Russia’s political and administrative structure and its relationship with the rise of a nation-state identity have been discussed more than once in articles in Russia in Global Affairs. These problems continue to be very relevant today, as the country is going through a complicated period of consolidation into a new type of state power. On the other hand, like all other countries, Russia has found itself subject to an increasing influence of multifarious external factors in the age of globalization.

Swiss geographer Claude Raffestin wrote fifteen years ago that borders are social analogs of biological membranes regulating a metabolic substance exchange between a territory – ethnic or sovereign – and the world around it. It is obvious that the efficiency of this “metabolism;” i.e. the involvement of a state in global, political, economic and civilizational processes and its simultaneous protection from undesirable impacts, depends to a large extent on the condition of the membrane – the state border – and of the adjoining territories. History proves that the bigger the unification of the political and administrative structure of the border periphery is, the greater its efficiency.

Moreover, Russia’s border periphery has never been homogeneous. In the Russian Empire, state unification embraced only those border provinces that had formed as products of a spontaneous popular colonization – first during the reign of Peter the Great and then during the reign of Catherine II. As for ethnic provinces, beginning with the annexation of the Kazan khanate, the degree of their integration into the country’s political space and, correspondingly, their status in the administrative system has varied considerably.

As a result, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Empire emerged as an agglomeration of administrative entities. It had a mixed, unsystematic and rather loose organization on the political, administrative and legal plane. The regional and ethnic separatism was somewhat counterbalanced by the idea of a united and indivisible centralized state; and the military and civilian administrations in the provinces relied on that. This idea would often take the form of talk about “a common destiny” of peoples living in Russia, as a reflection of their awareness of a common external threat and economic space.

The combination of these concepts became an important factor behind the formation of the Soviet Union and the political mobilization of its people, especially in the 1930s and the 1940s. However, external threats, common economic space and Marxist-Leninist ideology could not secure the political and administrative unification of the border periphery. Nationalistic and separatist moods among Communists in the former ethnic provinces forced the Soviet leaders to make concessions; Leninist and Stalinist nationalities policy only worked toward a conservation of regionalism and ethnic separatism. The policy of the self-determination of nations also fostered them.

To understand the logical antecedence of the Soviet Union’s law On the Resolution of Issues Pertaining to the Secession of a Union Republic from the USSR, which was passed on April 3, 1990 and which guaranteed unconditional self-determination of the autonomies of all levels, it is sufficient to open Volume 14 of Joseph Stalin’s Collected Works.

The text of Stalin’s report on the draft constitution passed in 1936 says the following on promoting the autonomous republics to the status of Union ones: “First, it is essential that a republic be a border province […] because, if a Union republic retains the right to secession, it should have a logical and practical opportunity to raise the issue of its withdrawal from the USSR. And that right can be enjoyed only by the republics that have, say, a border with some foreign countries and are not surrounded by the territories of the USSR  […] So, if a Union republic has the right to secede, we should create conditions that would prevent this right from turning into a senseless scrap of paper […] Second, it is necessary that ethnic people, who give their name to the title of the republic, represent a more or less compact majority on its territory […] Third, this republic […] should have a population, say, of no less than a million people. Why? Because it would be wrong to suppose that a small Soviet republic with a minimal population and a minimal army could count on its existence as an independent state.” These provisions stayed in effect even after the dismantling of Stalin’s personality cult.

The inviolability of the Soviet borders was ensured by the Iron Curtain and the state’s integrity hinged on the principles of Communist Party construction in line with Article 6 of the Soviet Union’s Constitution. The abolition of this article meant not only a loosening of ideology at the Union center, but also a loss of the sole mechanism of internal political integration.

As for Boris Yeltsin’s proposal to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow,” it would be strange if the constituent territories of the Federation located along the border (and elsewhere) decided not to use it in such a situation. The result was that – although Russia maintained formal unity – it turned into a conglomerate of territorial entities that ignored the supremacy of federal law and the common economic space de facto and de jure. “We have a decentralized state,” President Vladimir Putin had to admit in his state-of-the-nation address to both houses of parliament on July 8, 2000.
In spite of the course toward centralization that the Russian leaders embarked on at the beginning of this decade, today’s Russian Federation still preserves the legislative base of regional and ethno-political disintegration in the border areas. This has the following backbone elements: the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation; the major laws and regulations of Russia’s constituent regions located along the state border; Presidential Decree No. 773 of July 2, 2005, On Interaction Between and Coordination of Activity by the Agencies of Executive Power in Constituent Regions of the Russian Federation and Regional Branches of the Federal Agencies of Executive Power; federal laws On Amendments to Separate Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation in Connection with Improvements in the Distribution of Powers (No. 199, signed December 31, 2005) and On Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation (No. 165-FZ, signed December 11, 2002).
It may look at first glance that the effective Constitution lays the foundations for a centralized model of federalism: it declares Russia’s sovereignty over its entire territory; the supremacy of federal law; unity of the legal and economic space, as well as of the system of state power.

Still, Vladimir Putin said at a session of the Council of Legislators in March 2006 that work on aligning territorial legislative acts with federal ones had been completed in only ten constituent territories of the Russian Federation. Also, Clause 2 of Article 5 of the constitution treats the constituent republics as statehoods, while Article 73 affirms their right to enjoy the full scope of state power. These provisions, in turn, are fixed in the basic laws of all the constituent republics, with Kalmykia and the Republic of Altai being the only exceptions.

Buryatia, Ingushetia, Karelia, North Ossetia, Tyva, Sakha-Yakutia and the Chukotka Autonomous District are the only constituent territories that mention the federal constitution as a document determining their state and legal status along with their regional constitutions. However, the latest edition of Sakha-Yakutia’s constitution lists the issues pertaining to the state structure, status and territory as the prerogatives of the republic. Along with it, “the people of the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia retain the right to self-determination (hereinafter italicized by the author – Ed.) on the basis of the expression of the will by its citizens.” A number of Russia’s constituent regions – the Volgograd, Omsk and Sakhalin – define themselves as “state territorial entities.”

Only three of all the national constituents – Karachai-Cherkessia, Republic of Altai and Kalmykia – recognize in their constitutions that their territories are inalienable parts of the Russian Federation, and only the Chukotka Autonomous District has a provision in its regulations that affirms Russia’s sovereignty over its territory. However, Article 1 of the regulations says that the area “enjoys the social, economic and political autonomy inherent in a constituent of the federation.”

It is noteworthy that most of the constituent territories located along the borders have the right to maintain international and foreign economic relations, although neither they themselves nor the agencies of local self-government are subjects of international law. Constitutional changes over the past few years have mostly embraced ethnic territorial entities – and only formally.

Kabardino-Balkaria and Sakha-Yakutia continue to position themselves as de facto independent subjects of international relations with a status standing on a par with the Russian Federation, since they coordinate their foreign relations and trade with it. Karachai-Cherkessia, North Ossetia and Kalmykia fully manage international relations on their own without any constrictive provisions in their laws. The same can be said of the Astrakhan, Belgorod, Kurgan, Omsk, Samara, and Smolensk regions. The regulations of the Pskov Region mention a single provision concerning international relations: “The Governor of the Pskov Region acts as the Region’s representative in international and foreign economic relations.”

Russia’s constitution does not envision any forms of the federal government’s legal interference in the affairs of constituent regions. More than that, Paragraph 6 of Article 76 says: “Should a contradiction emerge between a federal law and a legal act of a constituent territory […], the legal act of the constituent territory shall prevail.”  This provision has been carried over to the most recent editions of constitutions and regulations of absolutely all the constituent territories.

Generally speaking, the constitutional acts of the constituents place the main accent on their own territorial integrity, and not the Russian Federation’s territorial integrity. Only Karachai-Cherkessia says in its constitution that its border with a foreign state is also Russia’s state border and that its status is stipulated by federal law.

Meanwhile, some of the political and administrative powers of constituent border regions bear an overt threat to Russia’s territorial integrity. For instance, they make decisions on their administrative and territorial composition. Karelia and Sakha-Yakutia have reserved for themselves the right to set up ethnic municipal entities (and Yakutia can even decide on their status). More than that, the Sakha constitution gives the head of the republic the power to introduce and lift a state of emergency.

All of this means that courtesies toward the supremacy of the federal laws and the unity of the system of state power are nothing more than camouflage. Any weakening of the federal center will prompt the constituents to ignore the principles if they find it useful.

One more document that reduces to nothing the supremacy of federal laws and the unity of the system of state power is Presidential Decree No. 773 issued on July 2, 2005. It empowered the constituents to control the performance of top officials of regional branches of federal agencies who are appointed by the federal center. The decree embraces the heads of regional departments of the Interior Ministry, Emergency Situations and Civil Defense Ministry and Justice Ministry. The Federal Security Service and the Defense Ministry are the only two agencies it leaves out. This document expanded the opportunities for regional leaders to have a say in the appointment of territorial Interior ministers and heads of major departments at the Interior Ministry as compared with provisions of the 2001 federal law On the Police. It is worth remembering that an effort to replace Kalmykia’s Interior Minister in the fall of 2003 barely stopped short of turning into a large-scale army operation.

Federal law No. 199 handed still more power from the center to the constituents in sectors like land tenure, ecology, protection of historical and cultural monuments, education, science, and housing laws. It has thus provided the infrastructure capability to further build up sovereignty of the border regions.

The federal law On Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation also has provisions fraught with a deplorable aftermath. One of them says: “The state shall facilitate the development of languages, bilingualism and multilingualism on the entire territory of the Russian Federation.” As a result, we have a broad use of ethnonyms, or a name applied to a given ethnic group, in the official political vocabulary (El Kurultai, Il Tumen, the People’s – or Great – Khural) and in the official titles of constituent republics, like the Republic of Sakha instead of Yakutia or Tyva instead of Tuva. Linguistic separatism of this kind once served as a springboard for the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Another provision of the same law says that “the [constituent] republics have the power to adopt their own state languages in line with the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”  It is not surprising therefore that Karelia’s constitution stipulates the right “to establish other state languages on the basis of a direct expression of the will of the people of the Republic of Karelia through a referendum.” Quite emblematic is the fact that the basic laws of the border constituents where small ethnic groups reside also guarantee development of ethnic languages and culture. Patriotism and nurturing an all-Russia consciousness are mentioned only in the regulations of the Krasnodar Territory, the Omsk, Novosibirsk and Orenburg Regions.

These legal provisions and practices pose threats to Russia’s common information and cultural space and lay the cultural and ideological basis for its collapse. It is language that shapes cultural paradigms; in the meantime, this law guarantees “the right to obtain general education in the native language and to choose the language of education within the scope of opportunities offered by the educational system.” This is how the law permits the destruction of the common space in education, to say nothing of the fact that, not infrequently, education in ethnic languages is defective, as they do not have the stock of terminology for a whole number of disciplines. Add to this that the ethnic constituent republics actively build up and promulgate myths about their own political history.
The above-said highlights the importance of looking closely at international experience in that sphere.

First, the majority of multi-ethnic states are not federations, while the majority of federations were not built along the ethnic principle.

Second, poly-ethnic federations have smaller chances for survival. Will Kymlicka, a classic figure of contemporary political philosophy, pointed out that territorial autonomy is simultaneously an insufficient and excessively representative method of defending the interests of ethnic minorities. So one should seek some non-territorial mechanisms. It is also true, though, that the same author was skeptical about the outcome of this search. In reality, ritual invocations of a non-territorial autonomy seldom produce a clear idea of how this should be done in practice and instances of a successful implementation of such autonomy are but few, he wrote.

This reveals two ways for political consolidation.

Number one suggests consolidation of ethnic Russians in the face of the “ever-present external foe” and the “fifth column” that this foe has allegedly set up inside Russia. The most frequently named foes are Western civilization, the “Golden Billion,” the “global government,” the “global backstage milieu,” and the “global shadow organizations.”

However, this strategy actually aims to form priorities of ethnic and – quite often – religious identity, but not political ones. In this sense, national identity of ethnic Russians can only be viewed in terms of identity with the Russian state in the context of gathering lands and peoples around them. In all other cases the consolidation of the ethnic core would pose a serious threat to the unity of the state. Consolidation of this kind more often than not comes as a response to national humiliation. It has always followed the formula of the “ladder” specified by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov – “from national self-consciousness to national complacency to national self-admiration to national self-destruction.”

Path number two, which is gaining popularity among political scientists in Russia, suggests the development of unitarianist concepts based on the belief that genuine federalism is inorganic to Russia and that it is necessary to abolish the constituent territories’ unbounded rights and freedoms along with this country’s simultaneous transformation into a “federated empire” or “an imperial federation.”

But whatever the lures of these models, they remain the abodes of researchers while the interests of the political elite, which continues to take steps toward “pulling the state pegs” out of the political, economic, social, and cultural life, stay far away from the tasks of imperial construction.

The above-said leads us to the following conclusion. The federal authorities have certainly done much in recent years to strengthen the unity and territorial stability of the Russian Federation. This was achieved largely through the centralization of Russia’s political space and an unprecedented ideological and political consolidation around a popular national leader. However, the institutional and legislative guarantees for the country’s territorial integrity are quite unreliable. If an unforeseen political weakening of the federal center occurs, there is a high likelihood that the country’s federative structure will be shattered.