Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Balance in local government reform 2817 D. N. Kozak had headed the legal department at St Petersburg CityAdrministration, when Vladimir Putin had been head of external affairs. Kozakwas to manage Putin’s re-election campign in 2004, and headed the secretariat ofthe RF government from where in 2004 he led the reform of federal administrativestructures of 2004 which separated ministries, services and agencies. SinceNovember 2004 he has been presidential representative in the Southern FederalDistrict, which includes the North Caucasus.8 Federal Law ‘Ob obshchikh printsipakh organisatsii zakonodatel'nykh (predstavitel'nykh)i ispolnytel'nykh organov gosudarstvennoi vlasti sub'ektovRossiiskoi Federatsii’ (Law No. 95/2003).9 V. A. Kirpichnikov (Chair of the Board of the Congress of Municipalities),‘Planiruyemiye izmeneniya v zakonodatel'stvye po mestnomu samoupravleniyu’,in V. B. Zotov (ed.), Mestnoye Samoupravleniye v Rossii, Moscow: Os'-89, 2003,pp. 45–50.10 Kirpichnikov, p. 46.11 Ibid., pp. 46–8.12 T. Lankina, Governing the Locals, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.13 Alexander Shivalov replaced Dmitri Kozak as chair of the Commission on thedivision of powers between levels of government in late 2003, when the lattermoved to the apparat of central government (in the process replacing Shuvalov aschair of the commission on administrative reform.14 This has been discussed in A. Campbell, ‘Local Government and the RussianState’, Local Government Studies, Vol. 32, No. 5, 2006, pp. 659–76.15 V. Babichev (secretary of the Congress of Municipalities), ‘Mestnoe samoupravleniev postsovietskoi Rossii: nekotoriye itogi i prognozy’, in A. V. Ivanchenko(ed.), Konstitutsionniye i zakonadatel'nye osnovy mestnovo samoupravleniya vRossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow: Yurisprudentsiya, 2004, pp. 175–220.16 V. S. Mokriy ‘Mestnoe samoupravleniye: vchera, sevodnya, zavtra’, in V. B. Zotov(ed.), Mestnoe Samoupravleniye v Rossii, Moscow: Os'-89, 2003, pp. 36–44.17 Yu. V. Yakutin (ed.), Samoupravleniye v Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow:Vneshinform, 1998.18 This issue has been dealt with in Campbell, 2006, so is not discussed further here.19 Session of the Kozak Commission, 18 June 2002. Authors included LeonidGiltchenko (then head of the Terrorial Directorate of the PresidentialAdministration), and Aleksandr Mal'tsev (then vice-chair of the DumaCommission on Local Self-Government).20 Session of the Kozak Commission, 25 June 2002.21 Discussion with senior federal official, 14 December 2005.22 Alexei Lavrov, presentation at Gorbachev Foundation, 19 February 2004.23 N. Robinson, Russia: A State of Uncertainty, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 2–6.24 In an interview with the author in June 2006, a representative of the SocialDemocratic Party of Russia, usually highly critical of Yeltsin, nonetheless arguedthat had Yeltsin been President of the Soviet Union rather than the RussianFederation, the Union would have survived the crisis in its relations with theconstituent republics.25 This view coincides with J. L. Linz and A. Stepan’s concern (in, Problems ofDemocratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1996)that in Russia economic reform had been privileged over democratic reform (p.392), and also their inclusion of a functioning state administration as a preconditionfor successful democratic transition.26 M. Thumann, Das Lied von der russischen Erde, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002.27 See C. Lever-Tracy ‘A civilised gemeinschaft – ally of civil society in capitalistdevelopment’, inSzelenyi, No. 60, Rutgers University, 1998, http://hi.rutgers.edu/