Chapter 8: The Russian Federation

Russia

Russia

is a federal state, whose constitution specifies six categorizations of eighty-three different local governments united together under one national federation, with three supreme branches of government.

Federalism

was established as the solution to the diverse needs and interests of the many disparate ethnic minority groups across the massive territory of the country, but the last decade or so has seen the erosion of federalism as local levels of government lose more and more power to the central national level.

Mongol invasions

Russia established a cooperative nobility, but under Ivan III (Ivan the Great), 1462–1505, and Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 1547–1584, Russia secured its independence and laid the foundation for the modern Russian state.

Tsars of Russia

were initially princes over Moscow, established under Mongolian rule, but after Ivan III, the tsars began a long tradition of strong, authoritarian, autocratic rule.

Catherine the Great (1762–1796)

held similar goals for westernization, drawing inspiration from ideas about science, philosophy, and religious toleration from Enlightenment thinkers of the west.

Russo–Japanese War of 1905

in which Russia was soundly defeated by what was once a similarly backward Eastern nation.

Japan

had modernized under a Western model, however, and built a world-class military that Russia was ill prepared to contend with.

Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917)

capitulated by creating the Duma, an elected national representative assembly, to move Russia onto a path of constitutional monarchy.

Marxism

is a political and economic ideology framed by Karl Marx in his nineteenth-century writings, the most famous of which is the Communist Manifesto.

Vladimir Lenin

who had written a pamphlet in 1905 after the Russo–Japanese War entitled What Is To Be Done, in which he advocated the creation and support of a small, elite revolutionary leadership of professional intellectuals who could guide the workers in pursuit of revolutionary success.

New Economic Policy (NEP)

gave peasant farmers private property ownership of their land, in addition to rights to earn profits on sales of their produce.

Joseph Stalin

emerged from the party’s internal power struggle to rule over Russia as Lenin’s successor from 1922 to1953.

Kulaks

who resisted collectivization were regularly either sent to forced-labor camps in remote parts of the country, summarily killed by state forces, or in many cases, turned in by their neighbors sympathetic to the demands of the regime.

collective farms

owned by the state would serve the purpose of feeding the cities, whose workers were doing what Stalin perceived to be the most important work of turning Russia from a backward agrarian nation into a modern industrial power.

Winston Churchill

famously characterized the military buildup along the border between democratic and communist countries as an Iron Curtain, which had descended across Europe, dividing the East from the West.

Nikita Khrushchev

rode a reformist wave within the party to win the power struggle after Stalin’s death, and he delivered the now famous secret speech to the assembled Communist Party leadership, in which he decried Stalin’s program of personality cult and rule by totalitarian fear.

Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982)

who articulated and exercised the Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet military intervention in any country where communist rule was threatened.

Mikhail Gorbachev

General Secretary from 1985 to 1991, promised reforms to save the communist economy from certain disaster through a three-pronged program.

Glasnost

Rather than continuing to attempt suppression of bad news of the Russian economy and dysfunction of its political institutions, Gorbachev allowed glasnost, or “openness” of the sharing and discussion of information as a limited form of free speech.

Perestroika

Perestroika was a program of limited market reform to try and bring modern economic practices to Russia.

Democratization

Gorbachev attempted to preserve the existing Communist Party structure while incorporating limited democracy through the creation of a directly elected Congress of People’s Deputies, who would also be empowered to choose a president of the Soviet Union.

Boris Yeltsin

famously spoke on top of a tank immobilized by the protesters, urging the military not to accept this unconstitutional action and calling for a national strike until the coup ended.

Asymmetric federalism

as opposed to the typical symmetrical federal system, in which all lower-level regional governments are given consistent, similar, constitutionally defined powers generally equal to one another.

Creation of federal super-districts

In 2000, responding to terrorist attacks believed to have originated in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Putin created seven Super-Districts.

Power to remove governors

The 1993 Constitution gave voters the power to directly elect their own governors in their local region, but the Constitution was amended to allow the president the power to remove a governor if that governor would not conform local law to the Constitution (or perhaps the president’s interpretation of the Constitution).

Power to appoint governors

Another change was made in 2004 to end direct election of governors altogether.

Federation council reform

The 1993 Constitution created the Federation Council as an upper house to represent the interests of local governments.

Managed elections

The 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections all exhibited signs of the state heavily influencing the outcome, if not fully “rigging” the election, through fraud or sham ballot counts.

State duma election reform

In 2005, the law changed State Duma elections from a partially single-member-district (SMD) and partially proportional representation (PR) system to a fully PR system, and raised the PR threshold to win representation from 5 percent to 7 percent.

Extending the presidential term

The 1993 Constitution called for a president to serve no more than two consecutive four-year terms.

Opposition candidates

cannot convince citizens to vote for them because to media restrictions.

Illiberal democracies

aren't democracies because those in power can use the state to protect their authority, thus voters can't hold a government accountable or vote it out.

Navalny

has been imprisoned multiple times for various white-collar offenses, generally within days of spearheading rallies against Putin and United Russia, and he has served time in prison and home arrest.

Liberal Democrats

are neither liberal nor democratic.

Liberal parties

have the potential to win elections and challenge Putin for power frequently have a difficult experience in communicating their message and getting their candidates on the ballot.

Siloviki

is a Russian term for people who worked in the security services such as the KGB (Russia’s Soviet spy service) or its modern day successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), agencies that Vladimir Putin worked for during his early career.

Boris Berezovsky

was a media tycoon who owned Russia’s most watched TV networks, and used his networks to help Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Mikhail Khordorkovsky

was once Russia’s richest man, worth over $15 billion, but used his money to fund opposition parties in the 2003 Duma elections and criticized the “managed elections” and corruption under Putin.

Igor Sechin

a former deputy prime minister of Putin’s, is Rosneft’s chairman of the board.

Appointment of the prime minister and the cabinet

The president may appoint a prime minister with the consent of a majority of the Duma.

Legislative powers

The president may draft bills and submit them to the legislature for their consideration, and he may sign or veto any bills passed by both houses.

Issuing decrees with the force of law

The president controls the policies of the state through decrees issued to cabinet ministers, which act as the law of the land.

Suspension of local laws

The president may suspend a law or regulation in one of Russia’s regional governments if he believes it is contrary to the Russian Constitution, laws or treaties of the Russian Federation, or a violation of human rights.

Pardons and reprieves

The president may grant a pardon or a reprieve for any person under federal law.

Foreign policy

The president is empowered as Russia’s chief voice in foreign affairs.

Russia’s Federal Assembly

is a bicameral legislature with a lower house (the Duma) and an upper house (the Federation Council), and each possesses distinct character traits and functions.

Oblasts

mostly ethnic Russian, elect their own legislature and governor.

Republics

are ethnic minority homelands with their own constitutions.

Shock therapy

left most Russians damaged, as poverty rose to 10 times pre-Soviet-collapse levels and inflation and unemployment hit them more than the Great Depression.