Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Balance in local government reform 26110 See John F. Young, ‘Zakonodatel'stvo Rossii po mestnomu samoupravleniyu’, inKimitaka Matsuzato (ed.), Tret'e zveno gosudarstvennogo stroitel'stva Rossii,Sapporo: Slavic Research Centre, Hokkaido University, 1998, pp. 109–29.11 See, for example, Vladimir Kuznechevskii, ‘Komu ne po dushe edinaia Rossiia,Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 6 April 1995, pp. 1–2; Sergie Shakhrai, ‘Federalizm i novaiaregional'naia politika’, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 4 February 1995, pp. 1, 4.12 See Irina Starodubrovskaya, Problems of Reforming Local Self-Governance:Structural and Financial Aspects, Moscow: Institute for the Economy inTransition, 2005, pp. 60–4. The vast differences in structures are not shaped byany one factor, as national republics, oblasti and autonomous okruga are found ineach category. There was, however, a surge of republics in the last category, thosetoo complicated to fit into the simpler classifications.13 The case of Udmurtia is best known. The Republic of Udmurtia nullified localself-government in 1996, subordinating local administration to state authority.The Constitutional Court defended the right of citizens to elect their local governments,but also conceded that the republic could legally create local organs ofstate power parallel to local governments. See ‘Aktual'nye problemy formirovaniiamestnogo samoupravleniia v Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Gosudarstvo i Pravo, Vol. 5,1997, pp. 24–45; Young, ‘Parallel Patterns?’. The Constitutional Court also ruledin favour of local elections in the Republic of Komi. See ‘PostanovlenieKonstitutsionnogo Suda Rossisskoi Federatsii’, 15 January 1998.14 ‘Kollizii zakonodatel'stva o MSU’, Mestnoe Samoupravleniia No. 5, May 2007,http://emsu.ru/lg (accessed, 24 September 2007).15 For a statistical overview, see Formirovanie organov mestnogo samoupravleniia vRossiiskoi federatsii, 1995–1998: Elektoral'naia statistika, Moscow: Ves' mir, 1999.16 Vladimir Gel'man and Alfred B. Evans, Jr., ‘Conclusion: Toward a New Politicsof Local Government in Russia’, in Alfred B. Evans Jr. and Vladimir Gel'man,The Politics of Local Government in Russia, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, NewYork, Toronto and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, pp. 274–87.17 See Andrei Poliakov, ‘Vlast' bez deneg – fiktsiia’, Malye goroda, No. 6, 1998, pp.5–11. Poliakov was the chair of the Duma Committee on local self-government.18 Aleksandr Koliadin, ‘Zazerkal'e gorodskogo biudzheta’, Rossiiskaya Federatsiya,No. 14, 1999, pp. 39–40.19 See Roger Gibbins, Antonia Maioni, and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Canada byPicasso: The Faces of Federalism, Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada,2006; and Janice Gross Stein, ‘Networked Federalism’, in John F. Young (ed.),Federalism, Power, and the North: Governmental Reforms in Russia and Canada,Toronto: Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, University ofToronto, 2007, pp. 77–106. The references to Picasso suggest that his art is an aptvisual demonstration of the distortions and imbalance between financial capacityand political accountability among different levels of government.20 As cited in Gel'man and Evans, ‘Conclusion’, p. 275.21 N.V. Volodina, Gosudarstvenno-Konfessional'nyi Otnosheniia: Teoretiko-PravovoiAnaliz, Moscow: Shchit-M, 2005, pp 157–69. Another example is noted byTomila Lankina, who referred to the 70,000 violations by local governments offederal statues concerning permits for such things as publishing, vocationaltraining, and investment management. See her Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, NewYork, Toronto and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, p. 157.22 John F. Young and Gary N. Wilson, ‘The view from below: local government andPutin’s Reforms’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 59, No. 7, November 2007, p. 1077.23 Federal'nyi Zakon No. 131 (2003), ‘Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogosamoupravleniia v Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Moscow: Grossmedia, 2006.