Paul Goble
Staunton, November 22 – Russia’s regional leaders today increasingly occupy a niche and play a role like “the Soviet prefects” US scholar Jerry Hough described in that they form part of a system in which a controlling state bureaucracy and a centralized party nonetheless allows for the development of local political machines, according to a St. Petersburg scholar.
In a September lecture posted online last week, Vladimir Gelman, a professor of political science and sociology at the European University in the northern capital, says that the current arrangements reflect a restoration in many but not all respects of those of Soviet regional leaders 30 to 40 years (www.polit.ru/lectures/2010/11/17/avtoritarism.html).
And he argues that what is worrisome in this situation is that even if democracy should by some miracle come to the Russian political system at the national level, that development would have little impact on these sub-national authoritarian systems absent specific policies from the center and popular mobilization from below.
Gelman notes that the regional political development of Russia has passed through two stages since the end of the Soviet period. In the 1990s, he notes, there was “spontaneous decentralization” and the appearance of a great “diversification” of organizational arrangements put in place by regional elites.
But after 2000, the year Vladimir Putin came to power, things changed “in the opposite direction.” There was “a recentralization of the state, financial, economic and administrative.” And regional and city administration were “ever more forced to follow those rules which were imposed on them from the center.”
Despite that, however, they were usually able to preserve their “political monopoly” in the regions and cities, Gelman continues, “even though their autonomy from the federal Center has been reduced.” As US specialist Edward Gibson has observed about Latin American systems, Russian regional and city heads were able to do so because “the control of borders.”
That is, these heads were able to treat the territories entrusted to them as “their personal domains,” forcing anyone who wants to get involved there to go through them and thus profiting as a result. And because of this and also the patrimonial nature of the political system, they are able to build political machines that work to keep themselves in power.
“Theoretically,” Gelman argues, there are two ways this could change. One would be a policy shift by Moscow which could decide not just to control the appointment of regional leaders but use “the most varied instruments – legal and force” to break up such machines. A second would involve political mobilization from below.
At the present time, neither of these things is on offer in Russia. The newly recentralized state apparatus and ruling United Russia Party are interested in maintaining these prefect-like institutions, and there is insufficient popular mobilization in most places to force a change from below.
In many ways, Gelman argues, this reflects a clear “historical continuity with the sub-national authoritarianism of the Soviet period,” a system of 30 to 35 years ago which was described by Hough as consisting of officials he called “the Soviet prefects,” officials who were appointed from above but built machines by controlling access to their fiefdoms.
“Of course,” the St. Petersburg scholar says, “here not everything is exactly as it was in Soviet times.” There is more intrigue connected with appointments and retirements. But “nevertheless, the most significant aspect [of both] is the non-competitive character of the regional and local political process” at least in terms of public politics.
This development has been assisted by the appearance of state corporatism with its branch-like system. That offers regional leaders the chance now, as in Soviet times, the perfect opportunity to “systematically dis-inform the federal powers, and the federal powers that be correspondingly cannot and very often do not want information about the real state of affairs.”
Gelman points out that it is important to remember that “the mechanism of control is only one aspect of the activity of ‘the power vertical.’” That set of institutions involves not only controlling the country but also and in many cases more importantly “the positive stimuli” that its members receive.
Put more simply, “in a country where the earning of rents is the main goal and chief content of state administration, it is very profitable to be attached to ‘the power vertical.’” And even more than in the late Soviet period, “negative stimuli” play only a secondary role compared to such “positive” enrichment.
“If we compare sub-national authoritarianism in Russia in the 1990s and in today’s Russia, then we see that these are two different stages” in political development, the first being a “serious disease of growth,” although one subject to cure, but the second being far more accurately described as “a chronic illness.”
Gelman concludes his argument by asking his listeners to imagine that “something supernatural has taken place in Russia and suddenly democratization at the country level takes place. For example … Putin leaves for another world or evil cyborgs kidnap him” and a real political struggle breaks out.
What would that mean as far as sub-national authoritarianism? “With a high degree of probability, in a significant part of Russian cities and regions, it would remain in its former condition,” something Gelman insists that does not point to a positive trajectory even if by some miracle the political situation of the country as a whole should change.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Window on Eurasia: ‘A Caucasus without Russians Means a Russia without the Caucasus,’ Moscow Commentator Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 22 – Unless something is done to reverse the flight of ethnic Russians from the republics of the North Caucasus, a commentator in one Moscow newspaper says, that region will ultimately be lost to Russia because “a Caucasus without ethnic Russians can mean only one thing: a Russia without the Caucasus.”
In Friday’s “Segodnya,” Aleksey Sidorenko argues that Russian outmigration from the region reflects the coming together of the impact of Soviet policy on the region, the failure of Russian government policy there, and the intensifying crisis of Russian national identity (segodnia.ru/index.php?spos=1&spor=1&rst=0&srch=&srchtp=0&pgid=2&cldday=&srv=segodnia.ru&partid=10&newsid=12932&snewsid=0&gallery_id=0&imgnum=1).
The 1917 revolution and the ensuing civil war “almost led to the final destruction of Russian statehood and the loss of the Caucasus, he begins. These events led to the disappearance of many of “the socio-cultural achievements” of earlier decades, and that loss was exacerbated by “the grandiose social experiment” which the Soviet authorities conducted in the region.
On the one hand, that experiment led to the destruction of the region’s “traditional” religious faiths, both Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, and the elimination of the Cossacks as a social stratum. And on the other, it involved the modernization of the region’s economy and of the cultures of the peoples there, Sidorenko says.
“The main role in this process belonged to Russians and Slavic specialists,” and initially the local people welcomed their assistance. But the repressions and deportations of Stalin’s times opened the way for local nationalists to “link responsibilities for these tragedies with the Russians – even though the Russians had been the main victim in numerical terms.”
After the death of Stalin, “national-cultural policy in the USSR was directed at the formation of a meta-national community of the Soviet people,” a construct based “on a single ideology, the principle of the unification of the social-political structure of ethnoses,” even though Moscow continued to recognize the ethnic communities as “subjects of culture.”
By the end of Soviet times, “the south of Russia has been transformed into a highly developed socio-cultural region,” with numerous universities, Academy of Sciences institutes and branches, and a massive group of highly trained local experts, not to mention nearly universal literacy among the population at large.
However, that was not enough to prevent the current crisis, Sidorenko says. “The crisis of socialist ideology at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, which formed the worldview basis of the systemic integrity of the meta-national community of the Soviet people and its culture, led to the segmentation of the post-Soviet cultural space.”
In the last two decades three different cultures co-exist in the North Caucasus: a revived traditional North Caucasus culture, surviving Soviet culture, and “contemporary mass Western culture.” Not surprisingly, this disrupted the earlier balance and “led to a universal crisis not only of Soviet identity,” Sidorenko says, “but of ethnic Russian identity as well.”
And this crisis has been intensified by the actions of the electronic media which have worked to “discredit everything that was connected with the Russian Empire and the USSR,” actions that not only changed the attitudes of many indigenous people but “deepened the crisis of Russian self-consciousness” by creating “an image of Russian culture as secondary thing.”
This identity crisis opened the way for the restoration of an “eastern, Islamicized mentality” among the local population, weakened the role of traditional Islam and thereby allowed for the penetration of “non-traditional politicized trends in Islam such as Wahhabism,” something that further damaged the situation.
In the past, ethnic Russians not only by their presence but also by the self-confidence their leading role in the state and in the North Caucasus generated were able both to serve as a cementing element in the region and, equally important, help block the spread of these “non-traditional” forces. But now that is changing and changing fast.
The rapid and continuing decline of the ethnic Russian presence there, the result of excess deaths over birth and “forced outmigration connected with the de-modernization of the North Caucasus, threats to security, and psychological discomfort,” alongside the lack of a Moscow policy to support them, is contributing to a disaster.
And still worse, Sidorenko says, Moscow is taking steps that are reducing the Russian presence where it matters most still further. Prior to the division of the Southern Federal District into two parts, ethnic Russians and other Slavic groups formed 15.3 million of the 23.1 million residents, some 66 percent.
But now, in the North Caucasus Federation District, the ethnic Russians number only 2.7 million of the region’s 9.1 million people there, a 30.1 percent share or less than half the fraction they formed in the earlier and larger Southern Federal District and one that is almost certain to cause even more ethnic Russians to leave.
Staunton, November 22 – Unless something is done to reverse the flight of ethnic Russians from the republics of the North Caucasus, a commentator in one Moscow newspaper says, that region will ultimately be lost to Russia because “a Caucasus without ethnic Russians can mean only one thing: a Russia without the Caucasus.”
In Friday’s “Segodnya,” Aleksey Sidorenko argues that Russian outmigration from the region reflects the coming together of the impact of Soviet policy on the region, the failure of Russian government policy there, and the intensifying crisis of Russian national identity (segodnia.ru/index.php?spos=1&spor=1&rst=0&srch=&srchtp=0&pgid=2&cldday=&srv=segodnia.ru&partid=10&newsid=12932&snewsid=0&gallery_id=0&imgnum=1).
The 1917 revolution and the ensuing civil war “almost led to the final destruction of Russian statehood and the loss of the Caucasus, he begins. These events led to the disappearance of many of “the socio-cultural achievements” of earlier decades, and that loss was exacerbated by “the grandiose social experiment” which the Soviet authorities conducted in the region.
On the one hand, that experiment led to the destruction of the region’s “traditional” religious faiths, both Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, and the elimination of the Cossacks as a social stratum. And on the other, it involved the modernization of the region’s economy and of the cultures of the peoples there, Sidorenko says.
“The main role in this process belonged to Russians and Slavic specialists,” and initially the local people welcomed their assistance. But the repressions and deportations of Stalin’s times opened the way for local nationalists to “link responsibilities for these tragedies with the Russians – even though the Russians had been the main victim in numerical terms.”
After the death of Stalin, “national-cultural policy in the USSR was directed at the formation of a meta-national community of the Soviet people,” a construct based “on a single ideology, the principle of the unification of the social-political structure of ethnoses,” even though Moscow continued to recognize the ethnic communities as “subjects of culture.”
By the end of Soviet times, “the south of Russia has been transformed into a highly developed socio-cultural region,” with numerous universities, Academy of Sciences institutes and branches, and a massive group of highly trained local experts, not to mention nearly universal literacy among the population at large.
However, that was not enough to prevent the current crisis, Sidorenko says. “The crisis of socialist ideology at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, which formed the worldview basis of the systemic integrity of the meta-national community of the Soviet people and its culture, led to the segmentation of the post-Soviet cultural space.”
In the last two decades three different cultures co-exist in the North Caucasus: a revived traditional North Caucasus culture, surviving Soviet culture, and “contemporary mass Western culture.” Not surprisingly, this disrupted the earlier balance and “led to a universal crisis not only of Soviet identity,” Sidorenko says, “but of ethnic Russian identity as well.”
And this crisis has been intensified by the actions of the electronic media which have worked to “discredit everything that was connected with the Russian Empire and the USSR,” actions that not only changed the attitudes of many indigenous people but “deepened the crisis of Russian self-consciousness” by creating “an image of Russian culture as secondary thing.”
This identity crisis opened the way for the restoration of an “eastern, Islamicized mentality” among the local population, weakened the role of traditional Islam and thereby allowed for the penetration of “non-traditional politicized trends in Islam such as Wahhabism,” something that further damaged the situation.
In the past, ethnic Russians not only by their presence but also by the self-confidence their leading role in the state and in the North Caucasus generated were able both to serve as a cementing element in the region and, equally important, help block the spread of these “non-traditional” forces. But now that is changing and changing fast.
The rapid and continuing decline of the ethnic Russian presence there, the result of excess deaths over birth and “forced outmigration connected with the de-modernization of the North Caucasus, threats to security, and psychological discomfort,” alongside the lack of a Moscow policy to support them, is contributing to a disaster.
And still worse, Sidorenko says, Moscow is taking steps that are reducing the Russian presence where it matters most still further. Prior to the division of the Southern Federal District into two parts, ethnic Russians and other Slavic groups formed 15.3 million of the 23.1 million residents, some 66 percent.
But now, in the North Caucasus Federation District, the ethnic Russians number only 2.7 million of the region’s 9.1 million people there, a 30.1 percent share or less than half the fraction they formed in the earlier and larger Southern Federal District and one that is almost certain to cause even more ethnic Russians to leave.
Window on Eurasia: ‘Don’t Russians Need All of Their Country?” Moscow Journalist Asks
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 22 – There are certain questions the mere posing of which often becomes more important than the answers anyone will give to them. Precisely such question was raised by a writer on a Moscow news portal at the end of last week who asked his readers to reflect on whether Russians in fact need all the space Russia now occupies.
That question is provoked, Kirill Govorov asks in KM.ru, by the plan the regional development ministry has come up with that calls for Moscow to focus its attention on 20 major urban agglomerations and largely neglect the rest of the country, an approach that will exacerbate existing regional differences (news.km.ru/nam_ne_nuzhno_vse_prostranstvo_r).
In fact, Govorov argues, the plan, if realized, will in a short time “convert almost all the territory of Russia into a vacant human desert,” something that he says is leading many in the expert community to denounce it as at variance with Russia’s interest in maintaining the territorial integrity of the country.
Some experts have gone so far as to argue that “the realization of this doubtful project will put the territorial integrity of [the Russian] state at risk,” an argument that has “nothing in common” with the typical alarmism of the media but rather is based on careful statistical analysis which suggests this new plan could make disintegrating trends “irreversible.”
Drawing on statistics from 2007 – the last pre-crisis year and a time when differences among the regions were less than now – the difference of GDP per capita between the richest and poorest regions was “almost 20 times,” and the poorer regions have been falling further behind for more than a decade.
By 2005, Govorov points out, roughly a dozen of the Federation’s 89 subjects provided “more than 50 percent of the GDP.” And the difference between these regions and the rest is rapidly becoming “the main social contradiction which is giving rise to political conflicts” and feeding in to the demographic problems the country has.
(As if to underline the KM.ru writer’s point, the Russian statistical agency today released figures showing that the rate of unemployment among the regions varies widely as well, with the rate of the regions with the highest unemployment being 45 times that of those with the lowest (www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=408368&cid=6).)
“In more than half of Russia’s regions, 47 of 89, there was an increase in the number of deaths in 2005,” and while “the excess of deaths over births for the country as a whole was 1.6 times” in that region, in 23 of the poorer regions, that figure was 2 to 2.8 times, a trend that is pushing them ever further behind.
For example, the KM.ru writer notes, the difference between the region with the highest life expectancy and the one with the lowest reached “almost 23 years in 2005,” and for men alone, this difference exceeded 25 years, “ranging from 46.4 years in the Koryak Autonomous District to 71.7 years in the Ingush Republic.”
Because of these regional differences, Russians are on the move: “Over the course of the last 15 years, more than 46 million – a third of the Russian population – have changed their place of residence in the hopes of a principle improvement [or at the very least] a stabilization of their situation.”
If current trends continue or if they are exacerbated by the new megalopolis plan, Govorov says, “the degradation of the overwhelming majority of cities and districts which are not federal or regional centers and megalopolises will continue,” with all the adverse social, economic, and political consequences that trend will entail.
Appended to Govorov’s article is a brief interview with Yury Krupnov, the chairman of the observers’ council of the Moscow Institute of Demography, Migration and Regional Development and a frequent commentator on the impact of the interaction of these forces on political life in the Russian Federation.
Krupnov suggested that the agglomeration approach “contradicts a different conceptional model” in which the entire country would benefit and appears to reflect the notion of some among the powers that be that betting on those urban centers that are already doing well and neglecting everyone else will give them “a bonus” in the form of more rapid development.
But even if that such a strategy were to work in the short term as the result of what might be called “competitive federalism,” he said, it would ultimately fail even in development terms and generate tensions between the haves and have nots that Moscow would find it far more difficult to respond to than the one it would confront with a more balanced approach.
Staunton, November 22 – There are certain questions the mere posing of which often becomes more important than the answers anyone will give to them. Precisely such question was raised by a writer on a Moscow news portal at the end of last week who asked his readers to reflect on whether Russians in fact need all the space Russia now occupies.
That question is provoked, Kirill Govorov asks in KM.ru, by the plan the regional development ministry has come up with that calls for Moscow to focus its attention on 20 major urban agglomerations and largely neglect the rest of the country, an approach that will exacerbate existing regional differences (news.km.ru/nam_ne_nuzhno_vse_prostranstvo_r).
In fact, Govorov argues, the plan, if realized, will in a short time “convert almost all the territory of Russia into a vacant human desert,” something that he says is leading many in the expert community to denounce it as at variance with Russia’s interest in maintaining the territorial integrity of the country.
Some experts have gone so far as to argue that “the realization of this doubtful project will put the territorial integrity of [the Russian] state at risk,” an argument that has “nothing in common” with the typical alarmism of the media but rather is based on careful statistical analysis which suggests this new plan could make disintegrating trends “irreversible.”
Drawing on statistics from 2007 – the last pre-crisis year and a time when differences among the regions were less than now – the difference of GDP per capita between the richest and poorest regions was “almost 20 times,” and the poorer regions have been falling further behind for more than a decade.
By 2005, Govorov points out, roughly a dozen of the Federation’s 89 subjects provided “more than 50 percent of the GDP.” And the difference between these regions and the rest is rapidly becoming “the main social contradiction which is giving rise to political conflicts” and feeding in to the demographic problems the country has.
(As if to underline the KM.ru writer’s point, the Russian statistical agency today released figures showing that the rate of unemployment among the regions varies widely as well, with the rate of the regions with the highest unemployment being 45 times that of those with the lowest (www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=408368&cid=6).)
“In more than half of Russia’s regions, 47 of 89, there was an increase in the number of deaths in 2005,” and while “the excess of deaths over births for the country as a whole was 1.6 times” in that region, in 23 of the poorer regions, that figure was 2 to 2.8 times, a trend that is pushing them ever further behind.
For example, the KM.ru writer notes, the difference between the region with the highest life expectancy and the one with the lowest reached “almost 23 years in 2005,” and for men alone, this difference exceeded 25 years, “ranging from 46.4 years in the Koryak Autonomous District to 71.7 years in the Ingush Republic.”
Because of these regional differences, Russians are on the move: “Over the course of the last 15 years, more than 46 million – a third of the Russian population – have changed their place of residence in the hopes of a principle improvement [or at the very least] a stabilization of their situation.”
If current trends continue or if they are exacerbated by the new megalopolis plan, Govorov says, “the degradation of the overwhelming majority of cities and districts which are not federal or regional centers and megalopolises will continue,” with all the adverse social, economic, and political consequences that trend will entail.
Appended to Govorov’s article is a brief interview with Yury Krupnov, the chairman of the observers’ council of the Moscow Institute of Demography, Migration and Regional Development and a frequent commentator on the impact of the interaction of these forces on political life in the Russian Federation.
Krupnov suggested that the agglomeration approach “contradicts a different conceptional model” in which the entire country would benefit and appears to reflect the notion of some among the powers that be that betting on those urban centers that are already doing well and neglecting everyone else will give them “a bonus” in the form of more rapid development.
But even if that such a strategy were to work in the short term as the result of what might be called “competitive federalism,” he said, it would ultimately fail even in development terms and generate tensions between the haves and have nots that Moscow would find it far more difficult to respond to than the one it would confront with a more balanced approach.
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