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Gordon M. Hahn is a visiting research scholar with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, political analyst for TheRussian Journal, and the author of Russia's Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (Rutgers University, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002).
An indicator of whether President Vladimir Putin's policies will strengthen or weaken Russia's fragile semidemocracy is his reform of federal-regional relations. On assuming the Russian presidency in May 2000, Putin placed at the top of his agenda a policy of strengthening the Russian state's "executive vertical" and reintegrating the Russia Federation's economic and legal space. Many Russian and Western analysts interpret Putin's federal reforms as a course that, intentionally or not, will re-establish a tsarist-style unitary state, even Soviet-style centralization. Nikolai Petrov has argued that although Putin's goal is not the dismantling of either Russian semidemocracy or federalism, his policies are leading to just such an outcome. 1 Leonid Smirnyagin has argued the very opposite: that although Putin's federal reforms have been intentionally "antifederalist," they have functioned to strengthen Russian federalism. 2 In reality, the policy appears to have a sophisticated and yet ambiguous intent and inspiration.
Federal authorities have documented thousands of violations of the Russian Constitution in various regional constitutions and laws. According to Russian democrat Vladimir Lysenko, a third of Russia's regions are authoritarian, with constitutions and laws that violate the Russian Constitution and its provisions on democracy and civil rights. 3 For example, in Tatarstan, Komi, and several other regions, laws allow the local government to appoint, sometimes with the legislature's approval, mayors and district (raion) heads. Federal law requires that such officials be elected by popular vote. Thus, re-establishing central control over the wayward regions and re-establishing the unity of Russia's legal space are to a certain extent necessary for the stability of the Russian state and the consolidation of its weak democracy. The same may be true for the consolidation of Russia's bureaucratized, kleptocratic capitalism. Republican leaders frequently argue that regional law is often more progressive than federal law, but the fact is that regional law constrains market development as much as it does democratic development. As Minister for Economic Development and Trade German Gref notes, regional authorities have constrained business development...