Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008
From: Alfred Evans <evansalca@comcast.net>
Subject: The Reform of Local Government in Russia: Goals and Implications
Alfred B. Evans, Jr. is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science of California State University, Fresno; a coeditor (with Vladimir Gel’man) of The Politics of Local Government in Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); and a coeditor (with Laura Henry and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom) of Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006).
Most Western writings about politics in post-communist Russia have focused on the central and regional governments and have neglected trends at the municipal level. Yet government at the local level has been the topic of a great deal of discussion in that country in recent years, and the current reform of local government will have far-reaching consequences affecting the lives of almost all citizens of Russia. This essay will draw on recent Western and Russian writings that have analyzed the goals and potential consequences of that reform. Particularly valuable essays on that subject were published by Cameron Ross (in Demokratizatsiya, vol. 15, no. 2, Spring 2007) and John F. Young and Gary N. Wilson (in Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 59, no. 7, November 2007).
Article 12 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which was ratified in December 1993, makes a distinction between “state power” and “local self-government.” According to the Constitution, the institutions of the national government and the regional governments (oblasts, republics, etc.) comprise the organs of state power, while the institutions of cities and districts (raions, roughly equivalent to counties in the USA) are not part of the state, but are organs of local self-government (mestnoe samoupravlenie, or MSU). Thus the Constitution accepted the distinction between state authority and local self-government that had been established in a law adopted in the Russian republic of the USSR in 1991. Some observers argue, however, that the reform that is now in progress will virtually eliminate that distinction for practical purposes.
A commission headed by Dmitrii Kozak, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, drafted the new law on local self-government in 2002 after a series of well-publicized hearings. The law was adopted by the parliament in 2003. There had been extended and lively debate about the proposed legislation in the committee of the Duma (the lower house of the parliament) that considered it; the controversy aroused by the bill was suggested by the fact that about 6,500 amendments were proposed while it was being examined by that committee. When Putin signed the bill in October 2003 its implementation was scheduled for 1 January 2006, but later its full implementation was postponed until the beginning of 2009. Over one third of the regions of Russia began to put the legislation into practice in January 2006; all of the regions are to enforce it by January of next year. There has been unceasing controversy concerning that law since it was adopted, with many requests for changes in its provisions. Rossiskaia Federatsiia segodnia (hereafter RFs), 2008, no. 5 announced that the Ministry of Regional Development was preparing a draft of changes in the law on local self-government, to be introduced in April. We may conclude that the path of reform in local government in Russia has not been straight or smooth.
In the 1990s, the first years of post-communist politics in Russia, the conditions of local government presented a mixed picture. On the one hand, the Constitution and laws of Russia offered a degree of independence for the city and district governments that was reinforced by the direct election of their chief executives (the city mayor and the head of administration of a raion) and legislative representatives (though in some locales the chief executive was chosen by the local legislature). Also of great importance was the disappearance of the old structure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, since the party apparatus was centralized and government bodies had been subordinated to the party. On the other hand, in the 1990s local governments almost everywhere in Russia were in desperate financial condition, since their tax base would have been inadequate even in good times, and the steep decline of the Russian economy caused their revenues to plummet. The executive heads of cities and districts were forced to petition the regional governments for financial assistance on a regular basis, which compromised the independence of the local authorities.
A central goal of the commission on reform of local government headed by Kozak was to delineate the responsibilities of different levels of government as precisely as possible and to make sure that the financial resources at each level would match the functions or powers (polnomochiia) at that level. As Igor’ Babichev said in RFs, 2008, no. 1, “the main thing is to introduce order in the financial sphere, to determine income sources, to calculate how much money is need for spending responsibilities.” Cameron Ross notes that the new law is intended to put an end to the notorious “unfunded mandates” by which higher levels of authority have assigned responsibilities to local governments without providing sufficient funding to carry out those duties. Young and Wilson put the thinking behind that law in a broader perspective in relation to the main goals of the Putin leadership when they assert, “Creating a well-ordered state is part of a recipe for economic growth.” Another interpretation was suggested by Tomila Lankina in Russian Regional Report in October 2005 when she reported that critics of the new legislation asserted that it was “a political concession to the governors, who had lost many of their powers in the context of Putin’s federal reforms.” As an article in Moscow Times on October 24, 2007 pointed out, the governors (the regional chief executives) are more important than the mayors for delivering votes in national elections. Under both Yeltsin and Putin the national political leaders at times have favored the governors in order to gather political support from them and at times have tried to appease the mayors as part of an attempt to counterbalance the power of the governors. The adoption of the new law on local self-government in 2003 seemed to mark a shift in favor of the governors, which created apprehension at the local level that the Kremlin has sought to alleviate by allowing extensive public discussion of the pluses and minuses of the law and promising revisions in the law to soften its more unfavorable effects.
Nevertheless, the annual report for 2007 of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, an institution that was created by the national government, said flatly, “in the past year the state of affairs with regard to local self-government in the country as a whole has become worse.” Ross argues that the full implementation of the law that was passed in 2003 will decrease the fiscal independence of local government even in comparison with what existed before 2006, and “will also directly subordinate local governments to regional and federal bodies.” Young and Wilson, while offering a bit more optimistic assessment of the implications of the new law, do not disagree with that point. Viacheslav Glazychev, the chair of the Public Chamber’s commission on the regions, offered a scathing assessment in RFs, 2004, no. 4: “All this year the building of an exclusively regional system of administration, in which local self-government figures purely nominally, proceeded with complete noninterference, if not with the support, of the federal executive power.” In the same issue of Rossiiskaia Federatsiia segodnia, Vladimir Klassen, the deputy mayor of the city of Zhigulevsk, charged, “Through federal legislation a system has been built that reduces that freedom [of activity of local self-government] to nothing or leaves it without any meaning.” The Public Chamber’s report for 2007 had made the same point: “Practically everywhere is observed the tendency of suppression by regional and district authorities of the capability of local self-government independently to resolve questions of local significance.” Those sources suggest that for practical purposes the trend that is promoted by the new legislation will eliminate the constitutionally based distinction between bodies of state power and organs of local self-government.
The saving grace of the current reform, from the point of view of local officials, was supposed to be the promise that the law would assure municipal governments sufficient funding to enable them to satisfy the obligations that have been imposed on them. So far, however, local officials complain that they still lack the income needed to carry out their functions under the law. An article in RFs, 2008, no. 3 reported that participants in a gathering of representatives of local governments considered their greatest problem to be the inconsistency between the stated responsibilities of local self-government and its financial capabilities. Boris Gryzlov, the Speaker of the Duma, admitted in RFs, 2008, no. 5, “By far not all organs of local self-government dispose of a sufficient financial base to resolve the whole range of future tasks independently.” According to the Public Chamber’s report in 2007, in the previous year on the average small cities kept only 7 to 10 percent of the taxes collected in their locales, and their own tax revenue covered only 5 to 10 percent of their current spending.
Young and Wilson estimate that under the reform coming from the new law, income from local taxes will decrease as a share of total government revenue. Thus the mayors of cities still must rely on transfers of funds from the budgets of the federal and regional governments in order to try to perform the functions that are expected of them. In Moscow Times on October 24, 2007, Putin was quoted as saying that during the last few years the total of budgetary transfers to local governments had increased by 60 percent. Because of the high rate of growth of Russia’s economy since the late 1990s it has been possible to increase assistance to the cities. But the Public Chamber’s annual report argues that financial dependence on higher levels of government detracts from the incentive for local bodies to facilitate economic development in their locales in order to build a stronger income base of their own. On the other hand, the need for local governments to depend on the regional authorities for financial assistance serves a political objective, because it enhances the governors’ capacity to gather support from local officials.
In recent years there has been debate over a proposal that the governors be given the power to appoint the mayors of cities within their regions, especially in the regional capitals. That proposal was the essence of a bill that was introduced in the Duma by deputies of the dominant United Russia party in October 2006. After local officials protested vigorously, Gryzlov, the chair of the Duma and formal head of United Russia, announced that his party did not support the idea of replacing the election of city mayors with appointment by the governors. The fact that Gryzlov has found it necessary to reaffirm that position repeatedly (as in Nezavisimaia gazeta on February 13, 2008) implies that some people still support that proposal behind the scenes. And as Ross observes, the law that was adopted in 2003 gives various reasons for which regional governments can take over the functions of a local government or remove the chief executive of a settlement or district. More dramatically, since May 2006 there has been a rapid increase in the number of prosecutions of mayors for criminal charges, in what some Russian newspapers have labeled “the hunting of mayors.” In 2007 alone, twenty-seven chief executives of Russian cities were forced to leave office as a result of court orders. Both Moscow Times (April 13, 2007) and Kommersant (April 24, 2008) contend that such judicial proceedings are primarily motivated by political considerations, reflecting a decrease in the status of mayors as a result of the current reform and the desire of governors to eliminate any remaining degree of independence of the cities’ chief executives.
Since the 2003 law requires that every settlement in Russia, no matter how small, must have its own organs of “local self-government” and cannot formally merge with the government of the district in which it is located, the implementation of that legislation will entail an enormous growth in the number of local governments in the country. One source quoted by Young and Wilson estimated that under the new law the number of “municipal formations” in Russia will increase from 11,560 to 31,298. (Those authors also report that regional officials are putting pressure on the governments of settlements to surrender most of their powers to the municipal districts to which they belong.) Such a tremendous increase in the number of local governments will ensure sharp growth in the number of municipal officials and a substantial expansion of the need for financial resources to support the staff, facilities, equipment, etc. of the new local governments. The proponents of the reform hope that the actual increase in costs resulting from growth in the ranks of municipal governments will not be overwhelming, if existing facilities can be used in many cases and most elected officials in the smaller settlements will be part-time public servants. In some locales, however, expenses are said to have risen significantly as a result of the proliferation of local government entities, as in the district of Novomoskovsk, which previously had only one government for the whole raion but now has six municipal formations (RFs, 2008, no. 6).
During Vladimir Putin’s time in office as president of Russia there has been a marked tendency toward the recentralization of power, and, as Ross has said, centralization is now reaching the local level with the implementation of the current reform. Though the Constitution of the Russian Federation classifies bodies of “local self-government” as separate from the state, based on the premise that citizens should be free to resolve local issues independently, the essential notion of the new law is to assimilate governments at the lowest level to a vertical chain of command headed by the national executive leadership. While it is true, as Wilson and Young say, that the thinking behind that reform is technocratic in nature, putting a high priority on economic development, it is a bureaucratic version of technocratic thinking, seeking to create institutions that will facilitate coordination from the top down and relying primarily on bureaucratic means of countering the pathologies of bureaucratic structures. Young and Wilson accurately portray the Putin-Kozak reform of local government as reflecting Russia’s “pronounced proclivity towards erring on the side of administrative order rather than the encouragement of democracy.” (I would differ with them only in arguing that in the late tsarist period the zemstvos and city dumas provided a partial but significant exception to that pattern, despite their limitations, because they had independent sources of revenue and some space for independent decision-making.)
It also seems likely that the Putin administration is striving to create optimal conditions for manipulating local governments for its own political advantage. What Lankina said in 2005 remains true: “The Kremlin continues to regard local government as an instrument for furthering its political and electoral interests, and not of bottom-up citizens’ rule.” Another aspect of the style of the current leadership of Russia that may not be widely appreciated, however, is revealed by the fact that there has been open controversy about the reform of local government in Russia from the time when its goals became clear. Rather than trying to suppress such debate, the Putin administration has given opportunities for local officials to voice their complaints and has sought to reassure such officials that it is listening to them. Last year Putin himself told a conference of municipal leaders (Moscow Times, October 24, 2007) that if they had concerns about the effects of the law on local self-government, they should address the problems directly to the national leadership, and he held out the prospect that the law might be amended in response to their suggestions. In early 2008 (RFs, 2008, no. 3) Vitalii Shipov, a deputy minister of regional development, asserted that while in the past the mayors had complained of a lack of attention from the central government, now there is “confidence that the voice of the localities finally is heard.” We still may ask whether the voice of the localities will be as influential as the goals of the central leadership and the demands of the governors in shaping the institutions of local government in Russia.