Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

224 Elena Denezhkina and Adrian Campbellgiven 1-200 ‘Urals Franks’ to spend in the company shop. The same hired activitistssupported Bakov in a mass attack on the Khimmash chemical plant, which endedwith Bakov forcibly expelling the previous owner, the oligarch Fedulev (admittedly ahighly compromised figure in his own right), from the premises. The May movementtransformed the political fortunes of Bakov’s associate Burkov, who went from winning1 per cent in previous elections to winning 28 per cent against Rossel in the 1999gubernatorial contest. Although Rossel won easily with 78 per cent, Burkov hadsucceeded in joining the political elite and went on win seats at regional and nationallevels. See Kommersant Den'gi, Vol. 16, No. 471, 26 April 2004.20 Chenetsky was to lobby consistently for an expansion for the fiscal base of localself-government, for which he made a strong case in front of President Putin atthe 2003 annual conference of the Congress of Municipalities.21 See S. Kondratiev ‘The Urals Federal Okrug’, in P. Reddaway and R. Orttung(eds), The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal-RegionalRelations. Vol. 1, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto and Oxford:Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, pp. 196–9.22 It would be more accurate to say one of the candidates. Rossel had difficulty inchoosing one candidate to oppose Chernetsky, in both 1999 and 2003. Severalwere backed, with the final choice being made on the eve of the election. Formuch of the run-up to the election of 2003 Rossel's team had been backing adifferent candidate, Gabinsky, seeing Osinstev more as a stalking horse to trip upand destabilize the mayor’s position.23 The city administration denied the charges, which were never, to our knowledge,proven.24 In Russian governance, whether at federal, regional or municipal level, theEconomy department has lead responsibility for overall development strategy, alegacy of the Soviet state planning hierarchy of Gosplan. After the fall of theSoviet Union, Gosplan became the Ministry of Economy of the RussianFederation (the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and several other former sovietrepublics follows a similar logic). Departments of Economy at municipal level arenot hierarchically subordinate to the Ministry of Economy, but are required tocollect and submit statistics.25 Some within the city hold the view that the federal projects presided over by thepotential successor to Putin, Dmitri Medvedev (with whom the city’s strategistshad met in 2003), on which part of the federal budget’s oil-generated surplus isbeing spent, took their inspiration from the Ekaterinburg City Strategy, whichplaced an emphasis on Education, Health and Housing as strategic areas ofimprovement in a way that was uncharacteristic of Russian policy in the early2000s – interview with senior economic manager, Ekaterinburg CityAdministration, June 2007.26 Russia-Advice to the City of Ekaterinburg (RACE), DFID (UK Department forInternational Development, which ran from 2000 to 2003 and was co-ordinatedby the authors of this contribution. Elena Denezhkina was project manager and amember of the Co-ordinating Council and of the Board of the ProgrammeCouncil for the Ekaterinburg Strategic Partnership. Adrian Campbell was projectdirector. See the city strategy web-site http://www.strategy-burg.ru/, also ‘TheEkaterinburg City Strategy’. Interview with Adrian Campbell in Stolitsa Urala,Issue 3, July 2003 (in Russian) and Russian national radio interview with AdrianCampbell, Ekho Moskvy, April 2003 (in Russian).27 See article by Igor Saveliev ‘Ekaterinburg Obraz Goroda XXI veka’, http://www.arm-group.ru/rus/talks/articles/citydev/yekaterinburganimageforxxicentury/28 ‘Ekaterinburg or Birmingham’, by Nikolai Eichler, http//www.politsovet.ru/analytic.asp?article = 1260, 27 November, 2002. Note : this pro-Osinstev articleappeared on a website controlled by Anton Bakov, who was to lead Chernetsky’s