Moscow fears federalism

By Pran Chopra

MOSCOW, AUG 1. No country of comparable significance needs a federal system as much as Russia. This is because of the variety, size and spread of its regions, their contiguity with so many countries, ranging from the heart of central Europe to Islamic Asia to the entirely different world of China, Korea, and Japan.

There is no known system of governance which can better encompass so much within a single country than a federation can. But federalism also faces more inhibitions in Russia than in most countries, some inherited from the Czarist past, some from Stalinist communism, more from the blunder driven concluding years of Mr. Yeltsin, and some which are being generated now due to the fear that federalism may feed separatism. From the first Czar to the time when, in 1990, the communist party was dismantled without preparing alternative structures, Russia has had a long history of all authority being concentrated in Moscow. That imperial stretch weakens Moscow's hold over the country, and today it is certainly weak. But it remains incompatible with the essence of federalism, a mutually understood and accepted partnership between the federal centre and the constituents of the federation.

The disastrous decade of the Yeltsin rule presented Russian federalism with its worst crisis. In 1990, Mr. Yeltsin gained control of the Russian Republic, which was itself a federation and also the richest and most powerful part of the Soviet federation. And the first thing he did was to start a mutually destructive collision between the Soviet Union and the Republic. The collision destroyed the Soviet Union but it also made the Republic a pauper, and aggravated those very fears of federalism for which democratic federalism is the best remedy.

By withholding large amounts that the Russian Republic owed the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin threatened to ruin the Union financially. In an effort to save the Union, its President, Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, drew up a well thought-out federal constitution for the Union as a whole, and won overwhelming approval for it in a referendum in March 1991. But Mr. Yeltsin proclaimed the Russian Republic as sovereign, and created a precedent which was to be quickly followed by the Baltic and Central Asian republics. As a result, the successor State, the present Russian Federation (RF) was crippled at birth.

Mr. Yeltsin became President of the Russian Federation in an election in 1993, which has been widely shown to have been fraudulent. But nemesis followed. Just as he had led the Russian Republic into a revolt against the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin was confronted by the local bosses of many constituents of the RF with demands for more sovereignty. To gain their support for a second term as the RF President, Mr. Yeltsin promised them `` as much sovereignty as you can eat.'' When that too did not resolve the sovereignty issue, he put aside the federal provisions of the Constitution he had promulgated in 1993 and proceeded to sign ``treaties'' with more than half the 89 constituents, the terms of each being determined by no established principles but by the political or economic bargaining power of each side in each situation.

They - and particularly the ``treaties'' with Tatarstan and Bshkortostan, the most assertive of the constituents after Chechnya - violate the Constitution's requirements about what Moscow and a constituent must do where they have joint jurisdiction. In some cases where the jurisdiction was joint under the RF Constitution it was entrusted exclusively to a constituent, and where it was exclusively the Federation's, such as in relations with foreign powers, it was made joint. Such is the maze of sovereignties in which the President, Mr. Vladimir Putin now finds himself, and it has become the biggest single challenge to his highest single domestic priority. On becoming President he had declared there would be a dictator now, but his name would be Law, meaning that Mr. Yeltsin's ad hocisms and rule by decree by earlier regimes would be replaced by clear and justiciable laws. But the beneficiaries of these treaties are so entrenched now that each has to be eased one by one out of the local tangle. For doing so, Mr. Putin has divided the Russian Federation into seven districts, and put each under the charge of a high-powered deputy hand picked by him. Success has come in a few cases but only a few.

In the meantime, Mr. Putin has made a mistake which might inhibit the long term and only real basis of Russia's unity, that each constituent should have such a strong sense of being a partner in the governance of the whole country that it may neither have reason to resist the centre nor wish to opt out of the country. Only democratic federalism can ensure that, by providing that authentic representatives of each constituent, elected by the local entities, have the opportunity to participate in the governance of the whole federation alongside federal level parties, while federal level parties have the opportunity to participate in the governance of the constituents, thus binding the whole polity in a web of the obligations of democratic federalism.

A new law recently promoted by Mr. Putin virtually prohibits constituents from forming their own parties. It requires each party to have so much membership in so many constituents that it bans any party which represents the constituents of one region. Fortunately, a new move is afoot, that federal parties may contest local elections in a constituent. That will force federal parties to compete for the support of local entities and will give the latter a chance to get some quid pro quo at the federal level. But that will take time, and the time taken will be time lost.

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