Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

230 Hellmut Wollmann and Elena Gritsenko‘delegated’ to them by the State, the local authorities operate, in the conductof such ‘delegated’ tasks, under the tight instruction and control of the State.This brings them close to acting as ‘part of the State structures’ and of being‘integrated’ into them – in sharp contradiction to the ‘non-state’ vision positedin Article 12.At this point, it should be noted that a new concept and term, ‘publichnyi’(‘public’), has been coined to legally capture the status of LSG. The conceptualand terminological repertoire dating back to the Soviet era wascharacterized by the dichotomy between ‘statist’ (gosudarstvennii) and ‘societal’(obshchestvennii) concepts of local government. Under the doctrine ofthe ‘unity of the State’, any‘public’ sphere outside the State was politicallyinadmissible and, hence, conceptually unthinkable. In the meantime, Russia’spost-Soviet jurisprudence has developed the notion of ‘public’, particularlywith regard to LSG, 24 in order to legally qualify its status as being neither‘State’ (in the narrow institutional sense) nor ‘society’ (as a sphere of ‘societal’actors, including ‘non-governmental organizations’, NGOs).3.2 Territorial organizationThe 1990 Law fell in line with the Soviet tradition of regarding the FederalSubjects (regions) as ‘local’ entities. 25 By contrast, the 1991 Law ceased tocount these as ‘local’, which mirrored the rapid ‘internal federalization’ ofthe Russian Republic. In the Federal Treaties of March 1992 the regionswere elevated to the status of Federal Subjects, including the cities ofMoscow and St Petersburg, and only the tiers below the subject (regionaland republic) level were designated as local.In the legislative debate about the 1995 Federal Law, the territorial structureof LSG was one of the most controversial issues. Whilst an influentialgroup of deputies advocated (in the so called ‘deputatskii variant’) that afull-fledged two-tier LSG structure be legally prescribed (thus assigning LSGalso to the districts, raiony), President Yeltsin (in the ‘presidentskii variant’)pushed for LSG to be established only on the ‘settlement’ (poselenie) level,while the districts were to continue to be units of state administration. Thefinal version of the 1995 Law showed the ambivalence of a (‘dilatory’) compromisein which the detailed regulation of the territorial structure was leftto the regions. 26 In the ensuing spree of regional legislation on the territorialstructure essentially three patterns emerged. 27 In most (that is in forty-six)Federal Subjects the single-tier district (raion) type was put in place – withLSG established only in the districts (and some large cities), while the bulkof towns and villages were left without LSG. In about twenty regions thesingle-tier ‘settlement’ type was introduced – with LSG established only onthe level of the towns and villages, whereas the district level was turned overto the state administration. In a further twenty regions the full-fledged twotierLSG system was installed (as envisaged in the ‘deputy variant’). Thegreat variance which the regional legislation manifested regarding the