Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

208 Elena Denezhkina and Adrian Campbellregion 1976-85. In the first multi-party elections in 1990, Ekaterinburg (thenunder its soviet-era name of Sverdlovsk) was one of only three large Russiancities to return a large majority of pro-reform candidates.For several years the city has enjoyed the highest levels of growth in retailand commerce, (and highest property prices) of all cities outside Moscowand St Petersburg. The city has seen a shift in industrial profile with moreprofitable enterprises being found in the food, drink and consumer productssectors than in traditional defence sectors (a shift less pronounced in thesmaller cities in the regions where industry is primarily heavy and defenceoriented).As a result, by 2000, the city of Ekaterinburg accounted for over60 per cent of the economy of Sverdlovsk Region and over 80 per cent of itsservice sector income.This has an impact on the economic strategies of the city and regionallevels. The region has pursued an active but traditional strategy emphasizingsupport for defence and heavy industry. The city, on the other hand has inrecent years been pursuing a consciously post-industrial strategy, on theEuropean model, promoting the city as a centre of business services.The Urals Republic versus the CentreFollowing Boris Yeltsin’s election to the executive presidency of the RussianFederation in June 1991, Eduard Rossel was appointed the first governor ofSverdlovsk Oblast (region). Rossel then appointed Arkady Chernetsky to thepost of mayor of Ekaterinburg in 1992.Rossel was one of the most assertive governors from the start. His projectfor a Urals republic pursued two aims. First, the immediate aim was to‘upgrade’ Sverdlovsk to republic status, thereby eliminating the differencebetween Sverdlovsk as an ethnic Russian region and titular ethnic republicssuch as Bashkortostan or Tatarstan (which at that stage was seen to enjoysubstantial fiscal privileges). This would effectively neutralize the nationality(as opposed to territorial) principle in the regional structure of the federation.The advocates of the Urals Republic considered that having threecategories of subject (as in the Federal Treaty) was an attempt by a weakcentre to divide and rule, and that the national ethnic principle of regionalpolicy was ‘a bomb planted in 1918 that will sooner or later go off, now thatthe Party is no longer there to exert pressure from above’. 4Second, Rossel had, in 1990, established an Association of EconomicCooperation between six regions in the wider Urals area. The aim was nowto convert this into a larger territorial unit. The historical precedent was thelarger Urals Region that existed before 1933 5 and the proposal presaged theUrals Federal District as created in 2001. The argument pursued by Rosseland his supporters had much in common with that of the SOPS economicplanning network that had always opposed the smaller regions that emergedfrom the Stalin period and sought to restore the larger Gosplan economicplanning regions of the 1920s. 6