Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Leviathan’s return 9might be, the Federation Council, which was supposed to represent theirinterests at the Centre, lacked significant powers, and could not be see as aneffective institution 34 – inter-regional coalitions emerged in an ad hocmanner and were short-lived as a result. 35The tone was set by a small minority of regional leaders (such as MoscowMayor Yuri Luzhkov and Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev). Takingpart in these coalitions brought them extra benefits through selective incentives:for example when the electoral bloc ‘Fatherland-All Russia’ was beingset up on the eve of the Duma elections of 1999, they played a leading role,supported by other regional leaders. 36 The majority of governors, lackingsuch incentives, but needing powerful allies in order to attain their ownobjectives (extraction of political rents) were drawn in by a kind of bandwagoneffect. Their behaviour varied according to the fluctuations in therelationship between the Centre and the regions, whether it was decentralization,as in the 1990s, or recentralization, as after 2000.It is not surprising that in setting the political course at the federal levelthe governors and their inter-regional coalitions were the junior partners ofmore influential interest groups. The same had happened with economicpolicy during the 1990s when the regional elites had been the allies of theoligarchs and the left (i.e. pro-market) factions in the State Duma. 37A similar bandwagon effect was set in motion during the federal electionsof 1999-2000: as the campaign of the inter-regional bloc, OVR (Fatherland-All-Rusia), began to lose ground to that of the Kremlin-backed bloc ‘Unity’,so the regional elites began to desert to the camp of the victors, culminatingin Unity’s hostile takeover of OVR in 2001. 38 After their defeat in the Dumaelections of 1999, the leaders of OVR no longer had the resources necessaryto forge a coalition on regional policy. Thus when the Centre subsequentlyshifted away from its reactive regional policy towards an active politicalagenda it could apply the principle of ‘divide and rule’, without applying anyspecial measures. Already in February 2000, before Putin’s election as headof state, a proposal was circulated by the governors of Belgorod, Kurgan andNovgorod oblasts, calling for an amalgamation of regions to reduce theirnumber to between twenty and thirty and to end gubernatorial elections infavour of their appointment from the Centre. 39 As usual in such cases, thegovernors concerned were not those who had been in the vanguard of regionalization.After 2000 the regional elites lost the ability either to formulate orto assert any collective interest and did little to hinder the Centre’s policy ofrecentralization. Once again, just as in the 1990s, their preference was tonegotiate with the Kremlin for individual deals to retain their previous statusand resources but their negotiating positions proved weaker than in the past.It is clear then that after 2000 the Centre found itself with an almostunique opportunity to bring about recentralization of power, due to a consolidatedfederal elite having put together an ideological coalition to furtherits unified interests, whilst the coalition of regional elites, united neither byinterests nor by ideology, had to all practical purposes ceased to exist.