Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

268 Vertical or triangle?critics of Law 131. Shirokov in particular came to the view that the previouslaw needed to be altered substantially and in a paper, written before theKozak Commission was formed, the changes he outlines read like an earlydraft of Law 131. 14 Igor Babichev describes how the authors of the 1995 lawagreed that they would revise it within five years and that this work hadcommenced in 2000, again before the Commission was set up. 15It might be argued that the working group was obliged to follow the conceptset out by Kozak. Whilst formally correct this ignores the degree towhich Kozak’s concept of a two-tier local government system was itselfderived from critiques of the existing law by the members of the workinggroup and others in the local government policy network that had becomeestablished in connection with the 1995 Law and its aftermath. Babichev, inthe paper cited above, regards the introduction of the two-tier structure asthe most revolutionary innovation of the new law, ending the ‘artificial uniformity’of municipalities under the previous law. Vladimir Mokriy, the chairof State Duma Committee on Local Self-Government, 16 considered that ithad been clear from the start that the 1995 Law would not be implementedin most parts of the country, since it did not deal with the relationshipbetween local self-government and the state at a territorial level, and ignoredthe existing system of raion state administration which continued to existunder the guise of local self-government in many regions. The introductionof municipal raions was seen to provide territorial basis for cooperationbetween local self-government and the state.A similar analysis was presented as early as 1998 by a team from the(then) Ministry of Nationalities, responsible for local self-government, 17 whonoted the widespread use of pre-existing state administrative raions as thefirst level of local self-government under the 1995 Law. At the same time theauthors understood that to avoid discrediting the new system of local selfgovernmentthe organization of municipal formations on the level of villagesand rural councils in most cases, and at the level of small villages and hamletsin all cases, is unrealistic and pointless. This implied that a two-tiersystem might work better, although the authors appeared to go one stagefurther and consider letting local government develop via a two-stage process– establishing it first in larger territorial units (e.g. raions) and thenextending the principle to smaller settlements over time. This would suggestthat the error in Law 131 was not the establishment of a two-tier system(without which the system would not work) but that it attempted also tointroduce a strongly settlement-oriented principle from the start, which couldonly lead to large numbers of small municipalities. 18The reform becomes enmeshed in the monetization of socialguaranteesAt first the Commission’s aim appeared to be to reduce the dependence ofthe federal state on the regional level, by transferring powers either up to the