Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

16 Vladimir Gel'manfrom above; the vagaries of competitive elections have been eliminated notonly by unequal electoral arrangements now in force in the regions, but alsothrough the abolition of elections of regional heads; regional governmentalinstitutions have taken their place in a Russia-wide administrative hierarchyand regional markets may in many respects be seen to have become part of avertically integrated corporation headed by Gazprom. In terms of politicalstatus and administrative functions, regional executive heads had, by themid-2000s, come to resemble the First Secretary of the Obkom (RegionalCommittee) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Comparing today’s governors with the ‘soviet prefects’ (as the obkom firstsecretaries were described by Jerry F. Hough in his well-known study ofregional government in the USSR), 66 enables a number of parallels to bedrawn between the ‘new centralism’ and the Soviet model of government.Just as thirty–forty years ago, the Russian oblasts and krais are run by officialswho are de facto central appointees but formally approved by the regional elite.Their fulfilment of the most important economic tasks – ensuring territorialdevelopment and the attraction of resources into the region – depends as in thepast on their ability to exercise informal lobbying at the Centre. Their room forpolitical manoeuvre in the region and beyond is constrained by the structure ofpowerful economic interests and the associated phenomena of ‘regionalism’and ‘departmentalism’ at the regional level. Finally there is the tendency forregional authorities to become intertwined, as in the ‘state corporatist’ model,noted in several studies, 67 and which is not too distant from the system depictedby Hough. Of course, the parallels only go so far. The ‘party of power’,United Russia is not a reincarnation of the CPSU. The roles of Gazprom orpower monopoly RAO EES in the regions and in the country as a whole isscarcely reminiscent of the All-Union ministries of the past, and the governorshave not (yet) become ‘post-soviet prefects’. Nonetheless, the ‘new centralism’and the Soviet model of government do share a common foundation in thenon-competitive nature of the political regime (both at the Centre and, evenmore so, in the regions) and the monopolization of the economy, now basednot on central planning but on rent-seeking.In this respect, the decision to abolish direct gubernatorial elections wasnot simply the product of a contingent political agenda, facilitated by circumstance(as in, for example, the proclamation of the federal reform as theCentre’s reaction to the crisis of the 1990s). On the contrary, it was a strategicstep, which was intended to reinforce the emergent system of politicaland economic relations between the Centre and regions. The Centre’s orientationtowards the (re-) establishment of a non-competitive institutionalenvironment in politics and economics has led to the conservation of ‘regionalauthoritarianisms’ and ‘closed markets’ in the regions. All these phenomenaare successfully accommodated in the system of ‘new centralism’:concealed behind the façade of a drive towards political and economicmodernization in the regions lies a deepening of the clientelistic relationsthat flourished so markedly during the 1990s. 68