Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

244 Hellmut Wollmann and Elena GritsenkoContinental European countries, for instance in Germany (‘kommunaleSelbstverwaltung’ = ‘municipal self-administration’) and in France (‘ libre administration’= ‘free administration’). Although it may be more appropriate to speak,with regard to Russia, also of ‘self-administration’, we shall use the term ‘localself-government’ which, derived from the British tradition, is the more familiarterm employed by international scholars.2 ‘Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnovo samoupravleniya v RossiiskoiFederatsii’.3 In the official registration of Russian Federation legislation this act is identified asFederal Law, No. 131, which points at the sequence of legislative enactmentsduring the State Duma’s respective legislative period. Accordingly, in the relevantRussian literature it is mostly referred to as (Federal) Law 131. Because of thehistorical and developmental approach we pursue in this chapter we prefer tospeak of the 2003 Law in order to set it sequentially apart from earlier pieces oflegislation.4 In the official registration of Russian Federation legislation this legislative act isidentified as Federal Law No. 154.5 ‘Ob obshchikh nachalakh mestnovo samoupravleniya i mestnovo Khozyaistva vSSSR’.6 ‘The European Charter of Local Self-Government’ was adopted by the Council ofEurope on 15 October 1985. The RF State Duma ratified the Charter in April1998 by adopting Federal Law No. 55, ‘O ratifikatsii khartii mestnovo samoupravleniya’.NB: in the official Russian legislative wording the Charter’s original(English language) term, ‘local self-government’, has been translated as ‘local selfadministration’.7 Among Russian legal experts there is some disagreement on whether, through itsratification by the Duma, the European Charter has, within the RussianFederation legal order, become a directly binding and applicable law (as might beinferred from Article 15.4 of the Federal Constitution and Article 4 of the 2003Federal Law). However most agree that, by virtue of the ratification, the FederalParliament and authorities are duty bound to comply with its principles. For adetailed discussion see, Elena Gritsenko, ‘Universal'nye evropeiskie standartymestnovo samouprvaleniya v rossiiskoi pravavoi sisteme’, Sravnitel'noeKonstitutionnoe Oborzenie, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2005, pp. 127–34.8 For a case study of the City of Vladmir, see Sabine Kropp, Systemreform undlokale Politik in Rußland, Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1995, p. 245 ff.; HellmutWollman and Natasha Butusowa, ‘Local self-government in Russia: precarioustrajectory between power and law’, in Harold Baldersheim, Michael Illner andHellmut Wollmann (eds), Local Democracy in Post-Communist Europe,Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2003, pp. 211–240.9 See Hellmut Wollmann, ‘Institution building of local self-government in Russia:between legal design and power politics’, in Alfred B. Evans and VladimirGel'man (eds), The Politics of Local Government in Russia, Lanham, MD,Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto and Oxford: Roman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 108.10 See n. 16 below.11 For details and references see Wollmann 2004, p. 113 ff.12 In an analysis conducted by the Russian Federation Ministry of Justice in 1996only 4 of 68 regional laws regulating LSG were in full agreement with theConstitution, the rest were considered to be in blatant or partial contradiction: seeAleksandr Veronin, ‘Poka lish chetyre zakonnykh zakona’, RossiiskayaFederatsiya Sevodnya, No. 6, 1997, p. 30; Valerii Kirpichnikov, ‘Aktual'nyeproblemy formirovaniya mestnovo samoupravleniya v RF’, in Gosudarstvo iPravo, No. 5, 1997, p. 30; see also Wollmann and Butusowa, p. 231 for furtherreferences.