Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

50 Michael Burgessmodified version of the old centralized autocratic Soviet rule or represent anew ‘liberal-authoritarian’ federal model further from the USSR but closerto Malaysia. From the standpoint of what Bermeo calls ‘the grim reviews offederalism in post-communist states’, it is at least clear that we must be verycareful when we include countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia andCzechoslovakia in any surveys of comparative federalism and federation. 69The implications of failed federations in post-communist states for genuineliberal democratic federations are extremely limited, if not wholly irrelevant.As Bermeo remarks, ‘in each of the post-communist cases, failed federalismwas the legacy of imposed rule and of a past shaped by a dictatorial party’.She added that ‘there are sound reasons to expect that an imposed federalsystem would be unlikely to last’. 70 And if the claim made by Valerie Buncethat ‘territorially concentrated minorities in federal systems were the onlyminorities that challenged state boundaries in the new regimes of post-communistEastern Europe’ is empirically valid, it has no necessary implicationsfor federation per se. 71 It is important to be clear about this. Federations areliberal democratic federal states – not dictatorships – and they are formedfor a variety of purposes that can be distilled as combining ‘unity anddiversity’ in many different forms. Federation qua federation, then, did notitself create the national entities in the East European states; they alreadyexisted and so-called ‘ethno-territorial’ units were deliberately organizedalong federal lines. This merely underlines the point that federations are notalways appropriate and are certainly not panaceas for every political problemnor can we always prevent them from being used for illiberal purposes.But communist federations and military federations are essentially a contradictionin terms. Any serious comparative survey of the Russian Federationtherefore compels us to confront the simple fact of the absence of a liberaldemocratic culture in Russia. As the Putin era indicates, rebuilding theRussian Federation will be an extremely difficult and dangerous balancingact. But one major advantage of the comparative approach is that it canexpose federal facades for what they really are: impostors.Notes1 A. H. Birch, ‘Approaches to the study of federalism’, Political Studies, Vol. XIV(I), 1966, p. 3.2 N. Bermeo, ‘The import of institutions: a new look at federalism’, Journal ofDemocracy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2002, p. 98.3 ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1977’, Chapter 8, ‘The USSR – a federalstate’, in S. E. Finer (ed.), Five Constitutions: Contrasts and Comparisons,Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 165. The Stalin Constitution, 1936described it in Article 13 as ‘a federal state, formed on the basis of a voluntaryunion of the…Soviet Socialist Republics enjoying equal rights’, ‘Union of SovietSocialist Republics, 1936’, in Finer, p. 120.4 See M. W. Graham, New Governments of Eastern Europe, New York: Henry Holtand Company, 1927, pp. 594–95.