HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

Nowhere in the world are all regions set up on an equal footing. There’s always a contrast between the leaders and the outsiders. But everything’s relative. You won’t last long if you try to harness to the same cart the mighty “steed” of a modern post-industrial nation state with a nervous “donkey” from a tribe. The levelling up of different regions is essential politically: raising the status of the outsiders to that of the leaders. Improving the most backward regions that are not currently able to fulfil the political functions of a subject of the Federation (and, indeed, are not even classed as “subjects”), is a very difficult but essential task.

But you can’t do this on the spur of the moment. First, you have to develop the metropolises as potential administrative political and economic centres so that they can carry out their new role. We have to begin by creating a proper, quality university, that will set the level of the future metropolis. And this will take a long time.

So what can we do now? If we simply rely on the possible growth of the metropolises, we may never live to see the bright new future. The project for the deep restructuring of Russia’s territorial state system could take decades, if not longer. And if throughout these years the power structure remains as centralised as it is now, then there’ll be no possibility of breaking out of the prison of authoritarianism and backwardness that Russia currently finds itself in. This means that at the same time as the new system is being rolled out, we have to have a time frame to reform the existing system.

How should we approach the current reality? History has known two main ways of effectively decentralising power: self-rule and federalism. Neither of these have been studied in depth in Russia. Even though they’re both mentioned in the Constitution, they’ve never been put into practice, and so they remain there as mere false decorations of the political system. We can merely guess at how genuine self-rule and real federalism would work in Russia.

Russia has never really been a genuine federal state. The idea of the federation was simply a political formula to legitimise the limited autonomy of the colonies in their relation to the metropolis. The model of a federation has never worked in Russia, and no one can even be sure that it would work here. It was effective in the USSR only so much as it fitted the false federal model of Soviet power that protected the tough centralised machinery of the power of the Party (the real deep state), where there was no place for genuine federalism.

Self-rule has fairly deep roots in Russia, and in the pre-Soviet period it played an important supporting role in rural areas at the lower levels of governance of the empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, more complicated methods of self-rule began to develop, such as the zemstvo . But in the Soviet period all self-rule was wiped out, and the tradition was lost. Nothing of its kind has been created in the post-Soviet period. So any moves towards self-rule will have to start from scratch.

Nevertheless, we do have something that could be used as a starting point, and something that could be used for careful political refinement. I see the advanced development of local self-rule as the key condition that would make it difficult to slide into the well-worn rut of authoritarianism. Developing federalism would be an extra supporting factor. This is because it would be relatively easy to build public control over the structures of power, and a democratic tradition could be created on this basis.

The basic essentials for developing local self-rule should be granting it a protected budget – and competence. The concept of “joint (or mixed) competence” is a sly one. It’s a grey area, where the centre always wins. Self-rule, of course, means there must be responsibility. This a closed circle of political technology: a clearly defined area of competence, its own revenue base and management by elected, responsible people, who answer to the electorate for the results. The electorate themselves then carry the responsibility for their own mistakes, and can’t blame them on a higher level.

Clearly, like the people, the regions are not all the same, and in a massive country like Russia nothing will be achieved if there isn’t a redistribution of resources. But this must be done transparently, by a united fund for the regional development, and not secretively through the murky articles of the overall federal budget. So the question of transparency has to be decided separately.

Access to subsidies has to be fair and to stimulate local development. Subsidies must not be used for political trade-off, nor as a means of paying for “voting the right way”.