Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

264 Vertical or triangle?alleged misapplication of the term public authority . 2 It was seen to emphasizethe administrative-territorial aspects of local government, rather thaneconomic development. 3 It was seen to centralize power, concentratingfinancial resources at federal level while seeking to place the burden ofmeeting social guarantees on the local level. 4 It was seen as giving governorsmore extensive powers over mayors and seeking to integrate Russia s localgovernment into Russia s hierarchical state structure. 5Recentralization of power from regional to federal level has been one ofthe defining policies of the Putin administration. However, it does not followthat the policy towards local government should be interpreted as astraightforward extension of the same principle of centralization. Were thisthe case then it would have been logical for the principle of appointmentrather than election, applied to regional heads since October 2004, to havebeen extended to mayors. Such a step has been seen by some as entirely inkeeping with the administration’s outlook:To a product of the Soviet system the elimination of checks and balancesappears to increase the manageability of the political system. … thesame striving or clarity and order will encompass the sub-regional level… and may result in the direct subordination of mayors to governors. 6The option of substituting mayoral elections with a system of appointmentfrom above was openly considered by President Putin as early as 2000 andwas the subject of much high-profile debate in early 2005, before becomingthe subject of a draft amendment to Law 131 in November 2006. On eachoccasion the principle appeared close to adoption only to be brushed aside atthe last minute – a vocal federal constituency in favour of appointed mayorswas obliged to give way to another in favour of elected mayors.Were Law 131 primarily about integrating local government into the statevertical, and if this were all that federal policy on local government amountedto, this repeated recoiling from the idea of appointing mayors would beinexplicable. This chapter sets out to explain why the refusal (so far) toappoint mayors was consistent with the principles underlying Law 131, andhow the latter was the result of a more complex set of aims.The Kozak CommissionLaw 131 was one of the main outputs of the Federal Commission on theDistribution of Functions between Levels of Power in the RussianFederation, which was convened by the President in 2001. The first chair ofthat commission was Dmitry Nikolaevich Kozak, deputy head of thePresidential Administration, who had just competed an overhaul of theRussian Federation’s judicial system. 7 Although the Commission revisedover 300 federal laws in its programme of federal reform, most of these weresectoral laws. Two new laws, however, had a special status as they dealt with