Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Balance in local government reform 273model being a unit of ‘baroque’ complexity and specificity, preserving differenceand localism, whereas the territorial district reflects a more ‘romantic’view of state bureaucracy uniting the nation through standardization.The framework, understood in this way, helps to explain the otherwisecurious nature of the political/professional alliance that supported the Putinadministration – ex-secret service personnel, economic liberals and ‘StPetersburg lawyers’. 34 All three groups might be expected to regard thecombination of fragmentation at the centre and entrenched quasi-sovereignregimes in the regions with displeasure, albeit for different reasons. The alliancemay be seen to derive from the St Petersburg Mayoralty post-1991 (whereVladimir Putin served as Deputy Mayor for External Affairs and DmitriKozak as head of the legal department) where a widening split appeared inwhat had been a broadly united liberal opposition in the late 1980s. On the onehand were those attached to the late 1980s ideas of democracy from below, andon the other, those who had come to the view that reform required strongexecutive rule. 35 Those who had supported the council against the executive inSt Petersburg and elsewhere were generally strong supporters of the principleof local self-government as a popular rather than state institution. 36 Thus theschism that occurred after 1991 in St Petersburg within what had been the liberalintelligentsia was to focus in the longer term around the issue of local selfgovernment,which, as a result, took on major symbolic as well as practicalsignificance, as the terrain on which a compromise was still sought betweenstate pragmatism and the democratic ideals of the late 1980s.However, the significance of the Robinson framework, as far as localgovernment is concerned, lies more in the degree to which Russian regionalinterests tend to be based on the left-hand gemeinschaft of the framework, assubjects of a pluralistic constitutional patrimonialism (quadrant 1) or (as inthe case of the more autocratic titular republics of the Federation) in quadrant4 as domains of absolutist patrimonialism in their own right.In terms of this framework, Law 131 with its emphasis on rationalizingand clarifying the division of powers and responsibilities between levels (andwith clarifying the rules for delegating functions between levels) was clearlyaimed, as was the entire project of the Kozak Commission, at moving thesystem of intergovermental relations from the left (gemeinschaft) side of theframework to the right (gesellschaft) side, substituting rules for informalarrangements. As one senior federal official put it:The problem was the habit of ‘living by unwritten rules’ rather than bylaws, these unwritten rules being neither in local government’s nor thepublic’s interest, but in the interests of internal departmental procedures.This is the first law of its kind. 37The paradox of the Kozak Commission is that the more the law’s authorssought to contain regional power through clarification and rationalization ofthe division of powers between federal and regional government, the more