Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 31Graham Smith summarized the circumstances that occasioned the demise ofthe USSR in a similar vein but with an added emphasis on ‘ethno-federalism’.He described the unfolding of the Soviet Union as ‘the geopolitics ofdefederation’:What provided the necessary conditions for federalism to emerge on tothe political agenda was the centre’s eventual acknowledgement thatsocio-economic reform could not be effectively implemented without civilsociety’s participation as catalyst in facilitating ‘reform from above’.Having disabled the state-censored society through the twin policies ofglasnost and democratization, the centre in effect purposely invited amultiethnic society to engage in the making of perestroika, withoutconsidering the likely implications of its actions. Consequently, the federalquestion became quickly bound up with ‘a revolution from below’ in whichthe ethno-regions came to shape the nature of the federal agenda. 18Both of these summaries share the conclusion that what happened was thepolitics of unintended consequences. The disintegration of the Soviet Unionand the emergence of the Russian Federation were an accidental by-productof Gorbachev’s reform communism. The mode of ‘reform from above’ providedthe constituent ethno-republics with the opportunity – the institutionalspace – to seize the political initiative and set the pace in ‘putting the issue offederation on to the reform agenda’. 19From the standpoint of political philosophy, ethics and political practice,Gorbachev openly repudiated what Richard Sakwa has called the ‘emancipatoryrevolutionism of Marxian socialism’ characteristic of the Sovietpast. 20 But in seeking to address the yawning chasm that had opened upbetween ‘the system’s core and operating ideologies’ by a ‘cleansing process’that would remove ‘the deformations and accretions of the operating ideologyto allow a return to the core ideas’, he took a calculated gamble. AsSakwa observed, Gorbachev’s own‘antirevolution’ was actually ‘integrative’,but ‘the cleansing process came into contradiction with his integrativeagenda, since integration in the event turned out to be something muchlarger than simply a return to core principles’. 21 In short, the intellectualbasis of Gorbachev’s reform communism was in tune with the modernizingpressures of the age but while the theoretical catharsis was long overdue itspractical implementation harboured serious dangers for the future of theSoviet Union that he did not anticipate. Indeed, he badly miscalculated byoverestimating the value and esteem in which the Union was held in thejudgement of its constituent parts.The lowering of the Soviet flag over the Kremlin for the last time occurredon Christmas Eve in 1991, but if we construe Soviet disintegration in termsof a process rather than a single date it began at least as early as June 1990when Russia formally decoupled itself from the USSR and made its historicdeclaration of sovereignty. This event inaugurated a remarkable period of