Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 29purposes in the same company as authentic established liberal democraticfederations like the United States of America (USA) or Switzerland. This,however, is precisely what one leading scholar of federalism, William Riker,did during the Cold War years. Determined to promote the study of comparativefederalism as a genuine objective political science inquiry in theearly 1960s, Riker included the USSR in his seminal work and gave a conspicuousnod in its direction in an oft-quoted observation which contestedthe claim that ‘federal forms are adopted as a device to guarantee freedom’and railed against the numerous writers on the subject who had committed‘this ideological fallacy’. 12 He believed that this falsehood derived from themistaken assumption that confused the ‘guarantee of provincial autonomy’in federation with ‘the notion of a free society’ when it was perfectly possibleto ‘convert the government into a dictatorship’. 13 As we will see later in thechapter, this assertion was itself erroneous.In that same era another prominent scholar of federalism, Carl Friedrich,adopted a similar approach to the USSR, claiming that just because ‘theformal federalism of the government structure is superseded and transcendedby the integrating force of the CPSU … does not mean, as is often asserted,that the federal system has no significance in the Soviet Union’. 14 His distinctionbetween the form of the Soviet federal state structure and the substantivereality of Communist Party dominance implied that the structuralfeatures should not be dismissed as wholly inconsequential. State institutionsplayed an important role that had practical consequences for the operationof the Soviet political system. Since ‘uniformity was not the rule, with somerepublics managing to secure more autonomy than others’, there existeddiffering ‘degrees of regional independence and significant decentralizationof authority’. 15 Indeed in the Brezhnev era (1964–82) Moscow ‘prioritizedconsiderations of social stability over economic or political reform’ andpursued a ‘federal compromise’ with the provincial federal leadership thatfurnished them with ‘a degree of power and patronage over their territoriesprobably far more than at any time in Soviet history’. 16 Nonetheless, mostscholars of federalism continued to treat the USSR as a special case, ananomaly, something that was in reality an empire not an authentic federation.And as an ‘imperial federation’ it was an impostor that could not beincluded in comparative federal studies.In summary, then, the nature, meaning and purpose(s) of the Soviet legacyof federalism in theory and practice are interrelated in symbiotic fashion.The legacy constituted an integral feature of the revolutionary tradition thatbestowed a historical legitimacy and an important ideological symbolism onthe USSR. But as an imperial federation it has also had enduring implicationsfor the Russian Federation, especially in terms of its centralizing propensities,its qualified liberal democratic credentials and its underlyingauthoritarian character. Let us turn now to the second legacy in our surveyand assess the impact of the disintegration of the Soviet Union on theemergence of the Russian Federation.