Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

32 Michael Burgessintensive constitutional and legal change that elevated sixteen ethnicallydefined autonomous soviet socialist republics (ASSRs) and four autonomousoblasts (AOs) to the status of constituent republics of what itself was incomposition a federation, bringing the total number of ‘ethnic republics’ inRussia to twenty. The domino effect continued up until the summer of 1992when the Checheno-Ingush Republic was split into Chechen and IngushRepublics, thus ensuring that, in Cameron Ross’s words, ‘the Soviet Union’shybrid ethno-territorial principle of federation was bequeathed to Russia’. 22Meanwhile Gorbachev had been making last-ditch efforts to rescue theSoviet Union by cobbling together a new Union Treaty based upon asymmetricalrelations with the three Baltic Republics – Latvia, Lithuania andEstonia – Georgia, Moldova and Armenia and varying degrees of federalrelations with the rest of the imperial federation. The resulting nationwidereferendum in March 1991 ended not with a triumphant bang but with ahollow whimper as six of the fifteen constituent Soviet republics simplyrefused to participate. A subsequent deal between Gorbachev and Yeltsinproduced the so-called 9+1 agreement (referring to the leaders of the ninerepublics that did participate in the March 1991 referendum) in April butwork on its completion was brought to a dramatic halt by the abortive coupof August 1991 that presaged the termination of the USSR in December.The events and developments that occurred during the period 1990-3 inRussia and the USSR were apocalyptic. Together they represented twooverlapping but distinct historical processes that occurred simultaneouslyand were tantamount to the chaos of destruction and reconstruction. Withthe disappearance of the Soviet Union – the unravelling of its empire intoindependent sovereign states – a resurgent Russia stepped into the vacuumcreated by imperial decentralization. Indeed, in many ways a large part ofwhat we call the Soviet legacy was the resurgence of Russia. And thesepeculiar circumstances had important implications both for the Russian stateand for the kind of federation that it became. In the first place it was obviousthat what happened to the Soviet Union could just as conceivably happen toRussia. The collapse of communist party control allowed ethno-territorialityto become the driving force of Soviet imperial disintegration and this poseda similar threat to the territorial integrity of the new Russian state, especiallyin view of the territorial distribution of its own nationalities. Yeltsin, who in1990 had actively encouraged Russia’s autonomous republics to ‘take asmuch sovereignty as they could swallow’, found himself signing the FederalTreaty of March 1992, conceding greater powers to the republics andregions, in an attempt to rescue Russia from the same Soviet fate. Since theseyears were also characterized by Yeltsin’s power struggle with Gorbachevfollowed by his fierce battle with the Russian parliament, it is easy toappreciate why it was also a period of weak central power that providedmany opportunities for the republics to reassert their demands for nationalautonomy. The so-called ‘parade of sovereignties’ led to ‘contract federalism’and ‘the war of laws and sovereignties’ that pushed the concept of