CIAO DATE: 07/02

Disintegration and Consolidation: National Separatism and the Evolution of Center-Periphery Relations in the Russian Federation

John W. Slocum

Peace Studies Program, Cornell University
Occasional Paper #19
July 1995

Abstract

Practitioners of the late lamented science of Sovietology have been roundly criticized for failing to predict one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century-the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Anxious to avoid a repetition of past mistakes, post-Sovietologists have in turn devoted a good deal of attention to the question of whether the USSR's largest successor state, the Russian Federation, is itself in danger of breaking apart. Like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is a multinational state with ethnically-defined territorial subunits; political elites in these subunits, faced with massive political, economic and social uncertainty, may be attracted by the idea of political independence. During the first half of the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia has indeed experienced more than one crisis of center-periphery relations. The present study, however, suggests that the likelihood of a general disintegration of the Russian Federation peaked in the early 1990s and is now decreasing. In view of this analysis, the war in Chechnya is an exception to an overall trend toward consolidation, rather than an indicator of a general breakdown in center-periphery relations.

This study is intended to contribute to the small but rapidly expanding body of research on center-periphery relations in post-Soviet Russia. ₁ The analysis set forth here characterizes the overall trajectory of center-periphery relations in terms of the evolution of institutional structures and political demands, focusing on dynamics of center-periphery relations pertinent to the Rus-sian Federation as a whole, rather than the specifics of one particular "subject"f the federation. ₂ Special attention is paid to the politically salient distinction between Russia's ethnically defined "republics" and its non-ethnic "regions," an institutional feature of post-Soviet Russian politics that is a direct consequence of Soviet-era nationality politics.

Scholars have suggested that particular factors characteristic of the Russian Federation make it less susceptible to dissolution than the Soviet Union. Among the most frequently cited factors are (a) the preponderance of ethnic Russians in the population of Russia as a whole and within most of its territorial subunits; (b) the high degree of interregional economic integration within Russia; and (c) a lack of international recognition for the sovereignty claims of various local governments within Russia. ₃ These factors are all significant, but their contribution to the stability of Russian federalism will not be well understood without considering the overall con-text of extreme institutional flux. Throughout the former Soviet Union, the old rules of the game have been discarded, and new rules have yet to be firmly established, as the region undergoes multiple and simultaneous transitional processes of marketization, democratization, and the consolidation of new state boundaries, national identities, and security structures.

The present study examines how institutional change and uncertainty has affected the evolution of center-periphery relations in Russia. I suggest that these relations have passed through several discrete stages of institutional change. The outcomes of political struggles at each of these stages have influenced the scope and range of subsequent conflicts by affecting the definition of relevant political actors, their perceived interests, and the range of politically justi-fiable claims made by these actors. ₄ The overall argument rests on an historical-institutionalist interpretation that posits center-periphery relations in the Russian Federation as the latest stage of a process of institutionalization that occurred throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Early Soviet-era institutions provided sets of political identities for provincial elites (most impor-tantly, an institutionalization of ethnic identity) that in turn implied sets of justifiable claims over resources. The bulk of this paper is devoted to an examination of three recent stages of institu-tional change-beginning in the last years of the Soviet regime, and continuing through the mid-1990s- that transformed center-periphery relations within the Russian republic. These stages may be summarized as follows:

1. In the period 1990-92 the institutions, identities, and realms of justification associated with nationality politics and center-periphery relations underwent massive transformation, as a previously stable set of institutional relations was disrupted by (a) the end of the Communist party's monopoly of power in the face of processes of democ-ratization and marketization; and (b) the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent states, a process accompanied by proclamations of sovereignty by subunits of the Russian republic, thus threatening the territorial integrity of the emerging independent Russian state.
2. The period 1992-4 was characterized by a consolidation of Russian state-hood, a process that involved multiple negotiations over the contours of center-periphery relations. The relative strength of the periphery (regions and republics) over the center peaked during this period as peripheral units of the Russian Federation mobilized new sets of political identities and claims to rights against the center.
3. Finally, as the result of events of late 1993 through early 1995, the focus of disputes over center-periphery relations within the Russian Federation has moved from political to economic issues. The example made of Chechnya shows the limits of separatist political claims; the political identities of the regions and republics seem to have coalesced around an understanding that the political disintegration of the Russian Federa-tion would be an unlikely, unfeasible, and probably undesirable outcome. Thus, future center-periphery disputes are likely to revolve around economic issues-most importantly, on devising a working system of fiscal federalism.

Each of the stages of this argument is dealt with separately in the four parts which constitute the bulk of this paper. In a concluding section, I discuss how changing political conditions could lead to a new period of instability in center-periphery relations.

 

Full PDF article, 61 Pages, 231kB

 

Endnotes

Note 1: Exemplary studies include Lapidus and Walker 1995; Blum 1994; and Teague 1994c. Back.

Note 2: The Federation Treaty of March 1992 (actually three separate agreements) established three classes of subekty, or "subjects," of the Russian Federation. The term "subject"will be used in this paper to refer to any of the major territorial-administrative subdivision of the Russia. Among the subjects whose politics have received detailed empirical treatment by Western scholars are Altai province (Kirkow 1994), the republic of Sakha-Yakutia (Kempton 1995), and Primorskii krai (Kirkow and Hanson 1994). Back.

Note 3: See, for example, Kempton 1995. Back.

Note 4: Thus the methodology guiding this investigation borrows two concepts from the "new insti-tutionalism" in historical sociology: path dependence (see Sewell n.d.) and the idea of "institu-tional constitution of interests and actors" (Brubaker 1994, 48 [emphasis in original]). Back.