Over the past one hundred years, the problem of self-determination of one or another constituent part of Russia has overwhelmingly overshadowed the problem of the country’s self-determination as a whole. To ignore this looming dilemma would mean putting into jeopardy Russia’s political stability or successful integration into the global community.

SELF-DETERMINATION UP TO SECESSION

The history of Russian federalism is relatively short. Two attempts to hammer out a federal system were tantamount to emergency landing maneuvers. The first one took place in 1917-1922 and culminated in a de facto restoration of unitary rule. The second attempt started in the 1990s and it risks sharing the fate of the previous attempt, despite the fact that the effective Constitution proclaims the principle of federalism. Sadly enough, that principle got there as a fragment of the Soviet heritage, not as a product of Russia’s new self-determination.

The Soviet federation once in the past turned out the only type of state structure that proved capable of stopping the country’s disintegration and channeling the energies of the former ethnic provinces into revolution at the same time. However, the “right to self-determination up to secession” embedded in that structure and a rather arbitrary selection of the so-called ‘titular nations’ [after which entire constituent republics were named – Ed.] predestined problems for territorial integrity.

The two-tier system of Soviet federalism – the constituent ‘union republics’ and the autonomies subordinate to them – also contained logical flaws. It was believed that “historical progress” had driven the 15 titular nations to a level worthy of statehood, even though they were still inside the Soviet Union, while several dozen ethnic groups chosen as ‘titular nationalities’ for the autonomies had not reached it yet. As expected, the junior ones grew up and loudly claimed their rights in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their claims unleashed a ‘parade of sovereignties’ in Russia that brought into existence what can be seen as the second edition of federalism.

The Soviet federation had one more major problem – the divided ethnic self-identification of citizens. In spite of the broad propaganda of internationalism, the Communist leadership attached significance to the ethnic identity or even exclusiveness of titular nations, fleshing these categories out with formal and juridical notions. Meanwhile, the ‘multi-ethnic community of the Soviet people’ remained a notional bubble.

Special studies and attempts to mold a community of people along the principle of loyalty to the state without ethnic and/or religious boundaries were launched in the Soviet Union only fifteen to twenty years before its disintegration. Their progress was very uneven, as they were regularly sidetracked in favor of efforts to perfect unitary rule or, sometimes, to openly Russify the ethnic republics. The ideologeme of ‘proletarian internationalism’ was commonly invalidated by the routine practices of Soviet governmental and public organizations. No one gave serious attention to grassroots xenophobia, which has grown into a major problem for Russian cities today. The authorities plucked the measures for regulating migration out of arsenals of repressive methods that varied from Stalinist ethnic deportations to a gradual resettlement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russian workers to the Baltic republics. At the same time, they drafted practically no programs to help the arriving newcomers adapt to the local conditions.

The multi-ethnic Soviet Union failed to become a melting pot or a new historic union of Soviet people, and that is why it was fairly easy for the republics to leave the Soviet Union in the last decade of the 20th century. The Soviet Union failed both in Cold War battles and in its attempts to set up a civic society. When the critical moment came, it turned out to be a territory with a population lacking any civic feeling. Russia is facing a similar problem today.

SELF-DETERMINATION WITHOUT SECESSION

Boris Yeltsin’s opponents could never forgive him for uttering a phrase that invited constituent autonomies of the Russian Federation to take as much sovereignty as they thought appropriate. Many people discerned in it the motto of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, although in essence the phrase was meant to save the country.

At the very start of the 1990s, an acute stand-off broke out between the governments of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union. Both played very tough against each other and the game involved some risky political methods. The Kremlin made an offer to the autonomies that would bring their status to a level equal with the ‘union republics’ that they were part of. The goal was to weaken Yeltsin’s team.

Autonomies inside the RSFSR eagerly renamed themselves into republics and adopted declarations of state sovereignty. The most impressionable of them even planned on taking part in the talks to reshape the Soviet Union that were held at Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow. But the August 1991 attempted coup thwarted the negotiations.

After the Soviet Union was finally dismantled in December 1991, the Russian leadership had to sign the Federation Treaty that fixed new rules for the relationship between the center and regions. The scope of the latter included a separate group of about twenty former autonomies. The authors of the treaty tried to reproduce something that had not been effectuated at the Novo-Ogaryovo union talks on the scale of the Russian Federation. The goal was to keep the country’s unity by forming new foundations for the federation with a clear division of actual powers rather than fictitious ones. In December 1993, a new federal Constitution was adopted in a referendum. It also contained the word ‘self-determination,’ although it did not mention a possibility of ‘secession.’

The splitting of the volumes of powers, which poured down on the country’s regions the powers unseen until now, had the guarantees inherent in the Constitution, in the Federative Treaty and in the very essence of the deal formalized by those legislative acts. It boiled down to an exchange of unity for the regions’ rights. But as the new federated formation stabilized, it turned out that the federal center was inclined toward revising the distribution of powers, while the Constitution and the Federative Treaty were worded in such a way that did not require an introduction of amendments – even if a drastic overhaul of the relationship was in the cards.

It was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration that started taking persistent converging measures, partly dictated by the very circumstances that surrounded its rise to power. At the end of the summer of 1999, an armed conflict broke out on the administrative border between Chechnya, which had been living under a suspended status after the 1996 Khasavyurt agreements, and Dagestan, whose status fully rested on provisions of the Constitution and the Federative Treaty.

The fact that hostilities had broken in three operational theaters at one time in a constituent territory that had previously been considered peaceful gave Moscow a big headache. Putin, who had been appointed Prime Minister by then, took dramatic steps to keep Dagestan inside the Russian Federation and then to affirm Chechnya’s status through the use of force. These steps did not envision a dismantling of the federative structure, but they gave the new Russian leadership the image of a ‘gatherer of lands’.

Moscow supported that image over the next seven years correspondingly to its understanding of state unity – it gradually stripped the constituent territories of the rights they had won. The institution of presidential envoy in the newly established seven Federal Districts became a transitional – in fact, unitarianist – link of governance between the federal center and the regions, although the envoys had rather limited powers. Projects for regional enlargement, partly implemented by now, slashed, albeit moderately, the number of the federal center’s “counterparties.”

In the early 2000s, the Prosecutor General’s Office and lawyers for the presidential administration did a tremendous amount of work analyzing and editing regional laws. Certainly, any attack on the principles of federalism was out of the question, but the authorities displayed a clear trend toward leveling out the asymmetric federative relations, i.e. toward smoothing out the differences in the status of the republics and other constituent territories. By and large, this kind of unification is typical of relations in a unitary state that consists of administrative units subordinate to the center rather than of power-wielding subjects.

Several dozen treaties were broken off now regarding special arrangements for a distribution of power that Moscow and separate regions had signed in the aftermath of the common Federative Treaty in 1992. Regional elites used those documents as wrappings for the sovereignty that Boris Yeltsin had granted them in the form of budget discounts, preferences in the development of mineral resources and other special concessions.

Simultaneously, changes affected the patterns of forming the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s Federal Assembly. While previously seats there had been taken by governors and speakers of regional legislatures ex officio, the new rules required that they should delegate their representatives, whose appointments should unavoidably be coordinated with the Kremlin.

Finally, the population of constituent territories stopped electing governors in 2004. Instead, gubernatorial candidates were endorsed by legislatures at the president’s recommendation. This move looked like a response to the terrorist attack in Beslan and it confirmed once again that the Russian leadership identified the build-up of national security with controllability and a smooth adjustment of all elements of state machinery rather than with the fostering of people’s civic vigilance.

SELF-DETERMINATION IN LIEU OF SECESSION

Two of Russia’s republics took avail of Boris Yeltsin’s invitation to sovereignty and took more of it than the others. In 1992, Presidents Dzhokhar Dudayev of Chechnya and Mintimer Shaimiyev of Tatarstan did not sign the Federative Treaty. It was in these two regions that ethnic movements had the widest appeal, and the energies of an ethnic explosion remained a dominant factor in their regional policies.

Both republics abstained from voting on the 1993 federal Constitution. Their formal inclusion in Russia’s political and legislative space encountered variegated problems and ended only in the 2000s. Since Tatarstan and Chechnya followed different paths, the results they have achieved to date also differ. Tatarstan lived through “the wars of Constitutions” but eventually gained the status of a key region in the Volga river basin, both loyal and prosperous. It is a vital center of moderate Islam after settling some ethnic and inter-religious conflicts that smoldered there in the early 1990s.

Chechnya fought two wars with Russia. It lost a great part of its social and economic infrastructure and still remains an embarrassment for public opinion both inside and outside the country. The vast majority of ethnic Russians who used to live in the Chechen Republic have left it for good.

Nonetheless, it was Chechnya, and not Tatarstan, that won the race for the title of an exemplary constituent part of the federation in the past few months. The Tatar government proposed the signing of a new treaty on a discrimination of powers, but the federal center rejected the proposal in a refined Byzantine style: a draft endorsed by the president and adopted by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, was voted down by the pro-presidential majority in the upper house. Even if the Duma manages to override the veto somehow, after two years of consultations with Kremlin lawyers Tatarstan will get a purely formal symbolic agreement.

Chechnya turned down a similar treaty in the past and recently got a new president. At the same time, the republic obtained exclusive internal independence. The federal authorities have already been rebuked for de facto renouncing a strategic line at consolidating vertical power along with creating grounds for discontent in a loyal region and giving incentives to a disloyal one. However, the Kremlin’s decisions have an internal logic. They vividly attest to the current status and political meaning of Russia’s state structure, which quite frequently reduces federalism to an informal relationship between the federal and regional elites as regards economic resources.

TATAR SELF-DETERMINATION

Tatarstan refused to sign the Federative Treaty in 1992. Almost simultaneously with that, it held an internal referendum that reaffirmed the republic’s declaration of independence it gained in 1990. The question in the referendum was, “Do you agree that the Republic of Tatarstan is a sovereign state and an international legal entity that is building its relations with the Russian Federation and other republics and countries on the basis of equitable treaties?” The regional authorities explained on many occasions they had no plans whatsoever to drive the situation to the verge of secession, but one way or another, the referendum set the scene for a ‘constitutional war’ between Moscow and the government in Kazan.

The only document that formally linked Russia and Tatarstan over a period of nine years was an agreement on the division of spheres of competence and mutual delegation of powers between agencies of state power of the Russian Federation and agencies of state power of the Republic of Tatarstan, which Mintimer Shaimiyev and Boris Yeltsin signed in February 1994. The document reflected provisions of Russia’s Constitution related to the federal structure, thus making up for the blank spots that had appeared after Tatarstan had abstained from the referendum on the Constitution. Its status had a whole range of specific features, like impressive budgetary and tax privileges, preferences in natural resource production, powers in settling privatization policy issues, and even guarantees against interference by the federal Armed Forces in the republic’s political life. All of these were fixed in a series of intergovernmental agreements.

The tax privileges and rejection of landslide privatization practices enabled the Tatar authorities to cushion the aftershocks of the social crisis that swept Russia in the early 1990s. However, the metered-out privatization eventually brought a sizable part of resources into the hands of the irremovable local elite.

The republic’s government did a lot to overcome social tensions, emphasizing the equality and communion of citizens, irrespective of their ethnic origin or religious affiliation. The mighty wave of the ethno-nationalist movement of the early 1990s was thus cushioned and the republic came to view itself as a component part of Russia.

Tatarstan’s 1992 Constitution was amended and supplemented in 2000-2002 in compliance with the federal law. Its new version included the notion of ‘the Russian Federation’ and a phrase about “an unbreakable historic unity” of Tatarstan and Russia. Article 1 said relations between the federal center and the republic were determined by the two Constitutions and the treaty on the division of powers, still in effect at the moment.

In 2003, the federal center denounced the treaty along with forty or so similar documents. The draft of a new treaty, which many believe contains signs of the ‘parade of sovereignties,’ can be described as a centripetal one. The single feature it inherited from the previous treaty makes reference to Chapter 3 of the Federal Constitution that stipulates division of the spheres and aspects of competence.

The new treaty empowers the republic’s leaders to make agreements with the Russian government on any issues reflecting the historical, economic and ecological specificity of Tatarstan. In theory, such agreements may revive a system of budgetary privileges and some special regulations for mineral resource development, but only with the authorization of the federal cabinet of ministers and approval by the State Duma. Any activity on the part of Tatarstan in the field of foreign policy should also require consent from appropriate federal agencies, although the draft singles out the republic’s right to give assistance to ethnic Tatar communities outside Tatarstan.

The authors of the draft hope that its endorsement will provide an opportunity to fill it with real content over time. By doing so, the parties that endorse it will get more reliable guarantees for their interests than the de facto existing unofficial protocol of relationship between the federal and local Tatar elites gives both of them. There is hope that the treaty will at least partly prop up the status of the republican elite in the run-up to an inescapable change of top players both in Moscow and Kazan. However, the final text retained only symbolic elements of this status and the upper house’s veto cast doubts over the sincerity of the Kremlin’s plans to impart legal force to the draft. It cannot be ruled out that the whole story was kicked off merely to display courtesy toward President Shaimiyev in a way that perfectly fits the above-said informal protocol.

People in Tatarstan do not see any reasons for Shaimiyev’s early resignation yet, as his powers were extended for another five years quite recently. Shaimiyev has ensured stability and ethnic/religious concord in his republic. He maintains good working relations with Putin and is one of the pylons of the United Russia party. Also, the federal quarters have the 2007 and 2008 elections ahead of them – a context in which a replacement of regional leaderships does not look appropriate.

Still, observers have begun to name possible successors to Shaimiyev and the lists compiled by Moscow experts are apparently much longer than the lists compiled by local experts. The replacement of the important leaders in Kazan is most likely unavoidable and Shaimiyev’s advanced age is not the only cause for it. There is an incipient conflict rooted in the sphere of access to Tatarstan’s economic resources, now under control of the republic’s elite. Tatarstan occupies an important place in Russia in terms of crude oil production. Its monthly output compares to Chechnya, although the quality of its oil is much lower.

The practice existing now is such that the problems of resource redistribution are solved much more easily with the aid of personnel reshuffles than through the signing of public contracts. It looks like officials in Chechnya have realized the fact quite properly.

CHECHEN SELF-DETERMINATION

In 1990, Chechen-Ingushetia ceased to exist as an autonomous republic of the RSFSR and tried to jump onto the departing train of the Novo-Ogaryovo talks. As the Chechen-Ingush legislature supported the organizers of the abortive coup in August 1991, Boris Yeltsin’s team bet on the leaders of the Chechen nationalist movement in response. As early as November 1991, Moscow made an attempt to deploy more troops to Chechnya so as to cut short the mass outrages committed there. The self-proclaimed Ichkeria (Chechnya) adopted its own sovereign constitution the next year and divorced itself from Ingushetia that undersigned the federative treaty. Federal troops were pulled out of the Chechen capital of Grozny and other places of deployment. Ichkeria did not take part in the 1993 federal referendum on the new Constitution. A sizable part of the republic’s territory was controlled by armed Chechen opposition units that drew support from some quarters in the federal government. The first Chechen war that began in December 1994 was a result of Moscow’s attempt to demonstrate its unwillingness to tolerate separatism.

Yet the separatists seized Grozny in the summer of 1996, after which agreements on a ceasefire and the so-called ‘suspended status’ were signed in Khasavyurt. These documents indicated that Chechnya’s status inside/or outside Russia was to be determined in 2001 at the latest. Russian troops, police and government officials left the republic for the second time in the decade.

Aslan Maskhadov, who became Chechen president after the death of Dzhokhar Dudayev, now had to face a government consisting almost exclusively of field commanders who believed they had won a war of liberation against the empire. Maskhadov had to keep equilibrium on the brink of a civil war, but he could not prevent the militants’ invasion of Dagestan in 1999. By 2001, when the problem of Chechnya’s status should have been raised again under Khasavyurt terms, he had already been a president in the underground for two years.

Moscow decided to discard the services of the old Chechen-Ingush elite this time, however, and started looking for allies among the “moderate separatists” and opponents of fundamentalist Islam. It finally bet on Ichkeria’s former mufti Akhmat Kadyrov, who was unexpectedly appointed as the interim civilian administrator in 2000. The Chechen Constitution, adopted in a referendum in March 2003, finally attached the republic to the Russian Federation. Kadyrov was elected Chechen president that same year.

These developments unfolded in parallel with wide-scale amnesties, as Russia’s recent adversaries surrendered to Kadyrov personally on guarantees that no prosecutions would follow. That was how a kind of private guard, formally added to the tables of organization of federal enforcement agencies, took shape. One must admit, however, that it really brought out hundreds of people from the forest who had fired on federal posts and troops in the not so distant past and had been the engine of subversive activity in the North Caucasus in the first half of the 1990s.

In 2004, Kadyrov was assassinated in Grozny and was replaced by Chechnya’s former Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov, who had fought against the separatists. The old Chechen-Ingush elite and part of the Russian leadership pinned certain hopes on him, but he never received all-round support.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the thirty-year-old son of Akhmat Kadyrov who became president in April 2007, is often accused of “systemic separatism,” which means a type of situation where Chechnya officially remains part of Russia, but actually lives of its own free will. Critics especially point out the strength of the forces of law and order in the republic, which total about 15,000 men – almost the same figure as the strength of federal armed units deployed in Chechnya (about 22,000 troops at the moment). Chechen forces mostly consist of former militants, whose competence in the field of law and maintaining order is quite questionable.

Yet the authorities allowed the presence of this private guard as a replacement for Russian regular units, thus lifting from the latter responsibility before Russian and Chechen families. The “guardians” fulfill their task successfully.

Moreover, Ramzan Kadyrov has managed to convince some sections of the ethnic Chechen business elite to invest money in the republic’s postwar reconstruction. This investment stands on a par with federal subsidies. The young leader’s crude authoritative methods pushed the system of executive power into operation. It also looks like he has found a way to lead the economic reconstruction process out of a corruption deadlock. The only thing Ramzan Kadyrov does not control is the legal production of high-grade oil that totals about 2.2 million tons a year. In contrast to neighboring Ingushetia, where the government controls the oil industry, albeit a modest output, or to Tatarstan, where the local elite is extremely active in the oil business, Chechnya only has formal control over a 49-percent stake in the company Grozneftegaz. The controlling stake in it belongs to Rosneft, which reports to the federal center. Ramzan Kadyrov, who rejected a draft treaty that placed the problem of mineral resource development in the central position, is now looking for alternative ways to “restore justice.”

And yet Moscow is pleased with the current situation. In essence, Chechnya offers an ideal model of a relationship between the federal center and a constituent territory where the ashes of conflict are still smoldering. It has been tied together with its population and a strong local leader, who depends personally on the Russian president, but who has virtually unlimited powers in his own republic. The price of this relationship is the ceding of control over oil resources to a government company. This is a kind of condition of a contract, since any attempt on the part of Ramzan Kadyrov to gain control over oil wells in Chechnya will have an immediate effect on his career.

It is noteworthy, however, that Kadyrov and the people around him, who are mainly made up of former militants, seem to be more committed to the idea of unity of the federation than many politicians in Moscow. That is why apprehensions that he may “escape back to the forest” one day seem groundless. Unity is more than a slogan chanted by former militants at previous marches. It guarantees a status to the new elite. But sooner or later, the availability of a loyal prince, who receives powers from one hand while the other hand strips him of his means for subsistence, may stop being a sufficient factor. Since the current Chechen elite are not going to secede from Russia, what is left is to try and change Russia’s rules of the game. If the attempt succeeds, the role of the locomotive in writing a new edition of Russian federalism will go to Chechnya, not to Tatarstan with its courteous treaties.

STATE-FORMING SELF-DETERMINATION

The pattern of informal regulation of the relationship between the federal center and constituent territories that has been adopted in Russia now is reminiscent of a decaying ancient Rome that did not feel squeamish about handing over border provinces to barbarian federates.

However, this pattern does not work everywhere. Elites in many Russian regions simply do not have any attractive resources to exchange for guarantees of their status. One such case is the North Caucasian region of Karachai-Cherkessia, a depressed republic where an absurd local standoff is continuing for the fourth consecutive year. It paralyzes any possible progress, regularly provokes unrest and drags on unresolved, as the federal center does not interfere in it. The central authorities ignore the situation persistently, although it is developing near the state border and in the face of a looming threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

Second, the pattern implies a closed system of interrelations between elites, as the elimination of gubernatorial elections has fully ruled out any feedback from the people. Many regional leaders who relied on popular support about ten years ago have lost a big share of their authority now and they prefer using good relations with the center as a guarantee to their status. Chechnya remains an exception to the rule, as the new elite there still does not have a long “credit history” of relations with Moscow.

In the meantime, mutual alienation between the people and the authorities strips the center of its consolidating role. The center (or regional elites at their level) seeks to keep up the informal balance of interests and obstructs any attempts to change it. The government knows exactly who should not do certain things and what things, but it never explains what things people can do.

Recent developments prove that this alienation has also affected ethnic Russians who form the majority of population in Russia today. History proves that ethnic Russians continue to be the most loyal social segment and their protest capability, if it ever shows up, is never fuelled by ethnic sentiments. The reason for this consistency, which did not dwindle even during the “ethnicity boom” of the early 1990s, lies in the fact that the Russians have traditionally regarded the state as the most efficient and most reliable public organization for them. But now the veil of silence has been pierced, as ethnic Russians are adding themselves to the list of those who are discontent with the existing rules of the game.

A criminal incident in the northwest town of Kondopoga in early autumn 2006 exploded into unrest and rampage. It was not the ethnic problem as such that triggered it, but, rather, mistrust in law enforcement agencies, which proved unable to guarantee security to an individual or to punish the guilty. A wave of disgust turned into a sporadic and crippling attempt by the ethnic Russian population to organize in order to defend their rights and interests. Kondopoga is not the only instance, as the problem of migrants’ conduct and their contacts with the indigenous population stands out noticeably and requires consistent decision-making. However, the authorities prefer to respond to it only by stepping up tactical measures of police impact.

Meanwhile, the list of “Russian questions,” which the government leaves unanswered, is not confined to the number of foreigners working at open-air food markets. It is much longer and includes, among other things, the much-spoken-of demographic statistics and the disastrous position of refugees from neighboring countries and “blazing” regions of Russia.

Kondopoga also exposed the way in which the population may rise to such questions. It put some fear into the authorities, but their reaction did not exceed the limits of political technologies – experts beating about the Kremlin are working hard to snatch the electorate from marginal radical nationalistic parties through imitating a broad appeal to the interests of the ethnic majority. For this purpose, the United Russia party launched the blatantly political Russian Project television program that emphasizes the “Russian civilization” aggregating all of the country’s ethnic diversity.

The contents of that project are still too vague. It is unclear if the expected results can justify the risks inherent in achieving them. At any rate, it is not the first time that the authorities have appealed to ethnic feelings and reminded Russians of their “status as the country’s backbone.” The Stalinist leadership acted in the same way during World War II when it declared the Russians to be “nation number one among equals” in the Soviet federation. But even though the share of ethnic Russians in today’s Russia has increased compared to the former Soviet Union, this technique looks anachronistic. Just a cursory glance at demographic and migration statistics is enough to understand that the country is losing its Russocentric status. In this situation, a real, not elitist, federalism offers many more opportunities than any unitary system.

Federalism never played the role of a counterpoint to unity, since Russia’s multi-ethnic nation has always been the source of state power. This postulation is true for any constituent republic. Unlike union republics in the Soviet Union, they cannot be considered ‘ethnic,’ although many politicians still look at them this way out of inertia. The function of a state founder cannot belong to any separate ethnic group in a multi-ethnic society. This applies even to Chechnya and Ingushetia, which have become mono-ethnic territories due to the conflicts of the 1990s.

Russia’s extreme nationalists harbor an idea of creating a separate republic on Russian territory where the Russians would be a titular nation. This is a retarded manifestation of the “self-determination up to secession” principle. The tiniest verbal flaw by the masterminds of the Russian Project programs can set off a large-format replication of that principle and bring into existence one more “ethnic apartment” [the term used in the early 1990s to describe a tendency toward isolationism among former Soviet republics – Ed.]. This will intensify ethnic estrangement, stimulate governmental isolationism, and lead to the country’s territorial disintegration over the long term.

The development of this very pessimistic scenario can only be prevented by removing ethnic and religious barriers inside the community of all Russian citizens. The situation is not altogether unpromising. Opinion polls indicate that the word ‘Rossiyanin’ [a person identifying himself with Russia as a country rather than with Russian ethnicity; used emphatically at the beginning of the 19th century, but introduced into broad everyday use during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency – Ed.] is not associated with the unpopular President Yeltsin anymore. This means that the country called the Russian Federation is gradually winning recognition among its own citizens. The latter fact has a much greater importance than the artificial climate of interrelations inside elites, however strong their illusions might be about their exclusive right to shape political reality.