Asymmetric bilateral bargaining in the new Russian Federation: A path-dependence explanation

In this essay we identify economic and political factors that led both the federal centre and the regions in Russia first to open the process of federal bargaining and then to pursue it in the form of signing bilateral treaties, unique for each region. Many Russian politicians and most scholars of Russian politics view asymmetric bilateral bargaining as a dangerous institutional choice contributing to federal instability and potentially threatening the disintegration of Russia. We offer an alternative view. While the treaty-signing practices are actively maintained by Russian political elites, we argue that the genesis of asymmetric bilateral bargaining in Russia had a strong `path dependence' component. In particular, it was precipitated by the developments of the last period in evolution of the Soviet federalism.     

Putin's struggle for federalism: Structures,operation, and the commitment problem

This article provides an analysis of the institutional mechanisms that are required to ensure the effective functioning of federalism in Russian politics. A common contention in the literature on federalism is that, in addition to fundamental requirements such as the constitutionally defined division of powers between the federation and its constituent units, and the supremacy of the federal constitution, some ancillary structures are necessary. Of particular importance are institutions of inter-governmental co-operation, transparent means for the mobility of officials between the centre and the regions, and integrated systems of national parties. The functioning of these institutions must also reflect the culture and ethic of federalism. This article examines how well these three factors have been implemented in Russia in the course of Putin's reforms. It is shown that a preliminary network of such institutions has been created. However, their operational ethic, and in particular the lack of commitment to federal values, it is argued, could act as an impediment to the successful evolution of the federal state in Russia.     

Who has led Russia? Russian regional political elites, 1954 – 2006

Quantitative measures are used to compare the age, tenure, gender and change of political elites in 18 Russian regions from 1954 to 2006. The study finds more similarities than differences between regional elites from the Soviet era and from the post-Soviet Russian era. The Russian regional political elite since 1992 is actually older than the Soviet elite and resembles it quite closely in terms of years in office and turnover, comparing both the total time spans of the elites of each era and at 10-year intervals from 1956 through to 2006. Even in relation to differences by region and gender since 1992, there has been a re-emergence of a regional political establishment in a similar pattern to that of the Soviet era.     

Civil Society,the Economy,and Educational Assistance in Former Soviet Republics

Abstract

Liberal democracies throughout the world are committed to civil society in support of market economics and democratic politics. Through educational assistance programs, the U.S. government demonstrates this commitment by attempting to reinvigorate civil society in former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries in support of their economic and political reform efforts. Of particular interest are the Community Connections and Partners in Education programs conducted by the U.S. Department of State for interns from the former Soviet republics or now Eurasia, who participate in business and other professional internships in various locations in the U.S., including Northern Alabama.     

Environmentalism and Estonia's independence movement

The spirit of environmentalism generated some of the most memorable images of the eastern and central European independence movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1988, protesters formed a human chain around the Ignalina nuclear reactor in Lithuania.¹ That same year, thousands of Hungarians marched through downtown Budapest to rally against their government's prospective participation in the construction of a dam on the Danube River.² The environmental movements in the former eastern bloc marked the beginning of the end of Soviet era communism in Europe. However, many commentators have implied that environmental protest was a proxy for other, more politically explosive grievances.³ Environmentalism was decisive, it is argued, because it provided a release valve for pent‐up frustrations and repressed nationalistic ardor. Re‐examining the independence movement in Estonia, this article contends that environmentalism was not incidental to citizens’ larger aims. The specific, environmentally destructive activities people condemned embodied many of the features of the Soviet system that people despised generally. Resource‐intensive and pollution‐prone projects proposed by Moscow provoked a broadly conceived environmental revolt rather than environmental protest “in name only.” The environmentally related constituents of Estonia's independence movement included citizens’ opposition to pollution of the environment and waste of natural resources; perceived “mindlessness” of industrial policy in Estonia; the promise of new Russian‐speaking immigrants to work in environmentally unfriendly industries; and economic exploitation of natural resources in Estonia for the benefit of other Soviet republics, especially the Russian RSFSR.     

State and local finance in a command economy: the case of the soviet union

Two aspects of Western public finance, the economic theory of federalism and public choice theory, have insights that, if adopted in the Soviet Union, could help improve its resource allocation to permit economic growth, mitigate the problems it has with its minorities, and aid the transition away from a centralized, Communist-Party-dominated State and society. The economic reforms proposed by Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev are briefly summarized and criticized in the context of a summary discussion of governmental decisionmaking in the Soviet Union. Lessons are identified from the U.S. historical experience that suggest certain steps to improve local government as necessary preconditions for improving Soviet economic efficiency. These are free local elections, a free local press, an independent judiciary with real authority to protect the integrity of the press and local elections, real decentralization of political power to the regions, steps toward equalization of fiscal capacity among the regions, increased citizen mobility, and adoption of actions to provide incentives for Western investment in local government capital formation. This last precondition requires a convertible currency. (To achieve a convertable currency may require other economic and political changes that are beyond the scope of this paper.) Aspects of the paper rely on information publically available through mid-1989.     

Federalism and democratization in Russia

The scholarly literature on democratic transitions has largely ignored developments at the local level and the relationship between federalism and democracy. In this work I examine the development of federalism in Russia and I assess the impact of Russia's highly asymmetrical form of federalism on democratisation. The study shows that federalism far from promoting democracy has allowed authoritarianism to flourish in many of Russia's eighty nine regions and republics. Federalism and democratization in Russia exist in contradiction rather than harmony. In a vicious circle, authoritarianism at the centre has been nourished by authoritarianism in the region and vice versa. “Elective dictatorships” and “delegative democracies” are now well entrenched in many republics, and mini-presidential systems are firmly established in a majority of the regions.     

The Rise and Fall of Ethnoterritorial Federalism: A Comparison of the Soviet Union (Russia), China,and India

The early Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and independent India inherited vast territories and multi-ethnic populations from the preceding empires. Their maintenance was a political and administrative challenge. The Soviet Union devised an archetype of ethnoterritorial federalism, in which nationality groups were granted their own administrative territories and subnational governments. The PRC and India imitated this system selectively, aware of its dangerous centrifugal tendency. The collapse of the Soviet Union discredited ethnoterritorial federalism, but none of the three countries has since devised a new system of multinational integration to replace it.     

Things Can Only Get Better? Changing Views of the Past,Present and Future in the Former Soviet Union

Previous research has reported substantial levels of nostalgia for the Soviet era among citizens of some of the independent republics that emerged from its collapse. We report new analyses from eight former Soviet republics, and from two surveys, in 2001 and 2010, comparing attitudes to government in the Soviet period and at the time of the surveys, as well as expectations for the future. Everywhere, views of the past have become less positive and those of the present more positive. However, both the views in each survey and the change between each of them vary among countries and socio-demographic groups.     

Ethnofederalism and ethnonationalism in the separatist politics of chechnya and tatarstan: sources or resources?

Common explanations of the recent war in Chechnya add up to an astonishingly overdetermined picture. The conflict between Russia's central government and its separatist ethnic autonomy was blamed on several grand factors: oil interests, resurgent Islam, imperial collapse, international terrorism, organized crime. Superficially, Chechnya shares most of these features with Tatarstan — another defiant republic of the Russian Federation which has oil, notorious gangsters, and a native population of Islamic heritage. A more detailed account shows, however, that the two state entities have little in common except the Soviet-made institutional framework. Tatarstan is a rare example of an ethnically non-Russian republic within the very urban industrial core of the former USSR, while Chechnya was patently peripheral. Differences in historical legacies and present-day social compositions conditioned very different outcomes of multifaceted political struggles that accompanied the demise of Soviet empire. In Tatarstan, local ethnically-colored nomenklatura exploited the chaotic transition to claim property rights over the local economy. The new rhetoric of national revival which the nationally-minded wing of Tatar intelligentsia advanced during Gorbachev's relaxation of censorship, was used by the Tatar nomenklatura to justify its struggle for economic property rights and exclusive political jurisdiction in its territory. By contrast, the Communist patronage network which ruled Chechnya until 1991 was too dependent on the central government for subsidies and coercive resources to follow the Tatarstan example. In the aftermath of August 1991 hardliner coup, when the Chechen apparatchiks misplaced their bets in Moscow's politics and momentarily lost support of the central government, they were swept away by the social movement of rural masses and urban marginal intellectuals. In its turn revolution, the only such outcome among the republics of the Russian Federation (but not the USSR), created an inherently unstable regime in Chechnya which could legitimate itself only with the idea of national independence and, once Moscow attempted to destabilize it, through the patriotic war.     

Russia's Post-Orange Revolution Strategies to Increase its Influence in Former Soviet Republics: Public Diplomacy po russkii

The role of public diplomacy in Russian foreign policy has grown in recent years. There are two distinctive strands of Russian public diplomacy: one directed mainly towards Western states, and one towards the former Soviet republics. Despite the rhetoric of mutual interests and high respect for state sovereignty, the post-Soviet strand of Russian public diplomacy has more in common with the Soviet practice of ‘active measures’ than with the soft power of attraction commonly connected with public diplomacy. Russia's current policy runs the risk of eating away the soft power potential that Russia still enjoys in many post-Soviet states.     

The Soviet origin of Russian chauvinism: Voices from below

The fledgling democracy of Russia is facing many challenges. Perhaps the most dangerous of all is the rise of an aggressive chauvinistic nationalism. Initially, political analysts regarded it as a “recent” phenomenon which was filling in the ideological vacuum left by communism. As time went on, however, scholars began to grasp its deep historical roots and investigate its ideological evolution during the Soviet period. In this process, they tended to focus on the “legitimate” domains of the Soviet system – such as the official press, the literary field of socialist realism, and so on – in order to investigate how “the Russian idea” overtly coexisted or even covertly prospered within the boundaries of officially sanctioned ideology. The main goal of this paper is to bring a new dimension to our understanding of contemporary Russian nationalism, by approaching the whole phenomenon from below. While focusing on the Soviet period, this paper traces the ideological evolution of Slavophiles and their selective degeneration into chauvinism at the social level. In particular, it analyzes the underground ideological field of samizdat – uncensored illicit publications – where Slavophiles played a significant role. In this way, we can hear the “unfiltered” voices of rising Russian nationalists during the Soviet era.     

Budgetary politics in the Russian federation:(1) the case: of sakha (yakutia)

This article traces the evolution of center-periphery relations between the Russian federal government and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) using an institutional framework. During each of three stages the author identifies a distinct set of institutional parameters that, to varying degrees, determined the powers of federal and regional institutions. Each stage is also identified with a unique central institutional conflict that helped shape the rules of the political games played during that period. From this perspective, institutional change is seen as a major determinant of Russian center-periphery relations. The article concludes that Sakha has had remarkable success in extracting budgetary concessions from the federal government. However, Sakha has been unable to force the federal government to implement all the promises it has made.

Nonetheless, the concessions that Sakha and others have received are significant, and prompt the conclusion that Russia has become a federal state. However, Russia is far from an equal federation.     

Russian banks’ profit strategies: the evidence from various types of banks

This paper offers an analysis of profit strategies pursued by Russian banks depending on their ownership type, including federal state banks, banks of mixed ownership, banks connected to enterprises producing for the final consumers, and regional pocket banks owned by one particular business group or enterprise. The paper outlines a set of factors that capture a range of potential hindrances on the way to banks’ involvement in Russian economy. It traces how the characteristics of the state regulation and peculiarities of the economic sectors affect the proliferation of certain type of banks—pocket banks—at the expense of others. It looks into how the various types of banks function under the given set of political and economic constraints, and how these constraints shape the banking system in Russia and its relationships with the enterprises and sectors.     

Developments in Indian Federalism: 2005–2007

Abstract

The subject matter of this paper, in general, is federalism in India. Three recent instances of the impact of Article 356—the ‘Emergency Provisions’—are analyzed to study two questions. How is federalism affected when different political parties are in power in the States and at the federal level, and does the current coalition government's experience help or hinder federalism? As to the first question, the two States of Jharkhand and Bihar, with particular emphasis on the latter, in the aftermath of the 2005 elections are examined. In both cases, it was blatant federal intervention that led to the dismissal of the duly elected governments in these States solely on political considerations and the advice of the Governors who were appointed by the federal government. The third is the case of the State of Uttar Pradesh where in 2006–2007 an attempted use of this Article was thwarted by the Election Commission. As to the second question, the use or the very threat of using Article 356 to dismiss duly elected State governments under the pressure of coalition partners at the Centre does not augur well for constitutional government or coalitions, and certainly not for federalism. In any case, Indian federalism lives up to the moniker as pointed out by C. H. Alexandrovictz that it is sue generis.     

“Socialist in content,national in form:” the making of Soviet national art and the case of Buryatia

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia.     

Divergence and dispersion in the Russian economy

While post-war economic development In market economies was characterised by geographical concentration of economic activity, this was not the case in the Soviet Union. Soviet economic development resulted in a highly dispersed economic landscape with mono-industrial towns scattered around the country. One plausible reason for this was low perceived transport costs as seen by Soviet planners. Another reason was that political and not only economic motives governed industrial location (Maurseth, 2001a). In addition to the sheer size of the country, these factors made the Soviet Union one of the most transport-intensive economies in the world. The post-Soviet Russian economic geography faces Russia with important challenges. Production, population and employment patterns are likely to change dramatically. There are at least four reasons for this hypothesis. The first is structural change in the Russian economy. Production patterns in Russia were highly distorted. In the future industrial production, and in particular heavy industry, will represent a smaller share of total production while consumer industry and services will probably experience relatively higher growth rates. The second reason to expect a changing economic geography is that transport costs are likely to increase. While the Soviet Union implicitly subsidised transport heavily, Russia now faces important challenges due to increasing transport prices. The third reason for expecting change is population changes. Recently, migration from the climatically least hospitable areas has been growing. In the future, these trends are likely to continue. Fourth, and partly as a consequence of the above-mentioned factors, market access will probably become more important for location of Russian industry. The Russian economic landscape is therefore likely to become more concentrated in the years to come.     

Turkey and Russia in a shifting global order: cooperation,conflict and asymmetric interdependence in a turbulent region

The current global political economy is characterised by the intensifying economic interaction of BRICS and ‘near BRICS’ economies, with emerging powers increasing their influence in neighbouring regions. The growing partnership between Turkey and Russia constitutes a useful case study for examining this transformation, in which Western supremacy and US hegemony are under increasing challenge. Turkish–Russian relations shed light on broader themes in global political economy. First, significant economic interdependence may be generated among states with different political outlooks, in the form of loose regional integration schemes driven by bilateral relations between key states and supporting private actors or interests. Second, growing economic interdependence may coexist with continued political conflict and geopolitical rivalry, as indicated by the Syrian and Ukrainian crises. An important strategy that emerges is the tendency to compartmentalise economic issues and geopolitical rivalries in order to avoid negative spill-over effects. This facilitates the coexistence of extensive competition with deepening cooperation, as reflected in relations in the field of energy.     

Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.     

Opening the black box: an analysis of the Russian economy

The article develops a simple framework for a discussion of the structure of property rights in the Russian economy. The framework suggests how barter and enterprise restructuring can be evaluated simultaneously with political motivation. Using the notion of politicians with inefficient control over the private sector, it also assesses the recent virtual economy hypothesis. It emphasizes the importance of incentives that were carried over from the Soviet era, which, it is suggested, must be duly considered while analyzing parametric changes in the Russian economy. This point is supported with the help of two examples at the end of the paper.