Russia's post-federalism

The discussions on the end of the conflict in Ukraine reopen the debate on the Russian path to Russian federalism and the many aspirations of the peoples of the immense Eurasian territory. An issue that does not only concern ‘ethnic minorities’, but the very structure of an imperial state,

Moscow (AsiaNews) - While initiatives are being taken by America and Europe, in a varied order, to somehow resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the interest of many commentators is increasingly directed towards the future of the two countries.

If for Ukraine the question is obviously that of plans for the reconstruction of cities devastated by fighting and bombing, in Russia people are wondering what the future of ‘federalism’ will be, in an evident tension between the totalitarian and repressive regime of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin caste, and the many aspirations of the peoples of the immense Eurasian territory, which have re-exploded precisely in reference to the ‘Ukrainian question’.

In The Moscow Times, Vadim Štepa, editor-in-chief of the website Region.Expert, writes about this issue in an article entitled ‘Federation in Reverse’, trying to understand the opinions of Russian opponents abroad, the majority of whom talk about ‘restoring federalism in Russia’. What does this ideal really mean? The post-Soviet state was formally inaugurated by the Federal Agreement of early 1992, then confirmed by the 1993 constitution signed by President Boris Yeltsin and still formally in force, albeit with profound ‘sovereignist’ modifications imposed by Putin in 2020.

According to Stepa's comment, Yeltsin's definition of ‘federation’ ‘had very little to do with the worldwide practice of federal states’. Comparing Russia with the USA, Canada, Germany or Australia, it can be seen that these countries are based on the autonomous administration of the regions, a principle that Yeltsin had tried to inspire with his famous phrase in 1990, ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’, which was then radically denied by Putin's ‘vertical of power’.

In reality, Mikhail Gorbachev had also made an attempt, proposing the Union Agreement in 1991 to save Soviet history in a new form, which then failed due to the KGB coup in August of that year.

What Russia has never managed to achieve, the political scientist insists, is ‘the principle of subsidiarity between peoples and territories’, when regional parliaments, freely elected, delegate ‘from the bottom up’ issues that affect all federal subjects. This would be the principle with which the European Union has tried, with a thousand contradictions, to build, and the question is becoming increasingly topical for the United States as well.

The EU also defined itself in a federal and subsidiary sense in 1992, while Russia rejected these principles under Yeltsin, with the parliamentary revolts in 1993 and the elections of 1996, the beginning of the centralist and sovereignist restoration with the communists of Gennady Zyuganov.

Štepa reiterates that ‘the federation must be determined by its subjects, and not the other way around’, recalling that in the initial project the republics, regions and autonomous districts were allowed to freely decide whether to leave the Federation, as Mintimer Šaymiev's Tatarstan attempted to do, but was then brought back to ‘Kremlin reasons’.

The Russian Federation today is based on the ‘asymmetry’ not only of centralism, but also of the prevalence of the former Soviet republics that have many more powers and rights than the many other regions established over the course of these thirty years, despite the fact that some of these are more populous and developed than many of the former.

The issue therefore does not only concern the ‘ethnic minorities’, who also claim their own identity and independence in the diaspora circles abroad, but it is specifically in the structure of an imperial type of state that suffocates the development of its many territorial realities.

Now even the use of the title ‘president’ of the republics or ‘governor’ of the regions is forbidden, replaced by the anonymous term glava, ‘head’, who in fact is not even elected, but directly appointed by the Kremlin, or in any case piloted in farcical elections. The push towards ‘nationalism’ or ‘regionalism’ is repressed as a threat of ‘disintegration of the federal state’, when in reality it is the most important question to be resolved for the Russia of the future, which, however much it tries to unite in wars (Metropolitan Tikhon of Crimea has recently spoken of the reconquest of Constantinople), will have to come to terms with the diversity of its many ethnic, cultural and economic identities.