State consolidation in Russia

Many of us in the west have been highly critical of President Vladimir Putin's efforts to attenuate the federal character of Russia's political system. It appears to us that he is retrenching on the democratic reforms of the 1990s and reverting to the old autocratic ways of his communist and tsarist predecessors. However, Fiona Hill, writing for Transitions Online, puts a different spin on this in "Putin's Federal Dilemmas." Putin's actions must be seen in the context of the corruption of the 1990s and the more recent terrorist attacks, culminating in last year's horrific bloodbath in Beslan.

Putin and other Kremlin officials saw all this as a product of the 1990s. For them, the 1990s were not years of emerging political pluralism—as they are generally viewed in the West—but a decade of chaos. From their perspective, regional leaders took President Boris Yeltsin’s famous exhortation to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow” as a signal to create their own fiefdoms. These leaders defied Moscow, produced a myriad of new regional regulations, and both reduced and diverted revenue flows away from the federal government and into their own coffers. Electoral politics in the regions became irremediably corrupt as local mafias and business interests emerged as the primary backers of gubernatorial candidates and their campaigns. They called the shots in elections, not local publics, and not even Moscow.

From Putin’s point of view, decentralization under Yeltsin served to fragment the Federation and encouraged the kind of moves toward regional separatism that Chechnya embodied in its worst form. In his opinion, the self-interest of corrupt local elites, in Chechnya and elsewhere, came to replace the purported principles of self-determination that had led to the creation of Russia’s federal system in the Soviet period. Putin and those around him became increasingly frustrated at the growth of regional problems and disparities and at their inability to exert control over key parts of the Federation. As a result, the Kremlin became convinced that restoring Moscow’s firm grip over Russia’s regions was necessary to preserve national unity and public security from the twin threats of secessionism and terrorism. This conviction was bolstered by the tragedy of Beslan and the inability of local authorities to either prevent or respond to the attack.

Hill's observations should be taken as a reminder that effective constitutional democracy and federalism require a consolidated state apparatus as a necessary precondition. Where the state's public authority has been hijacked by localized private concentrations of power, the divinely appointed task of doing public justice will inevitably be compromised. Such a condition should not be confused with genuine federalism. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has argued in the past that some form of autocratic rule will likely be necessary at the top while the Russian people are learning democracy at the local levels. I can't say what Solzhenitsyn thinks of Putin, but the latter's actions may confirm his prediction.