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Local Government Studies
ISSN: 0300-3930 (Print) 1743-9388 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/flgs20
State versus society? Local government and the
reconstruction of the Russian state
Adrian Campbell
To cite this article: Adrian Campbell (2006) State versus society? Local government and
the reconstruction of the Russian state, Local Government Studies, 32:5, 659-676, DOI:
10.1080/03003930600896277
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03003930600896277
Published online: 24 Jan 2007.
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State versus Society? Local
Government and the Reconstruction
of the Russian State
ADRIAN CAMPBELL
School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, UK
ABSTRACT This paper sets out to demonstrate that the evolution of Russian local
government reflects the continuing debate between two traditions or theories of what
local government should be: a centralising tradition which does not recognise the claims
of either local autonomy or of political pluralism, and a romantic localism based on the
society theory of local self-government, which imbues local self-government with an
unrealistic mission and thereby (it may be argued) hinders the development of effective
local institutions, and thus indirectly supports the consolidation of the state centralism it
is opposed to. These two approaches to local government come into collision over the
status of districts, which are not entirely state or local government institutions. Whereas
the 1995 Law on Local Self-Government attempted to keep districts separate from local
self-government, this did not prove practicable, and the Law of 2003, by reintroducing
districts, may be seen as attempting to bridge the two opposing conception of the status
of local government.
Introduction: State versus Society Views of Local Government
The difficulty of applying any one model to the scale and complexity of
Russia’s territorial structure has meant that, paradoxically, debates around
the role, structure and functions of local government in Russia have tended
to polarise around two opposing abstract principles – the ‘state’ and
‘society’ models of local self-government (Vydrin, 2004: 36). According to
the state theory local authorities are an indivisible part of the state
administration and have no independent rationale or discretion, whilst
according to the society theory local self-government is created by society
and is wholly separate from the state (see Koveshnikov, 2002: 41–43).
The opposition between the centralised ‘state theory’ and the decen-
tralised ‘society theory’ has been central to each phase of reform of Russian
Correspondence Address: Adrian Campbell, International Development Department, School
of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Email: a.campbell@bham.ac.uk
Local Government Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 5, 659 – 676, November 2006
ISSN 0300-3930 Print/1743-9388 Online Ó2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03003930600896277
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sub-national government since the early nineteenth century (Heusala, 2005:
77). The main influence on the ‘society’ view was De Tocqueville’s idealised
picture of face-to-face local democracy in Britain and the United States,
whereas proponents of the ‘state’ theory looked to the French Napoleonic
model for inspiration (see Starr, 1972: 51–109).
As in Britain, where in the mid-nineteenth century De Tocqueville’s
writing inspired the view that self-government was part of a lost ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ heritage, by its nature opposed to a ‘Norman’ principle of the
centralised state (see Hunt, 2004: 196–212), so in Russia the tradition of the
village commune was upheld by opponents of ‘Western’ administrative
rationalisation (Vucinich, 1960). A more Western view, influenced by
German ‘free commune theory’ (see Soloviev, 2003: 11–15), according to
which local self-government precedes state authority, was propounded by
advocates of greater autonomy for the zemstvos, the local councils
established by the reform of 1864. As state institutions encroached on the
powers of the zemstvos in the late nineteenth century, so the belief that civil
society and the state were in opposition grew among Russian liberals, and
that elected local authorities were the vehicles of society that would supplant
state institutions (see Emmons, 1982: 433).
The incomplete modernisation of the Russian state pre-1917 prevented the
evolution of a workable system of co-operation between state and local
government, and the issue of local autonomy was effectively frozen for much
of the duration of the Soviet regime. As a result much of the academic and
policy debate on local government since 1991 has taken up where the
unresolved debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century left off. This
means that the thinking behind, and about, the local government reforms of
1995 and 2003 has been influenced by the state and society theories of local
self-government, and, more importantly, by what the two theories have in
common – the assumption that state and society are mutually exclusive.
Romantic localism was widespread in Central and Eastern Europe in
the early 1990s (see the introductory article in this collection, and that on
Poland and Ukraine). In Russia it falls into two categories – a Western
communitarian type, based on a Tocquevillian reading of local democracy in
the US, and a more traditional type, derived from the nineteenth century
Slavophile view of the Russian peasant commune. The latter type was more
influential in the early 1990s following publication of Solzhenitsyn’s (1990)
pamphlet which advocated ‘the democracy of small places’ as a basis for
social or national regeneration, although its central assumption – that
democracy should be built from below, and that small units are free from the
defects of democracy in large units because they have direct democracy –
retains adherents among supporters of local self-government across the
political spectrum. This view is curious in that in Russia it was the larger
cities that (although not without corruption of their own), from the early
1990s emerged as centres of political pluralism and local initiative and as the
main challengers to the tradition of government from above.
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Thus the society theory of local self-government, in both its liberal and
traditionalist forms, became attached to the communal or ‘settlement’
approach to local government structure – the idea that all settlements,
however small, have the right to elect their own mayors and councillors and
be constituted as municipalities in the full sense. Advocates of this view
opposed the competing ‘territorial’ principle (according to which rural
municipalities could be based on districts rather than individual settle-
ments), seen as synonymous with the state theory of local self-government
(although applied in several North European local democratic systems). The
assumed opposition between the settlement-society principle on the one
hand, and the state-territorial principle on the other, was to complicate the
local government reforms of 1995 and 2003, arguably to a critical extent.
One indisputable achievement of the society theory of local self-
government was the inclusion in the 1993 Constitution of Article 12, which
states that local self-government does not form part of the state
administration. This article is interpreted variously – either as indicating
local government’s total independence from the state, or as recognition of its
dual nature – expression of civil society but also provision of state-related
services (Bondar, 1997). A more pragmatic view is that the article does not
really imply independence, but acts as a means of limiting undue
interference from above (Kryazhkov, 1996). This polarisation between
subordination and separation of local government coloured debates on local
government reform, especially from the mid-1990s onwards. Article 12 did
not close the issue of local government’s autonomy, but provided a
framework for it nonetheless, and this constitutional guarantee had a direct
influence on policy. The following reminiscence, concerning the late Ivan
Polyakov, chair of the State Duma Committee on Local Self-Government
1996–2000 demonstrates this:
Polyakov had previously been 1st Deputy Governor of Moscow
Oblast. The Governor, Boris Gromov, didn’t like the fact that he
couldn’t fire mayors. He gathered them together and said that ‘that
stupid law may have been adopted, but it won’t be applied, so you are
subordinate as before’. He got Polyakov elected as an MP precisely in
order to get the law revoked. He became chair of the committee. He
called us together and said ‘your work is rubbish, the law is rubbish’. I
said that the Constitutional Court didn’t think so. I showed him the
Constitution and explained about Articles 9, 12 and 131. After two
months I heard him on the phone, telling a governor to read the
Constitution, Article 12. From then on he stopped trying to get the law
changed.
1
In recent years there have been moves to redefine the respective roles of local
government and the state to enable them to collaborate whilst remaining
distinct. The formulation now used is that of ‘public authority’ (publichnaya
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vlast’), analogous to the use of the public sector in the West to include both
central and local government. The Kozak Commission (the authors of the
local government reform of 2003) was however repeatedly criticised by
advocates of the society theory of local self-government for using this phrase
in relation to local authorities, this being taken as proof of an agenda of
absorbing the latter into the state. However the use of the term ‘public
authority’ in Russia pre-dates Kozak; in its 1998 judgment on the Komi
Republic, the Constitutional Court ruled that public authority did not
necessarily mean the state, and that it was therefore proper to refer to two
types of public authority – state and local (Shugrina, 1999: 18). Defining the
legal boundaries between local, regional and federal bodies of public
authority and their respective competences was becoming a major sector of
Russian legal research and publication – the term public authority was used
in Tikhomirov’s (2001) influential text on competences, whilst Chirkin
(2005) attempted to reintegrate Russian theories of society, as well as local
self-government, into a broad concept of public authority.
This preoccupation with legal resolution of the division of competences
between levels of government, and the benefits this might bring to both state
and society, may be seen as providing the intellectual background for the
Kozak Commission of 2001–04. Although the laws initiated by the
Commission were subject to political compromise, the widely held view
that the Commission was simply an expression of the Kremlin’s will to
centralise power is simplistic. The presidential administration contains
different groups with different ideologies and, whilst one faction pressed for
simplification and centralisation of the system of state authority, another
appears genuinely to have been seeking to strengthen the role of local
authorities in a law-based state. The motivation of those involved was very
likely not solely a belief in local democracy, but more the role that local
government could play in a system of public authority that would prevent a
return to the centrifugal tendencies that had characterised Russian centre–
regional relations during the 1990s.
Local Government and Federal–Regional Conflict
The introduction in 1995–96 of the election rather than the appointment of
governors meant that many governors and presidents (of constituent
republics) had by 1997–98 carved out personal fiefdoms (Ross, 2002: 174).
Territorial fragmentation was a consequence of a weak central state, viewed
by Linz and Stepan (1996: 391) as the result of privileging economic over
democratic state restructuring at the start of the decade. It was also a result
of endemic conflict between different levels of government. In 1990, at the
height of the struggle for power between the Russian Federation and
the then USSR, Boris Yeltsin had won over regional heads with the
injunction to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’ (Reddaway,
2004: 2).
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The result was not decentralisation but ‘autonomisation’, believed by
many at the time to be effectively irreversible (Mendras, 2001), whereby the
state was held together by a loose ‘parade of treaties’ bargained between the
centre and individual regions, creating an ‘asymmetrical federation’ (Kahn,
2001). The incapacity of the central state and the lack of oversight over the
periphery were seen as threats to the state’s survival (Stoner-Weiss, 2001:
134–135).
In this context, it was natural that the federal authorities should turn to
developing local government as a counterweight to the power of regional
governors (Sakwa, 2003: 250–251). However President Yeltsin’s abolition of
the soviets (councils) at all levels following his victory over the Russian
Parliament in 1993 (and their replacement by representative bodies with
more limited powers) had undermined the ability of municipalities to
challenge regional leaders. Instead, the shift of power to the executive at all
levels facilitated the development in some regions of a Russian variant of the
former South American tradition of caciquismo (Matsuzato, 1999), whereby
regional heads are able to manipulate local elections to get their favoured
candidates elected as municipal heads.
At the federal level systematic moves to cut back the power of the regions
were in preparation towards the end of the Yeltsin presidency. The
establishment of the seven federal okrugs (administrative super-regions as
extensions of the presidential administration, which removed a number of
key state-related powers from regional influence), one of the first acts of
Putin as President in 2000, was based on the recommendation of the SOPS
network of economic planners (see Granberg & Kustanov, 2003). The SOPS
(economic planning network) concept was to reassert the economic principle
over the administrative and national (ethnic) principles. The oblasts (regions)
and ethnic republics were seen as too small in population to be strategic, and
reflecting their origins as ‘mobilisation’ structures in the Stalin period.
Municipalities on the other hand were regarded as institutions more pre-
disposed towards economic development (Granberg & Kustanov, 2003: 67).
Not all initiatives came from above, however. In the late Soviet period
there had been a strong population shift towards the larger cities, especially
regional capitals, which offered superior infrastructure and quality of life
(Shaw, 1999: 163). Freed from their earlier dependence on regional
leaderships for food from the countryside, and powered by growth in
retailing and services and industrial recovery after 1996, the large cities
began to represent alternative centres of power (Nicholson, 1999: 41), which
brought them into conflict with governors, with the latter usually having the
upper hand (Slider, 2004), although in the highest-profile example of such a
conflict – Sverdlovsk Governor Eduard Rossel versus Ekaterinburg Mayor
Arkadi Chernetsky – the struggle for supremacy has continued at full
intensity from 1992 until the time of writing (Denezhkina, 2006). Such
conflicts are made the more intense by the pattern of concentrated
urbanisation, combined with relatively small sizes of regions: Ekaterinburg,
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the regional capital, accounts for 1,266,000 population out of a total of
4,612,000 in Sverdlovsk region (the next largest city in the region has only
390,000 – see Brunet, 2001: 349–358) and well over half the commercial
income. Regions such as Tambov and Cheliabinsk, where there are several
comparable urban centres, have seen less urban–regional conflict and more
development of local democracy (Matsuzato, 2004).
In the early 1990s, conflict had primarily been across the horizontal axis,
between mayors and councils (Campbell, 1992). After Yeltsin’s victory over
Parliament in 1993, representative councils at all levels were downgraded
and, particularly after regional heads acquired electoral legitimacy of their
own through direct elections after 1995–96, it was the large cities which
provided the most evidence of the survival of local autonomy in Russia, to
the extent of being credited with a ‘civilising mission’ in this respect
(Gel’man, 2002). This may be discerned at the level of local authority
associations, where the Union of Russian Cities has tended to play the
leading role within the wider Congress of Municipalities.
Despite this, the main local government reform of the 1990s, the Law on
the General Principles of Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation,
1995, put much emphasis on supporting the ‘settlement’ principle, giving the
full range of powers to local communities regardless of size, following the
pattern of territorial fragmentation seen elsewhere in Eastern Europe (see
Vanags & Vilka, Davey & Peteri, and Swianiewicz in this volume). The Law
was highly regarded within liberal circles, and internationally, and may have
assisted Russia’s accession to the Council of Europe (Federal Law, 2002).
The adoption of a settlement rather than a territorial approach meant
excluding the district (raion) from the system of local self-government.
The Ambiguous District Level
In the Soviet era, from the late 1920s onwards the basic local territorial unit
was the ‘raion’. Although regarded as the definitive Soviet institution, the
raion may also be seen as the direct descendant of the Tsarist-era uyezd,
itself a distant relation of the French department. The size of a raion varies
widely across different regions, but a total of 50–100,000 would be typical in
the more populated regions of Russia. A typical raion would consist of a
single urban ‘ raion centre’ surrounded by 10–20 separate rural communities
which depend on that urban centre for services, commerce and budgetary
support. Chistopol raion in Tatarstan is a good example – the total raion
population is 88,000, of which 66,000 live in Chistopol town (the raion
centre), with the remainder spread across 16 small communities up to 30 km
from the town (see Brunet, 2001).
The raion as a model was widely rejected by reformers in the 1990s, as it
was associated with the command structures of the previous regime, and
also because its status, as a kind of buffer between state and local
government, was hard to define. In evaluating the role of the raion in the
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countryside Vdovin and Vdovin (2004: 159) argue that, although in the
Russian Federation it is considered that (state) government and self-
government should be entirely separate, the two are inevitably blurred in
practice, particularly in the case of the raion, which is a level of self-
government but at the same time the lowest level of the state administrative
system.
Under the Soviet system raions as territorial units existed not only in rural
areas but also within the larger cities (i.e. those with more than a million
inhabitants), which thus operated a two-tier system, the raions (complete
with elected councils) being the lower level, not unlike London boroughs,
typically with a population of a quarter of a million. It was here that the
backlash against them began, in 1991, at the behest of Gavriil Popov (Yuriy
Luzhkov’s predecessor), the first elected mayor of Moscow. The city’s 33
constituent raions were abolished and replaced with ten prefectures and 147
municipalities (see Campbell, 1992). The prefectures have been the real
centres of decision-making below mayoral level, so that for much of the
period since 1991 the municipalities have been delivering on programmes set
by the mayoral administration. In St Petersburg in 1991 the same decision
was also taken, replacing the 23 raions and raion councils with 111
municipalities. These have however been throughout a byword for weakness
at the local level, having little capacity or resources, and this has more
recently been recognised by the city administration.
The campaign against raions (henceforth referred to as ‘districts’) as
territorial units, regarded by opponents as being creatures of the old regime
and not credible as organs of local self-government, was carried through
into the 1995 Law by specialists, notably Nechaeva, who had worked with
Mayor Popov on the previous reform, and sought to ensure that only one
level of municipal government was established under the new law, without
districts.
2
Unlike the earlier law on local self-government of 1991 (which,
like similar legislation in Ukraine, provided for local self-government only
below district level, with the district remaining purely state administration),
the Law of 1995 was drawn up on the assumption that districts would exist
neither as municipalities nor as state administration. In practice the majority
of regions were to retain districts, either as their one level of municipalities,
or as state administration organs, carrying out those functions for which the
municipal level lacked the capacity.
In the debates that occurred around the 1995 Law, two schools of thought
emerged regarding districts (Amirbekov, 2000). According to the first
school, the district should be counted only as an organ of state
administration. The second school of thought held that if the district were
removed from the system of local self-government, then all that would be
left would be ‘toy’ rural local authorities with no money or real power (very
much what happened in rural areas of Ukraine, where self-government was
deemed to exist only below district level, the districts themselves remaining
organs of state administration).
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By 1999 (Amirbekov, 2000), there were again seen to be two schools of
thought within the Federation Council (regional representatives) regarding
the problem of the weakness of first-level municipalities in rural areas –
either to bring (keep) them under state control and co-ordination, or to
create a two-tier structure, each tier to have distinct functions, so that the
upper level was able to carry out functions requiring economies of scale.
This may explain why in many regions the principles of the 1995 Law
were effectively inverted in practice. Whereas the Law sought to consolidate
the settlement (community) principle, in 43 of the 89 subjects the Law was
implemented on a strictly territorial principle, with the district as the only
level of self-government. This was seen as tantamount to abolition of local
self-government in the regions concerned.
However, in those regions that had implemented the Law as intended,
without a district level of local self-government, the municipalities created
were for the most part too small to fulfil most of the functions allocated to
them by the 1995 Law. This led to local government functions being carried
out by the districts after all, but by districts that were classed as organs of
state administration, without elected councils. Thus, where the 1995 Law
was implemented properly, it led (in rural areas) to a diminution of the
significance of local government and no elected political representation at
district level where most services were still carried out. The 1995 Law may
be seen as having been successful only in those regions where the district
level was maintained as a democratic level in its own right. The problem
was that the Law set out neither any division of functions between the two
levels (as the Constitution forbade subordination between levels of local
government) nor any basis for inter-budgetary finance between settlements
and districts.
3
There were thus two different views on the territorial/settlement problem
and the 1995 Law. On the one hand were those who thought the districts
were the problem and that they should be eliminated in favour of the
settlements, and those who thought that a (non-hierarchical) two-tier system
should be established. Early versions (in 2000) of what would become the
2003 Law considered abolishing districts altogether. In the event, although
the 2003 Law was to reintroduce the settlement principle far more seriously,
with a projected increase in the number of municipalities from 11,000 to an
estimated 24,000, its main contribution would be to establish the districts as
a second-tier municipality in its own right (although, in order to comply
with the Constitution the district would be classed as a different type of
municipality rather than a different level of municipality).
The 2003 Law on the General Principles of Local Self-Government
in the Russian Federation
4
The designers of the Law, primarily Alexander Shirokov, working under
Deputy Minister of Economy Vitaly Shipov, reporting to the Kozak
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Commission, set out to correct the perceived weaknesses of the 1995
Law (of which Shirokov had himself been one of the authors). These were
seen as an overemphasis on the independence of local government, based
on a simplistic reading of Article 12 of the Constitution, leading to too
little scrutiny of local authorities either from the state or from the public,
a set of functions allocated to all local authorities without distinction in
terms of size or capacity. The proposed remedy included the following –
to strengthen a multi-level system – towns (full powers), communes
(reduced powers in line with real capacity) and districts (those functions
that cannot be performed effectively at the level of individual settlements/
communes), introduction of contracts for top managers to raise
professionalism, shared administration and legal basis for inter-municipal
co-operation for small municipalities, increased powers for elected
councils and improved mechanisms for control by the public, allocation
of property and income tax to local level, together with mechanisms for
delegating budgets up from settlement level to districts level (Shirokov,
2003).
Shirokov’s approach was noteworthy in that, unlike that of some fellow
enthusiasts for local government development in the 1990s, it avoided seeing
local government in purely political terms, or as an inalienable right, or as
an end in itself, but saw it as an organisation aimed at service delivery and
improving the quality of life of citizens. This represented a change from
Shirokov’s view in 1998, when he had expected the libertarian Law of 1995
to provide a framework for local government which it would grow into over
20 years.
5
Disenchantment among the authors may have been the reason
whereby, instead of leaving it to the innate goodness of local government to
improve services to the public, legal means were now sought to make
municipalities more accountable. Thus it was that the Kozak Commission
(whose political agenda at the outset appeared to be to reign in regional
power rather than local power) ended up placing restraints on the power of
mayors, moving away from the strong mayor model, introducing city
managers and, once the governors were themselves tamed by President
Putin’s announcement (following the Beslan terrorist attack of August 2004)
that they would henceforth be appointed, to allow greater influence of the
regional authorities over local government.
This agenda for change is evident throughout the report of the broad-
based State Council for Local Self-Government
6
which included many of
the points that were to appear in the Law (although according to an
apocryphal story, the chair of the Council, Governor Sergei Sobyanin of
Tyumen
7
originally opposed the concept of the Law, but later decided to
bring the State Council’s report into line with it). Sobyanin’s report was the
first to raise the concept of three types of municipality – settlement-based
municipality, municipal district including settlement municipalities on its
territory, and large towns/cities which would combine the functions and
status of the other types.
Local Government and the Russian State 667
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Districts and Municipalities under the New Law
The importance of the district in the Kozak Commission’s overall agenda
was emphasised at a conference held by Commission in St Petersburg in
March 2002, where the Commission’s lead academic T.Y. Khabrieva
emphasised the difficulties caused by regions’ arbitrary designation of
territorial levels of local self-government and the fact that the list of local
functions was not differentiated by size or type of local authority
(Khabrieva, 2002), thereby introducing the idea of a two-tier system of
local self-government.
The main innovation of the new Law was to create a new hybrid
unit, the municipal raion (district), a territorial unit that would permit
greater economies of scale whilst allowing the (settlement-based)
municipalities to survive. The municipal districts would be primarily
responsible for inter-municipal functions and those functions for which
economies of scale played a larger role, for example health, education,
highways.
The municipal district would thus be at the same time an inter-municipal
body and a municipality in its own right. This dual nature gave rise to two
quite different concepts of the municipal district’s relationship to the
municipal settlements on its territory.
8
The first model was that of the municipal district as an association,in
which the power and resources ultimately rested with the municipal
settlements, which were more important than the district (the settlement
approach). Under this arrangement (inspired by the German kreise system)
the district council would be made up of the heads of the municipal
settlements,
9
who would become ex officio councillors, and the district
budget would be delegated to the district from the municipal settlements on
its territory, whose own heads made up the district council which would
then set the overall district budget. In this way the municipalities would
retain control of all district expenditure.
10
The second model was that of the municipal district as an integrated
municipal structure in its own right (the territorial approach). Under this
approach the district council would be elected by direct proportional
elections
11
and the budget of the district would be integrated and quite
separate from those of the municipal settlements on its territory.
12
The association model was the one initially favoured by the Kozak
Commission as it was seen as guaranteeing autonomy for the new first-level
local authorities and was seen as the more radical option, whereas the
integrated model was more conservative. Both already existed in approx-
imate form even under the 1995 Law, in different regions. Vologda Region,
for example had examples of both models in different districts, reflecting the
preferences of the communities concerned.
13
The second option by contrast was seen by many as being more
easily controlled by regional governors, either because districts were by
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nature more conservative and hierarchical, or simply because it would be
easier to control the district councils if they were not also accountable
downwards to a large number of municipalities, each of whom would have,
under either option, their own elected leadership (it might also be easier to
influence one district council election than all the constituent municipal
elections). No one argued what in a different context might have appeared to
be a tenable view that the integrated district would be a stronger institution,
with its own mandate and therefore able to resist pressure from above in the
same way as the large cities did.
Although the Kozak Commission preference was for the association
model, it was decided to give regions the option to choose between the two
models, and this choice was incorporated into Articles 35 and 53 of the Law
on Local Self-Government of 2003. In practice the choice was deferred as,
with new municipalities starting at both levels on the same date, it was not
possible for the indirect option to be chosen in advance and so the
proportional election route was the default option for most regions. The
upward delegation of budgets from small municipalities also began to seem
a less practicable option as the new municipalities would not exist prior to
the Law’s start date of 1 January 2006 (it would be difficult to establish new
districts made up of the heads of new first-level municipalities) and has not
been adopted in most regions.
If the association model of the district council began to recede as an
option, it did have one major consequence for the local government
system. The Law provided for there to be professional heads of
administration in the case of the association model, rather than having
the elected political head act as, in effect, chief executive as well. In the
case of the association model it was seen as necessary for there to be a
commission to select the person concerned, so that the choice did not
benefit any of the constituent municipalities of the district. The regional
governor was to have the power to nominate 30 per cent of the
membership of that commission (50 per cent in new municipalities, for
the first time such an appointment is being made), thereby allowing the
governors to have a direct role in appointing the head of administration of
the district, although the contract for the head of administration would lie
with the council or the council chair (municipal head). These provisions
have subsequently been extended to all municipal districts and to the city
okrugs (see below). The association model, whilst being regarded as the
most conducive to local autonomy, has thus led to bringing the regional
leadership into the process of appointing the municipalities’ heads of
administration, contrary to the spirit (although not the letter) of Article 12
of the Constitution.
The association model of the municipal districts could very likely only
have been viable in most cases if a minimum population of 5,000 for first-
level municipalities had been stipulated, rather than the 1,000 (3,000 in more
densely-populated areas) the Law prescribed, thereby ensuring that they had
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the capacity to carry out the complicated role required. Some had
argued in the Commission for a minimum of 10,000, but the latter’s view
was that anything above 1,000 as a minimum would disenfranchise small
communities, and complaints were made by local residents even about the
minimum of 1,000 population, which required some mergers of small
communities.
14
Cities – City Okrugs
Initially it appears to have been assumed that larger towns and cities
could simply combine the status of first- and second-tier municipalities and
carry out the functions of both. However it became clear that a third
category or type of municipality would be needed if the regions were to be
prevented from dividing cities up into smaller settlements, or made
subordinate to a higher district structure. This third category was that of
the city okrug, comparable to a UK metropolitan authority. The main
sticking point here was the population threshold above which a town or city
automatically qualified for the status of a city okrug. Various figures were
considered – 50,000, 100,000 and (under pressure from the regions), even
200,000 was accepted by the Duma, but to get the Law through the
Federation Council of regional representatives it proved necessary to
abandon any threshold at all. (In fairness it would have proved difficult to
find a figure that would have suited the wide range of population densities in
different regions of the Federation. There was a fear all the same that
regions would deny the status to ‘disloyal’ cities, or that, alternatively, too
many small towns would achieve the new status, in the event the latter
proved more of an issue.)
There were thus two complementary dangers – either the towns would be
bled by the subsidies to the countryside, if they stayed in the district (this last
was partially offset by a capping level for ‘negative transfers’ between
municipalities within a given district) or the reverse – that prosperous cities
would gain city okrug status and deny resources to surrounding villages.
Kozak himself was particularly concerned that if towns of, for example,
50,000 population had the right to be separate authorities, then this would
deprive the rural districts of their centres and sources of growth.
15
However it proved necessary to sacrifice any population threshold for the
city okrugs in order to get the draft law past the Federation Council (of
regional representatives). In the event there were to be far more city okrugs
than previously envisaged, typically more than five per region, whereas
original expectations has been that only the largest cities would qualify.
Some subjects attempted to cover their territory with a small number of city
okrugs, thus creating a one-level system (as they had done with the previous
Law of 1995). This loophole was closed by an amendment of 29 December
2004 restricting the boundary of city okrugs to the areas covered by their city
physical development plans.
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Assessments of the Law
The Law proved a source of continuing controversy and complexity, with 13
sets of amendments between October 2003, when it was first passed, and
October 2005.
However, most debate has been about fundamental principles. This is
perhaps because the Law attempts to bridge the principles of state and
society theories of local government, and the conviction on both sides of the
debate that these two should be kept separate. Advocates of the ‘society’
theory of local government subjected the Law to severe criticism, the lead
given by the President of the Urban Economics Institute:
The main deficiency of the law, from which flow all the others, is with
its concept and ideology. Its starting point is that local self-
government is part of a construct termed ‘public authority’. According
to the Constitution local self-government does not form part of state
authority, so they have had the idea of making it the third level of
public authority. They have thereby found a way of incorporating
local self-government into the state, forming the lowest level of state
power rather than independent local self-government wherein the
population independently, and responsible to itself, decides local
matters. (Kosaryeva, 2002)
However, the assumptions behind this view could be questioned. One critic
of the Law considered the others to be criticising the wrong aspects of the
Law:
The Institute of Urban Economics is criticising the law from an even
more extreme position of that view which caused the trouble in the
first place – the idea that local government is to be formed from below
on a courtyard by courtyard basis. The Commission in effect ignored a
whole ideology of local government, that of large cities, under the
pretext of helping local self-government develop in tiny units.
16
The settlement-based policy continues to be a source of debate,
although among those who had supported it over many years there were
some doubts:
We have 350 municipalities but it should be 160. There are 8 city
okrugs, which act as raion centres also. Kozak came to see us, liked
our approach to the 1995 Law. However it’s not sustainable – we lose
14,000 population from rural areas every year. It’s too expensive in
terms of staff. But if we merge the small authorities, those communities
will die. Their only hope is to have authority actually based in their
community.
17
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Finally, what is the significance of the postponement (from 2006 until 2009)
of the Law’s coming into full force? For some this represents a climb-down
in the face of pressure from those regions which are uncomfortable with the
pro-local autonomy aspects of the Law. For others it was a tactical measure,
which prevented these regions from using their main argument, that there
was not enough time to implement it. In any case the postponement only
affects new municipalities, so that where districts already exist as
municipalities, as with all other existing municipalities, the Law comes into
force from 1 January 2006.
18
The number of municipalities of different types that exist under the new
law is set out in Table 1.
Inside or Outside the State Hierarchy?
Once the decision was taken, following the Beslan events, that henceforth
regional heads would be appointed (in effect – the actual procedure is for the
President to propose a candidate to the regional council or election by that
body), there was feverish expectation that this principle would be extended
to mayors, especially those of large cities. This would finally bring the cities
into the state hierarchy, justifying the predictions made by critics of the Law
of 2003.
Mikhail Ponomarev, Deputy Minister of Regional Development, visiting
Ekaterinburg on 15 December, declared that mayors of million-population
cities would be elected, not appointed, and that this was clear from the
Russian Federation having signed the European Charter of Local Self-
Government. Mayor Chernetsky echoed this, saying that the question of
appointment of mayors was a dead issue – there was the European Charter,
there was the Constitution, and mayors would be elected, ‘as in all civilised
countries’.
Meanwhile the vice-speaker of the State Duma, Liubov Sliska (formerly
deputy governor with responsibility for local self-government in Saratov,
and perhaps therefore not an ally of local self-government) declared that the
reform of the vertical should be extended to the capital cities of subjects:
‘I am unconditionally in favour of mayors being elected. At first it should be
mayors of capital cities, and then, if possible, all the rest.’ This brought a
reaction from chess champion Gary Kasparov, representing the liberal
Committee-2008, who said that the liquidation of local self-government
would lead to Russia being expelled from the Council of Europe.
Table 1. No. of municipalities as of 1 March 2005
Total
municipalities City Okrugs Municipal districts Rural settlements Urban settlements
24,396 532 1,805 1,9736 2,087
Source: Russian Federation Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
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In Omsk, 22 employees of OmPO Popov Radiozavod registered as
candidates for mayor, the only point in their programme being that mayors
should be appointed, not elected
19
(the owner of the factory clearly having
an interest, or wishing to please the regional authorities).
Oleg Syssuev, President of the Congress of Municipalities, stated the
presidential administration has already worked out how to give governors
control over the selection of the mayors of regional capitals. The
presidential administration was struggling so that appointment would not
be merely by representative council, but the region would have influence
over this process (as they already did through having half the seats on
the selection panels for district managers). What made it difficult for
them was that the principle of independence of local self-government
was included not only in the Constitution but also in the European
Charter.
20
The above points are a sample from an extensive debate that took place in
the media and in most of the relevant institutions, and in which it was clear
that the Russian elite, right up to the presidential administration, was
sharply divided on this issue, even within the presidential administration. It
was finally announced in May 2005 by Igor Shuvalov, Deputy Head of the
Presidential Administration, to a meeting of his Commission, the successor
to the Kozak Commission, that he had spoken to the President who had
assured him that there was no question of the state vertical being extended
to local self-government. One anonymous commentator subsequently
observed that:
Even though the governors are now being appointed not elected,
which means that they can be given more functions by the federal
state, there is still a need for a counterweight to them on their territory,
and this is why local government, even in the large cities, will never be
subordinated to the state vertical.
21
The fact that rumours had circulated which had suggested mayors might be
appointed, whereas for structural political reasons (as well as European
principles) this was not likely to happen, could be seen as part of a ‘balance
of power’ strategy on the part of the federal authorities, whereby neither
mayors nor governors can take their position for granted. Although they
will still be elected, not appointed, they will have to work as part of triangle,
consisting of mayor (or head of municipality), chair of council and
professional city manager.
Conclusion
The state and society views of local self-government, which have shaped the
evolution of Russia’s system of local government, both imply that local
government and the state must be kept separate. Whilst this principle is
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undoubtedly useful as a shield against interference from above in local
authority business, it does make it difficult for local government to deliver
major services such as health and education, in that a rigid separation
between state and society will (except in the big cities) lead to a reliance on
small municipalities, since larger territorial bodies such as districts are by
tradition, and perhaps by nature, difficult to separate completely from state
influence. The Russian Law of 1995, by emphasising a system based on rigid
separation between local government and the state, and a settlement-based
system, led to unintended consequences, including the suppression of local
government in many regions. The Law of 2003 attempts to bridge the two
theories, by making a settlement-based first level of municipalities
mandatory, but introducing a second tier capable of managing larger
services (including delegated state functions). Whilst it is too early to claim
this as successful, the system may prove more effective in practice than its
(many) detractors predict, which suggests that it may be possible to find a
workable compromise between state and society views of local government
without local authorities losing their autonomy.
Notes
1 Interview with B. Smirnov, Moscow, Congress of Municipalities, 15 May 2004.
2 Conversation with T.A. Nechaeva, Nizhny Novgorod, 17 July 2005.
3 Presentation by Alexei Lavrov, RF Ministry of Finance, Moscow, 22 June, 2005.
4 FZ 131, 2003 Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya v Rossiskoi
Federatsii (Moscow: Os’ 89, 2005). Edition including all amendments up to 18 October 2005.
5 Interview with A. Shirokov, November 1998.
6 Kommissiya pri Prezidente Rossiskoi Federatsii po podgotovke predlozhenii o razgrani-
chenii predmetov vedeniya i polnomochii mezhdu federalnymi organami gosudarsdvenoi
vlasti, organami gosudarstvennoi vlasti subiectov Rossiskoi Federatsii i organami mestnogo
camoupravleniya. ‘Kontseptsia razgranicheniya polnomochii mezhdu federalnymi organami
gosudarsdvenoi vlasti, organami gosudarstvennoi vlasti subiectov Rossiskoi Federatsii i
organami mestnogo camoupravleniya’, Moscow, 2002.
7 In November, 2005, Sobyanin was appointed head of the Presidential Administration.
8 Discussion with working group for the Law on General Principles of Local Self-
Government in the Russian Federation, Moscow, June 2002.
9 FZ 131, 2003 Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya v Rossiskoi
Federatsii, Article 35.4.1.
10 FZ 131, 2003 Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya v Rossiskoi
Federatsii, Article 53.4.
11 FZ 131, 2003 Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya v Rossiskoi
Federatsii, Article 35.4.2.
12 FZ 131, 2003 Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii mestnogo samoupravleniya v Rossiskoi
Federatsii, Article 53.4.
13 Conversation with V.Ye. Pozgalev, Governor of Vologda Region, 29 October 2002.
14 Presentation by Kaluga Region at Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, 14 April
2005.
15 Interview with D.N. Kozak, 15 July 2002.
16 Interview with federal official, Moscow, July 2004.
17 Interview with Deputy Governor of Tambov Region, May 2005.
18 Interview with official in RF Ministry of Regional Development, November 2005.
674 A. Campbell
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19 Parlamentskaya gazeta, 1 March 2005.
20 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 15 March 2005.
21 Comment by the federal office at round table at Ministry of Economy, Moscow, June, 2005.
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