Window on Eurasia

Putin Policies Said Leading to ‘Degradation’ of Russia’s Regions

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 27, 2006 – President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to create a
power vertical in which Moscow controls everything may have saved the
country from disintegration, but they are “leading to the
degradation” of Russia’s regions and thus threating the country’s
future in other ways, according to a Urals-based scholar.

In an article in this week’s “Politicheskiy zhurnal,” Konstantin
Kiselev, the deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy and Law of
the Urals Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, argues that both
Moscow and the regions have an interest in finding a way out of this
“impasse” [http://www.politjournal.ru/], June 26.

One of the symptoms of the current problem is that many Russian cities
are seeking to portray themselves as “the third Russian capital.”
(Moscow, of course, is the first, and St. Petersburg is the traditional
“second” one.) But this approach, Kiselev says, prevents these
cities and the regions around them from modernizing.

Seeking to position themselves along the axis of “the
region-Moscow” or “the region-the center” invariably “plays into the hands of
Moscow and the central authorities” and thus means that potentially
vibrant cities and regions “will remain forever as party of the
periphery.”

There is only one way out of this for cities like Yekaterinburg, Perm
and Chelyabinsk, Kiselev suggests, and that is to seek to develop
themselves not in terms of Moscow but rather with their faces toward
“contemporary Europe, China, Japan, the United States, and so on.”

Not all of Russia’s regional centers will be able to do so even if
they want to, he continues. Only those cities which have the necessary
industrial base, international ties, sports facilities, and size will
allow regional political entrepreneurs to break out of the backwaters
in which Moscow has kept them and hopes to keep them in the future.

Kiselev devotes much of his article to a discussion of how regional
politicians could “break out of the deadend” in which they find
themselves now. First, they must seek to build the necessary
infrastructure and communications networks to allow them to connect to
the broader world.

Second, they must develop humanitarian institutions able to “produce
symbolic values, preserving them, and communicating” them to the
broadest possible audience in the region. Building such centers will
prevent Moscow from continuing to be a “black hole” into which the
most active people in the regions are drawn, never to return.

And third, Kiselev argues, the regions must develop a system of
democratic competition. Such competition is “important not only for
itself but in its positive influence on ecocnomic processes,”
something that Kiselev suggests many in Moscow too often forget and
many in the regions have not yet recognized.

Unfortunately, he concludes, the regions cannot do this by themselves
given both Putin policies and the history of Russian political culture.
Moscow must recognize how important dynamic regions are to the
country’s future and support them rather than view them as a threat
to its power.

At present, that is not the case, Kiselev says. Putin and his regime
have worked hard to stamp out what they see as “any federalist
‘heresy’ opposed to the new centralizing fashion.” In such a
situation, only a few regions, such as in the North Caucasus and the
Middle Volga have the resources to oppose Moscow.

The others – and they are the majority of the country, Kiselev points
out – lack such resources. Some of them have tried lobbying in
Moscow. Others have hoped to exploit social protests over the monetarization of
benefits. But few have been willing to try to promote a modern regional
identity.

Kiselev suggests that one should not be too critical of the failure of
regional elites to take this last step. After all, any moves in that
direction given the current climate in Moscow represents a threat not
only to those who make them but also to the regions they head.

In the immediate future, the situation is unlikely to improve, Kiselev
concludes sadly. But unless both the regions and Moscow work to revive
and modernize the country’s provinces, the regions and their capitals
will remain a drag on Russian development and the country will find
itself in “a blind alley” with no clear way out.