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Recognizing the depth and serious threat that regional recalcitrance presented to the success of Russian economic development, almost immediately after his May 2000 inauguration President Putin moved swiftly to address provincial challenges to central authority. Vowing to reestablish and reassert the strength of the Russian state and the “vertical” chain of authority from center to periphery in particular, Putin launched a multi-front war on regional resistance to the Kremlin. This effort culminated in his decision (and the Duma's quick ratification of this proposal) to eliminate competitive elections for regional governors entirely by February 2005. As noted earlier, this was done in the immediate wake of the Beslan school hostage-taking tragedy in the fall of 2004 (where he blamed, with little evidence, regional officials for a botched rescue attempt). This was, presumably, merely a pretext for cracking down harder on regional officials who had long thwarted federal policy. This dramatic measure also amounted to an admission of the failure of previous efforts to gain control over policy in the provinces. But just as President Yeltsin, in the absence of strong, competitive political institutions, built an unconsolidated Russian democracy with limited accountability of elected officials, Putin's solutions to Russia's regional problem amount to an attempt to build authoritarianism lacking an authoritative state – authoritarianism without authority. That is, although Putin correctly identified the danger of regional resistance to central authority in rebuilding the Russian state as an effective policymaking and policy-implementing device, he offered incomplete and perhaps ultimately ineffective solutions unlikely to break the powerful business–government nexus in the provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As noted in Chapter 1, historically Russia has always presented distinctive governing challenges. As far back as Ivan the Terrible, Russian rulers have lamented the great distances between Russian administrative outposts and the obstacles to coherent state policies this distance alone presented. Perhaps, then, it should come as little surprise that successive leaders of the contemporary Russian state have faced frustration in trying to convey authority across this vast expanse. Adding to the difficulties presented by Russian geography is the fact that population density (8.5 people per square km) is among the lowest in the world, and communications infrastructure even in the twenty-first century is often primitive to say the least. Yet, while the challenges of Russia's geography have been more or less constant throughout its long history, different regimes have had varying degrees of success in conveying state authority across territory. In the immediate post-Soviet period, however, the central state faced particularly widespread and persistent challenges to its authority beyond the Kremlin walls. This chapter begins by very briefly exploring the main mechanisms by which the Russian periphery was ruled during the Soviet period. This section contrasts the hypercentralization of the Soviet period with the rapid decentralization and sharply reduced governing capacities of the late Soviet and then post-Soviet Russian state in the first decade following the Soviet collapse. The chapter then moves to an examination of the patterns of regional defiance of central authority across time, policy area and region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way in which the Russian state might have become better vertically integrated in the past, and might perhaps do so in the future, is through the creation of unifying political institutions. In other political systems, political parties have served as links between national and local political actors. Political parties within the context of a competitive electoral system are one method by which to interrupt the collusive relationship between regional business and government that can be so detrimental to the creation of a unified political, economic, and legal expanse. Political parties are key institutions for building democracy and also key institutions in maintaining a cohesive state. Parties serve as conduits between civil society and the state, and also between center and periphery. They can promote coherence in policy platforms across nation-states. In short, parties can solve collective action problems by integrating the polity as well as by aggregating interests. But with the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and the limited role that both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin ascribed to political parties in their respective presidencies, it is hard to see a truly national party system that stretches from center to periphery developing in present-day Russia. Indeed, Putin's moves by 2004 away from electoral democracy at the regional level may well have permanently doomed the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explains the patterns of noncompliance and eroding central state infrastructural capacity in the provinces through the 1990s that were established in Chapters 3 and 4 and to which President Putin so strongly reacted by the end of 2004 (described in detail in Chapter 7). In presenting this explanation, I build empirically on the theoretical argument presented in Chapter 2 regarding the negative effect on central state capacity of the collusive relationship between regional government actors and enterprise directors. I begin, though, by discussing contending arguments regarding how the central state exercised its authority in the provinces in the past, including a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of mechanisms of Russian fiscal federalism and strategies on the part of the federal government to deal with regions bilaterally in an effort to “divide and conquer” them politically. I argue that none of these responses to regional resistance actually struck at the core of the problem – the business–regional government nexus. The persistence of regional compliance documented in Chapter 3 and the responses from policy actors that are presented in Chapter 4 indicate that instruments like withholding transfer payments or subsidies and subventions to errant provinces or signing bilateral treaties with some regions but not others turned out to be blunt weapons in the battle to gain better implementation of federal policy more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century was bracketed by two seminal events: the formation of the Soviet Union through the revolution of 1917, and the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. Far from being the end of history that Karl Marx might have predicted, the withering and then demise of the Soviet state brought with it the rebirth of Russia. In the early 1990s many hoped that the renewed Russian state would succeed where its Soviet predecessor had ultimately failed – in the provision of public goods and services to an exhausted and impoverished population. After more than a decade of incomplete reform, however, few Russians had attained the benefits of their nation's most recent great transformation. Indeed, the central state's halting abilities to extract revenues, enforce contracts, pay public sector wages on time, provide meaningful poverty relief or even basic social services defined the immediate post-Soviet transition effort. This book identifies the Russian state's inability to extend its authority across the vast Eurasian landmass as the primary problem of post-communist governance. Indeed, the task became so challenging that Russia's second post-communist president, Vladimir Putin, using the tragic deaths of hundreds of schoolchildren and their parents at the hands of Chechen insurgents in the southern town of Beslan, opted by the fall of 2004 to abandon even the pretense of democracy in Russia's provinces in favor of more centralized control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As I noted in Chapter 1, the central state's capacity to implement its programs and policies can be measured in a variety of ways. Where Chapter 3 used a data set derived from Russian media reports of regional noncompliance with federal law and the constitution in order to discern patterns across time, policy area, and region, this chapter explores in greater detail the patterns of relative central state infrastructural or administrative capacity in the regions. For despite all of the evidence in the preceding chapter of regional threats to central state capacity through noncompliance with federal law and the constitution, it is possible that regional politicians may have passed legislation that presented a serious challenge to central state capacity only to make a political point, but their policymaking and policy implementation activities tended to basically abide by federal norms nonetheless. If this were true, then simply citing examples of widespread legal noncompliance with federal power would mask the reality of federal control over Russian public administration in the regions. One method of addressing this possibility is to actually ask public officials in the periphery about how policy was made and implemented concretely, and what influenced both of these processes in the 1990s. This chapter, therefore, evaluates the concrete power balance between the central state and the periphery through interviews with 824 public officials in 72 of Russia's 89 provinces. Local teams of Russian interviewers conducted face-to-face interviews between September 30 and November 30, 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Chapter 1 noted, this book is devoted to explaining the weak political and administrative capacities of Russian central state institutions in the periphery following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. A thorough analysis of this question, however, requires an examination of the institutional mechanisms by which the Soviet state extended its authority across the periphery. This too begs the question as to whether or not Soviet central institutions were all that successful in governing disparate territories. This is particularly relevant too in light of Putin's turn toward a more centralized, authoritarian rule of Russia's provinces in 2004, discussed in the concluding chapter. In 1968, Samuel Huntington wrote admiringly that [T]he one thing communist states can do is to govern; they do provide effective authority. Their ideology furnishes a basis of legitimacy, and their party organization provides the institutional mechanism for mobilizing support and executing policy. But if the communist regime of the Soviet Union was so capable of governing, how and why did the system collapse? How did the nature of its collapse constrain the reform options for post-Soviet institutional designers? In what ways did these constraints and resulting decisions render Russian central state institutions deficient in penetrating provincial politics? This chapter responds to these fundamental questions. One increasingly popular line of argument in the post-Sovietological literature puts the blame on Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president, and his reform team of “neo-liberal shock therapists” as well as their foreign economic advisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]