Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 27integral, federal, multinational state formed on the principle of socialist federalismas a result of the free self-determination of nations and the voluntaryassociation of equal Soviet Socialist Republics’. 3 But in contrast to theFrench, German and American Constitutions the Soviet Constitution wasnot drafted in reaction to the past. On the contrary, as its Preamble makesclear, it was drafted in continuity with the previous constitutions of thecountry. Consequently in order to trace the origins of Soviet federalism wehave to go back at least to the Stalin Constitution, 1936 and the firstConstitution of the USSR in 1924. Indeed, we can already identify the firststep in the direction of Soviet federalism that foreshadowed the USSR andwas consummated earlier in 1922 with the signing of the Treaty of Unionamong the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the Ukraine,White Russia and the Transcaucasian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic(TSFSR). 4 The first documents of a Soviet federal or quasi-federal naturewere the ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People’promulgated in January 1918 and incorporated later in the 1918Constitution, and the resolution of the Third Soviet Congress on the‘Federal Institutions of the Russian Republic’. 5The original motive for the formal adoption of federalism first inBolshevik Russia and then in the USSR was simple and straightforward: itwas eagerly seized upon to prevent the secession of the nationalities, a phenomenonthat returned to haunt both Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachevover seventy years later. The threat of separation was a direct result of thepost-revolutionary programme of national self-determination in Russia andthe resort to federalism required Lenin to perform considerable ideologicalacrobatics to justify it in terms of established Marxist-Leninist theory. Hequickly rationalized federalism as merely a transitional step to a real‘democratic centralism’:In the example of the Russian Soviet Republic we see most graphicallythat the federation we are introducing will serve now as the surest stepto the most solid unification of the different nationalities into a single,democratic, centralized Soviet State. 6As Vernon Aspaturian noted over half a century ago, this apologia of federalismemerged as one of the chief characteristics of Soviet federalism:only when it is realized that the Soviet Union regards federalism not asan ultimate end, but only a necessary, but temporary, expedient, to begiven form but not substance, can one really understand the wide divergencebetween the theory and practice of federalism in the USSR. 7These words echo down the years. The immediate purpose of federalism wastwofold: ‘first, to prevent further separation and, second, to entice thealready seceded border areas back into the Russian state’. 8 And once again