Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

232 Hellmut Wollmann and Elena Gritsenkostatus of city districts has in most cases been granted to regional capitalsand similarly large (industrial) cities. In comparative terms, they have anequivalent in the German (single-tier) kreisfreie Städte (‘county freecities’) as well as in the English (single-tier) unitary local authorities.• Standing in remarkable contrast to its basic thrust to pre-empt and curbthe legislative powers of the regions within the constitutional concept of‘shared legislative powers’, the 2003 Federal Law puts the regions explicitlyin charge of implementing these massive territorial, organizationaland functional reforms (see Article 85.1).In setting a legislative schedule with binding deadlines for the various stepsand components of territorial and organizational reforms, the 2003 FederalLaw gave the regions ‘extraordinary’ powers during the initial ‘founding’period to suspend the ‘ordinary’ legal provisions (relating, for instance, tothe rights of the local population to create local boundaries by referendum 32or the right of the local councils to settle, by way of local charters (ustavy),the composition of their councils, their duration and the type of local leadership).33 These ‘extra-ordinary’ powers of the regions pertain particularlyto the ‘newly created municipalities’ that are to be established ‘from scratch’(see Article 85.1(2) of the 2003 Federal Law). At the end of the restructuringperiod some 12,000 out of 24,000 LSG units were ‘newly formed’, with theirboundaries and institutional setting, having been decided ‘single-handedly’by the regional authorities.In the meantime (as of 1 October 2006) a total of 1,757 legislative actshave been passed by regional assemblies to restructure the LSG levels andunits under the mandate of Article 85 of the 2003 Federal Law, resulting in:19, 904 rural settlements (selskie poseleniya), 1,745 city settlements (gorodskieposeleniya), both constituting the lower-level of the two-tier LSGstructure, 1,801 municipal districts (munitsipal'nye raiony) which make upthe upper level of the two-tier LSG system, and 522 city districts (gorodskieokruga) which are the (single-tier) local authorities in urban/big city/metropolitanareas. 34 There are also 236 ‘inner-municipal areas’ in the two ‘cities of federalstatus’, Moscow and St Petersburg. As a consequence of these developmentsthe number of local authorities has about doubled from some 12,000in 2000 to 24,210 in October 2006. This sharp increase is mainly due to thecreation of new municipalities in regions and rural areas where lower-levelelected local authorities had not been put in place, or had been eliminatedduring the 1990s.The great number of ‘newly formed’ municipalities hints also at the magnitudeof the administrative, personnel and financial challenges posed by thismassive institutional transformation at the local level. The fact that thedeadline by which the 2003 Federal Law should be operative in all its provisionshas been postponed several times (from 2006 to 2009) mirrors the(administrative, financial but also political) difficulties which this mammothrestructuring project has encountered.