Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

46 Michael Burgessmany constituent units has served to subdue aggressive ethnic conflicts byconfining them to smaller arenas and converting them into competitive distributivebidding in national politics. 60 Issues surrounding the economic viabilityof some small constituent units remain, as they do with Russia’s eightyfive‘federal subjects’, but there is also an important countervailing argumentthat this strategy enables federal systems to protect the numerous ethnicminorities from the direct hegemony of the largest ethnic groups.These comparative perspectives of ethnic diversity and multi-nationalismin federations confirm that the ability of the Russian Federation successfullyto accommodate this particular federalism in federation will be determinedlargely by how far distinct ethnic minority identities are protected from primarysub-state nationalities and how far primary non-Russian sub-statenationalities, such as the Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostanand the poorer but culturally distinct republics of Buryatiya and Tyva, canreconcile their autonomy drives with the limits set by the federal constitution. 614 Asymmetrical federalismThe notion of asymmetry in federalism and federation is not a novel idea. Ithas been implicit in the mainstream literature in studies of individual federations,such as Canada, Belgium, Germany and India, as well as in comparativesurveys of federalism and federation for many years. References tothe differential status and rights among the constituent units of federationsand between them individually and the federation as a whole have appearedsporadically in this literature without attracting much scholarly attention, letalone controversy. 62 In the context of the Russian Federation, however, itsdramatic appearance from the chaotic circumstances of the early years of theYeltsin–Gorbachev rivalry has given it a bad name. From the standpoint ofthose, like President Putin, whose principal concern is to ensure that Russiadoes not suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union, asymmetrical federalismmust not be encouraged. Indeed, in many cases it must be rescinded andsymmetry restored.The problem with asymmetrical federalism in Russia is that it is largelythe by-product of Yeltsin’s famous clarion call to the republics and regions totake as much sovereignty as they wanted. Consequently it has become associatedin the minds of many Russians with the transition context – a periodof chronic instability in which the territorial integrity of the state was threatened.The initial declarations of sovereignty in the USSR by Tatarstan andChechnya in June 1990 presaged the so-called ‘parade of sovereignties’ byunion republics, regions and autonomous republics that extracted a series ofbilateral treaties and agreements from Moscow, giving rise to ‘further asymmetriesin Russian federal relations as forty-six other regions demanded andachieved bilateral treaties and agreements for themselves by 1998’. 63Although never intended to violate the federal constitution, in practice manyof these treaties and agreements did openly contradict it so that by the time