Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

30 Michael BurgessThe legacy of Soviet disintegration and the resurgence of RussiaThis section of the chapter claims that the way the USSR collapsed in 1991 –the sudden and dramatic manner of its disintegration – had a direct impacton the formation and subsequent evolution of the Russian Federation. Thechaos out of which the new federal state emerged in the years between 1990and 1993 – the context of the transition – had important practical implicationsboth for the Russian state qua state and for the kind of federation thatit became. Consequently the period is characterized by two separate sets ofevents that are closely intertwined: the formal demise of the USSR and theresurgence of Russia. As we will see later, the relationship between these twosets of events has also had significant implications for the RussianFederation in comparative perspective.The abrupt collapse of the USSR in 1991 continues to excite disputesand arouse controversies about how and why it occurred when it did.There exists a vast literature on these intimately interrelated argumentswith many different competing explanations and I do not intend torehearse them here. Instead we will engage with this literature only to theextent that it sheds light upon the argument advanced here. Most diagnoses,however, acknowledge with varying degrees of significance theemergence of reform communism that began in the mid-1980s, underMikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, as the principal source of change thatserved unintentionally to weaken the central institutional support systemof the union to the point where it could no longer sustain the fundamentalfunctions and policy priorities of a vast empire. Two summariesthat succinctly encapsulate this broad generalization will be utilized here.Filippov et al. point to the impact of processes of liberalization anddemocratization that ‘fundamentally altered federal arrangements that hadprevailed for seventy years’:The initial revision of statutory and constitutional arrangements initiatedby Gorbachev upset the institutional status quo by shifting thearena of bargaining from within the Communist Party to previouslyunused or untested constitutional political structures. Those structures,whether good or bad as venues for bargaining, were not the institutionsthat either conferred legitimacy on policy or possessed legitimacy intheir own right. Absent a set of common beliefs as to what institutionswould coordinate or direct action within the union, the door was thenopen to a global renegotiation that not only encompassed the prerogativesof the union’s constituent parts, but also the institutions thatwould link those parts to each other and to the centre. That, in combinationwith the authority and strategic position of those given formalvoice by a partially constructed federalism that had earlier been designedto render a heterogeneous empire a single state, was the fundamentalcause of the USSR’s dissolution. 17