The view from below: Local government and Putin's reforms

Abstract

Local government reforms in contemporary Russia are placed in the broader contexts of political reform under Putin and the historical relationship between local administration and the state. Reforms of local government thus help illuminate the architecture of contemporary state building in Russia and the degree to which contemporary Russia perpetuates political traditions. This study reviews the antecedent action in local government prior to the Putin era. It then examines the Kozak Commission and the new law on local government, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these reforms. Finally, this study examines the challenges of implementing the reforms and what these challenges tell us about devolution and centralisation under Putin.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Mr Valerii Kirpichnikov, Dr Irina Starodubrovksaya, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹This is a short paraphrase of the longer description of the zemstvo by A. D. Gradovskii (1907, p. 540): ‘in the hands of governmental offices and officials remained power without competence; in the hands of the zemstvo institutions were concentrated competence without power’.

²There are seven federal districts altogether. Each federal district contains between 10 and 15 regions.

³The justification for Putin's reforms sounds eerily familiar. In the 1870s, War Minister Dmitrii Milyutin declared, ‘in Russia, reform can be carried out only by authority. We have too much disturbance and too much divergence of interests to expect anything good from the representation of these interests. … Besides, our reforms must cover the whole empire; any exceptional usages in this or that locale will harm the unity of the state, giving rise to separatism and rivalry. … Strong authority does not preclude the personal liberty of the citizen or self-governing institutions. But he who desires the true welfare of Russia … should firmly renounce anything that can weaken the unity of authority’ (Yaney 1973, pp. 240 – 41).

⁴Dmitrii Kozak, a lawyer by training, is known for having an acute legal mind and an insatiable appetite for detail. This would come in particularly useful when reviewing the laws and constitutions of Russia's regions to determine where they contradicted federal law and the Russian constitution. It would also prove helpful in terms of reordering Russia's complicated system of local government. For further discussion see Lankina (2003b).

⁵The Commission's official title was the Presidential Commission for the Demarcation of Powers between the Federal, Regional and Municipal Levels of Government.

⁶Author interview with Valerii Aleksandrovich Kirpichnikov, former Chairman of the Congress of Municipalities of the Russian Federation and a member of one of the local government working groups of the Kozak Commission, Moscow, 11 October 2005.

⁷Federal'nyi zakon, 2003 (2006) Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestogo samoupravleniya v Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow, Grossmedia).

⁸A further designation is for municipal wards of cities with federal status, Moscow and St Petersburg. We will not focus on this designation here.

⁹See Federal'nyi zakon (2006, Article 2) and Channov et al. (2004). The number of deputies in these councils is also mandated by law, and corresponds to the population of the respective territory: seven deputies for 1,000 residents or less; 10 deputies for populations between 1,000 and 10,000; 15 deputies for 10,000 – 30,000; 20 for 30,000 – 100,000; 25 for 100,000 – 500,000; and 35 for more than 500,000 (Article 35).

¹⁰The Housing Code passed in 2004, for example, reportedly introduces citizen committees in housing management, which are intended to connect with local governments. Another law on the redistribution of property will also have a strong impact on local government. How these and other laws can be integrated with the law on local government remains to be seen.

¹¹Nikolai Petrov (2006) suggests that hundreds of thousands of new civil servants will be needed to keep the new municipalities functioning.

¹²According to one report, the Ministry of Finance has supposedly allocated five billion rubles for municipal reform. But according to the State Duma Committee on Local Self-Government, 300 billion rubles will be needed to carry out the reforms (Migalin 2006).

¹³Of 1,859 local deputies elected in Arkhangelsk Oblast' in early October 2005, 31.3% have higher education. Women comprise 58% of all deputies, and 29% of the 202 heads of administration. On occupational background, and other classifications, see ‘Statistiki po isbrannym deputatam vnov’ obrazovannykh munitsipal'nykh obrazovanii', at the Arkhangelsk electoral commission website, available at: http://www.arkhangelsk.isbirkom.ru/way/1223187/sx/art/1290873/cp/1/br/1223186, accessed 8 November 2005.

¹⁴‘Spiker dumy Stavropol'ya: Zakon ob organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya neobkhodimo korrektirovat'’, available at: http://www.urbaneconomics.ru/texts.php?folder_id=197&mat_id=344, accessed 16 May 2007.

¹⁵By the summer of 2006, 46 of 88 regions had passed or amended legislation on local government reform, while 40 regions continued to drag their feet. Two regions (Chechnya and Ingushetiya) do not have local government (Ragozina 2007; also available at: http://www.urbaneconomics.ru/texts.php?folder_id=197&mat_id=371, accessed 15 May 2007).

¹⁶T. Chuprova, ‘Gubernskii labirint’, 2005, available at: http://www.arhpress.ru/labarint/2005/10/20/3.shtml, accessed 10 November 2005; O. Podgornykh, ‘Vsya vlast’ sovetam!', Krasnoborskaya gazeta, 19 October 2005, available at: http://www.arhpress.ru/krasnoborsk/2005/10/19/7.shtml, accessed 10 November 2005; O. Podgornykh, ‘Obsuzhdeniya proektov ustavov proidut v noyabre’, Krasnoborskaya gazeta, 28 October 2005, available at: http://www.arhpress.ru/krasnoborsk/2005/10/28/6.shtml, accessed 10 November 2005.

¹⁷O. Nikitina, ‘Sredi deputatov predstaviteli vsekh otraslei’, Zvezda, 28 October 2005, available at: http://www.arhpress.ru/zvezda/2005/10/28/7.shtml, accessed 10 November 2005; Velikaia and Shishkin (2003).

¹⁸Article 32(2) states: ‘Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to elect and be elected to bodies of state authority and bodies of local self-government and to participate in referendums’. Article 130(2) states: ‘Local self-government shall be effected by citizens through referendums, elections, and other means of direct exercise of their will, and through the elected and other bodies of local self-government’.

¹⁹Recently, a number of mayors, including Grigory Limansky, the mayor of Samara, have been subject to criminal investigations (Bigg 2006). Nikolai Petrov has suggested that mayors are losing out in a struggle for political and economic power at the regional level (Petrov 2007).

²⁰Guseva (2004); author interview with Valerii Kirpichnikov (see fn 6).

²¹Federal'nyi zakon, ‘O vnesenii izmenenii v otdel'nye zakonodatel'nye akty Rossiiskoi Federatsii v svyazi s sovershenstvovaniem razgranicheniya polnomochii’, 31 December 2005, available at: http://www.rg.ru/2005/12/31/polnom.html, accessed 12 October 2006.

²²Postanovlenie Konstitutsionnogo Suda RF ot 15 Maya 2006 g. N 5-P, available at: http://www.garant.ru/prine/20060524/12047167.htm, accessed on 15 May 2007. The court ruled that the state might, rather than must, transfer funds accordingly.

²³L. Oparina, ‘Vybory po novomu zakonu priznany sostoyavshimsya’, 3 October 2005, available at: http://www.dvinainform.ru/news/2005/10/03/33293.shtml, accessed 10 November 2005.

²⁴‘V Rossii proshli mestnye vybory’, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/russia/newsid_6438000/6438841.stm, accessed 15 May 2007. As local elections often coincide with regional elections, it is increasingly difficult to determine voter participation in municipal elections.