambitions,” Baturin stressed.

Certainly, the idea of annexing poor and underpopulated areas to wealthier and more populous ones in a federal system as a costsaving measure has been raised in other countries with federal systems of government. In Canada, for instance, British Columbian premier Thomas Dufferin Pattullo, who governed that province from 1933 to 1941, favoured annexing Yukon Territory to British Columbia. Before that, the Northwest Territories--now a Canadian territorial unit a bit more than one million square kilometres in size in the Arctic--was periodically whittled down to allow Canadian provinces to either expand their existing territories (Ontario, Québec, and Manitoba) or to be formed de novo (Alberta, Saskatchewan) as settlement proceeded in these regions. Jeremy Bransten's article for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, "Russia: Kremlin Approves Regions' Decision To Merge", suggests that Krasnoyarsk's consolidation--strongly supported by Putin--might be motivated at least as much by a desire to centralize control as by anything else.

De Spiegeleire in The Hague [. . .] noted that many countries -- especially in Europe -- have highly successful economies precisely because they are small and adaptable. Many highly developed large countries tend to replicate these conditions by having a high degree of decentralization, so that most decisions are made on a local level. This has two advantages. It breeds healthy competition among regions, and it ensures that those who make the decisions are most familiar with conditions on the ground.

"Some of the most successful large countries are very decentralized and have a federal system," de Spiegeleire said. "I'm thinking here of the United States, of course, Canada, Germany, even Brazil. You need that to have a really workable system, which is not the kind of control that the people who are in power in Russia now or that were in power in the Soviet Union thought was necessary. It's a system of checks and balances that ends up yielding much more stability, certainly in the medium term, than any type of direct control that you can have."

De Spiegeleire called the Kremlin’s drive to consolidate power “profoundly ill-guided.”

The consolidation of Russia's federal subjects, as De Spiegeleire went on to note, might have the long-term result of strengthening Russia's regions.

Several governors who are allied with powerful business interests are preparing to follow the Krasnoyarsk example by absorbing smaller surrounding regions. If this happens, said de Spiegeleire, the Kremlin will have inadvertently created a new class of regional politicians with the political and economic power to counter Moscow’s influence.

"What will end up now is that you have weaker regions being swallowed up by larger regions that have connections to very powerful financial industrial interest groups," de Spiegeleire said. "And that will start re-creating some of these checks and balances that the system is trying to get rid of. Obviously, a small entity like Evenkia, or like Taimyr, or like some of the other autonomous districts which will probably be swallowed up by some of their neighbors -- all of these players were very weak players in the political system. So in a sense this is only strengthening regionalism."

Certainly, in the Canadian federation Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba are much more powerful players than the pre-1905 Northwest Territories ever were. If the recent referenda in Krasnoyarsk is a test of a new method of centralizing power, the current Russian regime might want to engage in some classic contrast-and-compare studies.