Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 35This conclusion has implications for the Russian Federation in the extentto which it has inherited any Soviet features, which serve to undermine orcontradict the basic principles and practices of liberal democracy. States withauthoritarian military governments or governments that use the coerciveforces of the state to restrict the basic rights and freedoms of its citizens,control the media and intimidate opposition critics cannot be considered asgenuine federations. In the mainstream literature on federal studies there hasnever been any doubt about these considerations. 29 There is admittedly ascholarly consensus about the doubtful credentials of ‘federal democracy’ insome federations, such as Malaysia, Mexico and Ethiopia, but this is a differentmatter. It is a world away from serious consideration of the USSR as agenuine federation. Where the Russian Federation presents scholars of federalismand federation with an awkward problem lies partly in its institutionaldesign but chiefly in the operation of the federation. The writtenconstitution entrenches the liberal democratic basis of the federationaccording to the recognized principles identified above but it must alsofunction in accordance with these principles.With these preliminary thoughts in mind, let us turn now to the four maincomparative perspectives that we intend to utilize in our survey of theRussian Federation.1 The federal bargainWe have already observed that Riker included the Soviet Union in his generalsurvey of comparative federalism. The bedrock of his thesis about theorigins and formation of federations resided in the notion of the ‘federalbargain’ whereby political elites willingly agreed to create a federal constitution.Riker also claimed that two preconditions were essential to federalstate building, namely, the promise of territorial expansion and the existenceof an external military threat. In his view the formation of the USSR in1922 – later formalized with the constitution of 1924 – was just as much theproduct of the two preconditions that he identified as essential to federalstate building as were to be found in the cases of the USA and WestGermany. He deemed the period 1922–4 to be akin to a process of constitution-buildingthat culminated in ‘the bribe of federalism to meet themilitary threat’. 30 And in acknowledging that many scholars refused toclassify the Soviet Union as a genuine federation, he simply dismissed thisas ‘the expression of American-Commonwealth mythology that federalismought to prevent tyranny’. Indeed, since the Soviet Union exhibited manyof the structural features of federation, the mere fact that it failed ‘to preventtyranny should not lead to casting it out of the class of federalisms.Rather it should lead to a re-evaluation of what federalism means andimplies.’ 31Given the ideological circumstances of the time, this conclusion about theUSSR was all the more perplexing. Intellectually he seems to have been