Trying to Reign in the Regions

As the Soviet Union crumbled, federal relations within Russia (the largest of the USSR's 15 successor states) lapsed into chaos. To quell restive provinces that had already begun to show a taste for declaring themselves sovereign in various ways, elected Russian president Boris Yeltsin first tried appointing regional governors. This had been the Soviet practice, too, of course, but many of the Soviet-era regional appointees in the republics had turned against the center and become nationalists (especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states) as central authority began to decay. In a somewhat similar fashion, Yeltsin found that many of his own appointees in the Russian provinces backed the failed hard-liners' coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and later the October 1993 uprising against Yeltsin's own authority by a faction of the Russian parliament. The lesson from these experiences should be that merely appointing people is not enough to make them loyal or accountable to central authority absent bonding institutions such as political parties.

Under Yelstin, who was president for nearly the whole of the 1990s, policy-making authority devolved quickly and nearly completely from the center to the regions. By decade's end, the center's writ no longer really ran in many a Russian province. In a trend that had begun as the USSR was beginning to come undone in 1991, regional actors declared their laws sovereign on provincial territory, usurped federal taxation privileges, imposed illegal internal tariffs, established citizenship requirements distinct from those of the Russian Federation, and even issued their own currencies. By the late 1990s, even aside from the bloody business of Chechen separatism and Moscow's war against it, unbridled provincial ambitions were threatening Russia's cohesion as a single political and economic expanse.

Apparently realizing that regional resistance to Moscow's policies was seriously undermining the capacity of the Russian state, Putin wasted little time after his May 2000 inauguration in taking steps to end such defiance of central authority. Vowing to reestablish the strength of the Russian state in general, and to reassert the "vertical" chain of authority from the center to the periphery in particular, Putin launched a multifront war against regional resistance to Moscow.

His first line of attack included the establishment under his presidential administration of seven new federal districts, each encompassing approximately a dozen subunits of the Russian Federation. This did not involve a redrawing of formal borders between provinces. Rather, it was an administrative change mandating that each of the seven districts would be headed by an appointed presidential representative charged with stopping the overt flouting of central authority by elected regional governors and the presidents of republics. This was a controversial move because it meant placing appointed presidential representatives higher in the political-administrative hierarchy than elected governors and presidents of regions.

Second, in an effort to remove hyperactive regional governors from excessive involvement in national politics, Putin proposed and the Duma accepted a plan to reorganize the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament. The idea was to ensure that regional governors, presidents, and heads of legislatures would no longer automatically receive seats. Instead, each region would be represented in the upper house by a pair of deputies, one to be named by the region's chief executive officer and the other to be chosen by vote of the regional legislature.

Third, to address regional governments' chronic noncompliance with federal laws and the Russian constitution, Putin had the Russian State Duma enact legislation providing for the removal of governors and the dissolution of regional legislatures that could be proven in court knowingly to have passed laws in violation of the constitution or federal statutes. Relatedly, he began demanding that regions repeal any such legislation.

Fourth and finally, Putin quietly nullified most of the complex cluster of preferential bilateral treaties that Yeltsin had set up between Moscow and about half the regions.

Putin was responding to a real problem, but he was applying solutions that smacked of the Soviet era to decidedly post-Soviet circumstances. Not surprisingly, the depth, durability, and efficacy of his efforts to enhance the central state's governing capacity all proved questionable. In creating the federal districts, for example, Putin added a layer to the central state-a strategy that has time and again proven futile-but did not necessarily increase its effectiveness. As had happened under Yeltsin (who tried his own variation of this approach), the newly appointed presidential representatives had poorly defined responsibilities. It was unclear, for example, to what degree they were supposed to oversee the actions of regional governments in general or merely those of federal bureaucrats in the regions. The representatives' staffs were small relative to the size of a typical regional administration, and the representatives had no role in disbursing federal funds or attending to the implementation of federal laws (instead, they were merely to report any instances of non-implementation that they might observe).

The presidential representatives' main task was to serve as the Kremlin's "eyes and ears" in the provinces. The representatives had little if any impact on concrete tasks of governing in the regions. The wide variation in how presidential representatives carried out their roles testifies to how poorly these were defined. Within two years, the overall effectiveness of the federal envoys as a remedy for weak central-state capacity in the provinces was in serious question. In a study of the results of the reform in the Southern federal district, Natalia Zubarevich reported that the president's representative there had done little to stop gubernatorial patronage of local companies. She concluded, "the presidential envoy's battle with corruption is selective, of little impact...and achieves its purposes only when the envoy's interests coincide with the interests of another level [either city or oblast] of government." Referring to the activities of the president's envoy in his region, the governor of the Leningrad Oblast asserted that by the summer of 2002, "results are not visible" and "We need to create the appropriate conditions for business, not set up Gosplans [Soviet-style planning agencies]."

Numerous examples-whether drawn from recent Russian history or from other countries-show that a bigger state is not necessarily a more capable state. Moreover, just as during the 1990s some regions were more assertive than others in their attitudes toward Moscow, a 2002 report compiled by Western analysts concluded that "weak governors tend to heed and meet with federal representatives, while powerful [governors] keep their distance." In sum, Putin's creation of these seven federal districts headed by representatives accountable directly to him did little to interrupt previous patterns of center-periphery relations in Russia.