Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

28 Michael Burgessthese remarks are prophetic: they are imperatives that could conceivablyrefer to the Russia of the period 1991–3.The nature of the Soviet legacy of federalism is one that was determinedby its original purpose, namely, to rescue the Russian state from the imminentthreat of complete disintegration wrought by Lenin’s post-revolutionarysupport for national self-determination. Federalism was both salvation andsolution, but it was initially only a short-term political strategy – a temporaryexpedient – designed to achieve immediate objectives. It was neverintended that it should become an integral structural and institutional featureof any future Soviet state. Indeed, it had been categorically rejected byMarx, Engels and Lenin who collectively construed it as nothing more thana mere survival of feudal particularism. The temporary, however, becamepermanent because of the necessity to elevate the constitutional deceptionto a political myth and then to perpetuate it as a powerful ideologicalsymbol of ‘the free self-determination of nations’ in a voluntary union ofequal constituent republics. In this way the form took priority over thesubstance.In these peculiar circumstances it is small wonder that political scientistsin general and scholars of federalism in particular should view the Sovietlegacy of federalism with both consistent scepticism and not a little intellectualdisdain. It is easy to pour scorn on something that is so transparently afake. A quick glance at the last Soviet Constitution of 1977 confirms this.Article 70 mentioned above is severely qualified by Article 3 which confirmsthe organizational basis of the Soviet state to be ‘the principle of democraticcentralism’ while Article 6 alludes to the ‘leading and guiding force of Sovietsociety and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations andpublic organizations’ to be the Communist Party, the CPSU. If we add tothese two articles that which deals with the role of the Supreme Soviet(Article 108), it is obvious that ‘the highest body of state authority’ that was‘empowered to deal with all matters within the jurisdiction of the Union’succeeded in fusing the legislative, executive and judicial branches of governmentrather than separating them. 9 This resulted in the most accuratedescription of the USSR as ‘a multi-national unitary state’. 10But if it is clear that the USSR was not a federal state in the sense thatfederation is conventionally understood in the West, it is also true, asFilippov and others noted, that ‘the mechanisms by which the union wassustained were not (at least following Stalin’s death) wholly coercive and thefederal aspects of its political processes were not entirely orthogonal to thoseof its democratic counterparts’. 11 This view of the USSR represents a usefulcorrective interpretation to the extent that it acknowledges a minimal degreeof multi-level bargaining indicative of competing vested interests within therestrictive centralized Soviet polity, but it also compels scholars of federalismto reflect upon a particular aspect of this federal legacy. The federal credentialsof the USSR have always been regarded as a sham and prima facie wewould not expect such scholars to place the Soviet Union for comparative