Setbacks to Recentralization

Putin had other sticks that he failed to use (perhaps because doing so proved politically impossible) against errant governors or regional legislatures. Four years after securing passage of the law described above, he had yet to bring a case for removing a single regional leader or dissolving a regional legislature. While some had predicted that the law would prove a tool for ridding Russia of corrupt regional leaders or at least let Putin end the careers of those who had spearheaded noncompliance campaigns against Yeltsin in the 1990s, neither of these scenarios has proved true. A crucial test of this authority was the case of Yevgenny Nazdratenko of Primorskii Krai in the Russian Far East. Instead of charging this seemingly corrupt figure, long a thorn in Yeltsin's side, in an effort to cashier him, Putin chose instead to gain Nazdratenko's resignation by offering him a plum job as head of the Federal Ministry of Fisheries.

In July 2003, a Russian Constitutional Court ruling rendered the center's authority to remove errant governors even more impotent. In a case involving the obstreperously noncompliant regional governments of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the Court ruled that federal prosecutors based at the regional level lacked the legal authority to file cases against regional governments which, in the prosecutors' opinion, had passed laws contradicting the federal constitution. The justices went on to say that only their Court could wield this authority. Given the mammoth amount of work involved in monitoring the legislative output of 89 regional governments and legislatures, the justices had dealt a sharp blow to Moscow's ability to enforce uniformity in Russian laws.

Putin's administration suffered other legal and political defeats that left the regional leadership structures of the 1990s largely intact. In July 2002, the Constitutional Court ruled that all terms served by regional governors prior to the passage of the October 1999 federal law on the organization of regional government did not count toward the two-term limit which that law established. This meant that many regional leaders could run for third and fourth consecutive terms. In 2002, 53 out of 89 governors could potentially have ruled their provinces for another four to eight years, allowing their terms in office to last for as long as twelve to twenty years. The relative silence with which the presidential administration and its allies in the Duma greeted the Court's decision was widely interpreted as a retreat by Putin and his lieutenants from their efforts, begun just two years earlier, to curb the authority of regional political actors.

Moreover, while the presidential administration became strongly involved in trying to shape the outcomes of regional elections between October 2000 and January 2002, the incumbency rate for regional governors and presidents in those races was a startlingly high 65.4 percent. There was reportedly extensive involvement by business elites in regional elections-either trying to run candidates of their own or backing incumbent candidates in exchange for preferential tax and budgetary treatment. Despite what is said to be the rising influence in the regions of Putin's custom-crafted Unity (now United Russia) coalition, the "gubernatorial regimes" of the 1990s mostly remain in power whether they enjoy United Russia's backing or not.

The concrete effect of Putin's decision to dissolve so many bilateral treaties between the Kremlin and some Russian provincial governments is unclear. It is noteworthy that the 14 treaties he chose to leave in place tie the central government to some of the more notoriously and persistently noncompliant regions. Perhaps the status of some of these very regions as net donors to the federal budget explains Putin's forbearance. The agreements made Russia's already complex federal relations even more confusing, while doing little to stem the tide of noncompliance, to clear up murky issues of federal versus regional jurisdiction, or to make center-periphery relations more equitable. The treaties were widely variable. Some gave certain regions, such as Tatarstan and Sverdlovsk, considerable economic and tax privileges. Others amounted to little more than expressions of friendship and solidarity between the regional signatory and the federal government. In sum, it is hard to say what net effect either preserving, restoring, or abrogating the treaties would have on Russian federal relations in general and the central state's practical authority in particular.

Putin and his supporters have tended to present his efforts at making regions comply with federal law as his biggest success in the area of federal relations, but serious questions as to the actual success of federal envoys in obtaining the reversal of offending legislation have lingered for years.' Then too, the Constitutional Court's July 2003 ruling denying prosecutors the power to bring noncompliance cases raises large questions about how much more progress, if any, Putin's team can make in this area.

Whatever Putin might say, it seems safe to assert that by the fall of 2004 the authority and capacity of the central state in the provinces of the vast Russian Federation were not much different from what they had been under Yeltsin. Even after Putin's first wave of "recentralizing" reforms, the fundamental structural problems remained. The president's post-Beslan opportunism, therefore, may have been motivated by the frustration that he has experienced in his dealings with stubborn and often irresponsible regional political elites. Is Russian democracy "collateral damage" of this frustration? The February 2005 law mandating presidential appointment rather than popular election as the way to choose regional governors, whatever its intent, certainly represented a major setback for Russia's status as an electoral democracy. Will this shift away from democracy actually gain Putin the control and governing capacity that he seeks in Russia's provinces? Could it be that not less but more democracy might instead be the key to making Moscow's writ more authoritative in Russia's far-flung provinces and localities?