Putin's federal reform package: A recipe for unchecked Kremlin power

Demokratizatsiya, Summer 2001 by Orttung, Robert

However, although the reform has knocked the governors down a peg, it had little direct impact on their power. On 1 September, Putin established the new State Council, whose membership includes the Russian president and all of the governors.' The body is purely consultative, designed to give the governors access to the president at least once every three months. The governors lost their ability to participate directly in the national legislature, but they did retain membership in a national institution.

The governors and regional legislative chairmen now appoint representatives under their firm control to replace them in the Federation Council (the change will take effect for all regions on 1 January 2002). Because the governors and regional legislatures can remove their representatives, they can keep them on a short leash. A two-thirds majority in the regional legislature can stop the governor from removing the representative, but as most governors control the regional legislature, this provision does not present much of an obstacle. The new members of the Federation Council will serve full time in the body, so they will be able to act on legislation much more effectively than the governors did when they went to Moscow two days a month for Federation Council sessions. Judging by the initial appointments, the new Federation Council will be made up of former governors and close friends of sitting governors. The governors will not have the ability to tell their representatives how to vote on every single issue, but the representatives will inevitably toe the governor's line as closely as possible.

The Seven Federal Districts

Given the muddled nature of Putin's reform of the Federation Council and creation of the State Council, his most important initiative was the creation of the seven federal districts. Again, the goal of the reform is to take power away from the governors and concentrate it in the hands of individuals and institutions more clearly subordinate to the president. To avoid encouraging potential separatism, Putin drew the boundaries of the new federal districts along the lines of the interior troop districts rather than the eight interregional economic associations that functioned during the 1990s.8 As a further sign of his intention to take power, five of the seven representatives Putin appointed came from the Federal Security Service or the military (see appendix 1). Only two were civilians: a former prime minister and a diplomat. Since there are seven presidential representatives and eighty-nine governors, the representatives are likely to have much better access to the president and work at a higher level, avoiding the kind of gubernatorial attempts to control federal officials that had been successful in the past.

Putin charged his representatives with coordinating the activities of federal agencies in the regions, monitoring the actions of regional authorities, and supervising the process of bringing regional laws into conformity with federal laws. These tasks bring the representatives into confrontation with the governors and the federal ministries. Whereas the governors had been able to influence the appointment of federal officials in the regions in the past, they appear to be losing that ability. The representatives also come into conflict with the Moscowbased ministries, who, like the governors, do not want to give up their power to the new players. Rather than creating a direct hierarchy of power from the president to the regions, Putin has created a triangle, with the representatives, governors, and federal ministries pulling in different directions.