Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 49prescriptive predisposition that reflects particular federal values, beliefs andinterests that are, in turn, linked to fundamental issues of legitimacy, participationand overall political stability. The Russian experience of asymmetricalfederalism therefore is in many respects both unusual and unfortunatealthough it certainly raises questions about the limits of asymmetry in federations.Clearly too much asymmetry could provoke serious conflicts andtensions in some federations and even encourage secession movements inothers. Each case must be judged according to its own historical specificities,the constellation of cleavage patterns that give each its character and thepeculiar circumstances that surrounded each case of federal state formation.It is now time to conclude the chapter with a summary of the RussianFederation in comparative perspective.Conclusion: between a rock and a hard placeThis chapter has looked at the Russian Federation from the standpoint offour principal comparative perspectives. These are the federal bargain, historicallegacies of centralization, ethnic diversity and multi-nationalism andasymmetrical federalism, and each of these has been firmly located in thespecific context of the Soviet legacy of federalism in theory and practice andthe legacy of Soviet disintegration and the resurgence of Russia.Our comparative survey has demonstrated that the Russian federalism –its socio-economic and cultural-ideological dimensions – in the RussianFederation sits comfortably in many respects with other liberal democraticfederations on some perspectives, such as centralization and ethno-nationalism,but that it does not sit at all easily with the Rikerian notion of the federalbargain nor with the underlying normative assumptions characteristic ofcontemporary trends in asymmetrical federalism. The two legacies identifiedin our survey – what Stoner-Weiss has called ‘dual transitions’ –fit a modifiedpath dependency argument that suggests they have effectively closed offsome possible future scenarios and limited the likely Russian federal trajectoryto what is currently dubbed a ‘managed democracy’. Between a rockand a hard place, President Putin is himself a legacy of these legacies, cast inthe invidious role of the villain – for some critics – trying desperately to holdthe federation together by increasingly coercive and undemocratic means,however temporary they might be. Sakwa has argued that Putin’s overridingaim was to ‘make the federal system more structured, impartial, coherentand efficient’ and that he was caught between the opposing models ofreconstitution and reconcentration. The former is a law-based federal modelwhile the latter is ‘a more authoritarian attempt to impose authority overrecalcitrant social actors in which it is the regime that is consolidated ratherthan the constitutional state’. 68These concluding reflections do not suggest that we should dismiss theRussian Federation as yet another post-communist failed federation. It is toosoon to tell whether the contemporary trends in Russia will revert to a