In the two volumes under review here, Dr. Matsuzato and his collaborators continue their efforts to document and explain the power dynamics in the former Soviet Union at the local and regional level. Together, these two volumes describe these processes in all six ethnic republics of the Volga and Urals regions, with volume 7 covering Tatarstan, Udmurtia, and Mordovia, while volume 8 examines Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and Mari El. Each of the regional chapters, written or co-written by a local social scientist, has a similar structure, starting with an overview of the region, then a chronology of political events from 1988 to the date of writing (which ranges from 1998 for Tatarstan and Mordovia to 2002 for Bashkortostan), and concluding with a set of short biographies of the region’s political elite. Several of the chapters are accompanied by diagrams that show the changes in the composition of the local elite over time. Finally, each of the volumes includes an introduction by Dr. Matsuzato, which sets out the comparative framework for the whole enterprise and draws comparisons among the regions. In this review, I first describe Matsuzato’s general model of regional power consolidation and then turn to a discussion of each of the regional chapters.
The Matsuzato model of local power consolidation is quite simple. The most important proposition is that authoritarianism develops in regions where governors (called presidents) have the power to appoint raion-level administrators. In the six regions discussed in these two volumes, this outcome has occurred in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Mordovia. Efforts by the republic leadership to end the election of local leaders failed in Udmurtia and Mari El and were not attempted in Chuvashia. Furthermore, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the appointed local bosses are required to run for seats in the republic parliament. This system, which Matsuzato calls centralized caciquism, in effect merges the executive and legislative branches of government and allows the governor to control all levers of power in the republic. At the same time, the extent of elite consolidation varies even in the authoritarian regions. In Matsuzato’s model, consolidation depends on the extent of internal divisions within the region. Such divisions can be caused by clan or ethnic divisions within the regions. If the authoritarian elite is not consolidated (as in Bashkortostan and Mordovia), the government tries to maintain control by repressing the press, gerrymandering electoral districts, and preventing opposition candidates from registering for elections. If it is consolidated (Tatarstan), the rulers feel secure enough to allow more open discussion in the media and even some public opposition, so we see fewer violations of human rights.
The weaker republics featured frequent turnover of government and occasional (and sometimes successful) attempts to eliminate the office of the president and restore parliamentary rule. In their weakness, their efforts to catch up to Tatarstan led to sporadic attempts at repression, which were foiled in Mari El and Udmurtia but succeeded in Mordovia. Only Chuvashia has had a succession of relatively liberal regimes throughout the 1990s.
In five of the six republics there was a period of political instability in the early 1990s, as the disintegration of the Communist political system led to a search for new formulas for stable government. Only Tatarstan avoided such instability, primarily because its leaders instituted a republic presidency early on as part of their competition for power with Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government.
Relations with Moscow play a notably minor role in the consolidation of local authority. Under Yelstin, Moscow had an impact on local politics only if it had local allies with some independent source of power and influence. Moscow has also been able to arbitrate whenever local political conflicts threatened to get out of control, as they did in Mari El in 1996 and Udmurtia in 1998. While Putin has frequently spoken of the need to strengthen central control of the regions, he has only succeeded in imposing such control on the weaker regions, as exemplified by the continuing and seemingly never-ending battle to bring the constitutions of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan into conformity with the federal constitution.
While these volumes make available a wealth of new information about local politics in Russia, they suffer from one weakness. While Matsuzato’s introductory theoretical discussion of the patterns and sources of local political power is very enlightening, several of the chapters lack any sort of theoretical framework. The chronologies in the Tatarstan and Mari El chapters particularly resemble simple lists of events. The readers of these chapters would have been much better served had the authors used Matsuzato’s theory to frame the events of the last decade or just attempted to tie these events together into some kind of explanatory framework, such as was done by the authors of the Bashkortostan and Udmurtia chapters. This complaint, however, should not detract from the overall value of these books for any scholar interested in the patterns of power consolidation in the Russian Federation at the local level.
The Tatarstan chapter, written by Nail Mukhariamov, suffers the most from the lack of a theoretical framework. It includes a very useful background section on the republic, brief biographical entries on key members of the political elite, and a 95-page chronology that is meant to be the analytical centerpiece of the study. However, while the chronology provides the reader with a wealth of information about political developments in the region during the 1988-98 period, one is left with no real sense of why particular events were included or how early events influenced subsequent political developments in the region. Most of the focus in this discussion is on elections and changes in the political elite. At the same time, key protest events, such as the May 1991 nationalist demonstrations, are ignored. These demonstrations involved tens of thousands of participants and ensured that voting in the June 1991 Russian presidential election would remain optional in the republic, thereby setting the stage for the Tatarstani boycott of Russian elections that lasted until the signing of a special bilateral treaty with Moscow in February 1994. Similarly, the very detailed and interesting discussion of the events surrounding the parliamentary rebellion during the election of a new parliament speaker in 1998 does not address the likely causes of this unprecedented expression of open opposition to President Shaimiev’s decisions on who gets top posts in the republic. The biographical section also suffers from a lack of organization, as the entries are neither alphabetized nor categorized, requiring the reader to flip through the entire section when looking for a particular entry. Overall, this chapter serves as a useful source of background information on Tatarstan, its leaders, and its political life during the 1990s. But it does not contribute as much as it might have to explaining the development of centralized caciquismo in what is undoubtedly the most powerful republic in the region.
The Mordovia chapter, written by Sergei Polutin, presents a positive contrast to the one on Tatarstan. The biographical information on members of the elite is much more extensive and is organized by category. The set of tables describing the chronology of raion-level leadership is a particularly useful reference tool for anyone working on Mordovian local politics. The chronological overview, while briefer than the one for Tatarstan, is much better organized, with topical headings. The author makes an effort to explain the causes of key events, such as the fall of Vasilii Guslyannikov, the first president of the republic, and the success of leftist and nationalist parties in voting for the State Duma in the region. Polutin is a bit cautious in his discussion of the ascent to power and governing style of Nikolai Merkushkin, the current president of the republic, but this is only to be expected given the the authoritarian nature of Merkushkin’s rule and the author’s employment at Mordovian State University.
The Udmurtia chapter is by far the strongest in the first volume. It is co-written by Igor Egorov and Kimitaka Matsuzato, and includes some particularly useful graphical displays of leadership changes over time at the subregional level. The biographical section is organized alphabetically and is preceded by a table listing the holders of regional leadership positions over time. The chronology section is particularly strong. It explains why Udmurtia’s deviated from the Russian norm of presidential rule by adopting a parliamentary system of government in the early 1990s. This system, according to the authors, was instituted in order to ensure peaceful access to power for all of the republic’s power groups. Such a system was implemented because the republic lacked a dominant political figure in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Subsequent events showed that, once implemented, the parliamentary system became entrenched and proved difficult to change even for a dominant leader, as shown by the outcome of the republic’s mid-1990s constitutional crisis over whether the executive branch should have the power to appoint subregional chiefs. The authors spell out the demographic, political, and legal sources of the conflict and describe its eventual resolution through the institutionalization of a rules-based competitive political system.
The second volume begins with Mari El, written by Elena Belokurova and Olga Denisova. This chapter has a standard biographical section and introduction. The chronology section is similar to that of Tatarstan. The events are described thoroughly, but there is little discussion of their significance. The authors are also a bit too effusive in their praise of current president Markelov. While Markelov is certainly not the most repressive of Russian regional rulers (an honor that might well go to Bashkortostan’s President Rakhimov), he has made efforts to close down the opposition media. Some leaders of the Mari nationalist movement have also been subject to beatings by mysterious assailants. Markelov has also systematically attempted to remove his opponents from power, often through the courts. Unlike the authors, I am not at all certain that open criminal proceedings are a better method of dealing with political and economic opposition than secret battles in the corridors of power. Given these events, I am troubled by the authors’ concluding statement that “the republic has finally completed its transition to democracy (to the extent that it is possible in contemporary Russia).” The authors seem to believe that political stability and a liberal economic policy equals democracy. The record of stable pro-market dictatorships (such as Pinochet’s Chile) suggests otherwise.
The chapter on Chuvashia, with sections written separately by Dmitry Shabunin and Kimitaka Matsuzato, deviates somewhat from the standard format. In addition to the standard introduction, chronology and biography sections, there is a short section on the leadership styles of four key politicians in the republic, including the current president Fedorov, the leader of the Communist Party Shurchanov, the leader of the nationalist forces Khuzangai, and the centrist university rector Kurakov. In this section, Matsuzato describes the key factors that create the uniquely liberal political environment that characterizes Chuvashia. The chronology section is quite strong, with the focus on Shabunin’s explanation for Chuvashia’s liberal political system. Shabunin argues that this system is the result of a combination of President Fedorov’s natural liberalism, with his inability to assimilate or destroy the republic’s Communist Party. The dominance of leftist political views among the population, combined with the support among ethnic Chuvash for a native son who had achieved national prominence as Minister of Justice in the early 1990s, has led to the development of a stable bipolar political system in the republic. The chronology section describes the various events in a decade of Chuvash politics within this context. The final section of this chapter, co-written by both authors, describes subregional leadership changes in Chuvashia over time. In doing so, the authors describe the type of person most frequently appointed or elected to local leadership positions and show that the weakness of the perestroika-era local elite played an important role in preventing the development of caciquism in Chuvashia.
The Bashkortostan chapter is divided into two parts. The first, written by Ildar Gabdrafikov and Aidar Enikeev, describes political events in the republic from 1990 to 2002. The authors describe the consolidation of Bashkortostan’s authoritarian elite and analyze the causes for the weakness of opposition to the Rakhimov regime. They conclude that the only successful challenge to this regime can come from the federal government in Moscow. The second part of the chapter, written by Rushan Galliamov, describes the republic’s political elite. It includes both the usual biographical section, and a very strong analytical section that traces the changes in the elite’s composition over the last decade. In the latter section, Galliamov shows that most changes in subregional leadership happen immediately after elections, and are strongly correlated with results that do not correspond to the preferences of the Rakhimov regime. In this manner, the republic’s leadership ensures that its position is maintained and removes potential challengers.
Despite the weaknesses of a few chapters, these two volumes provide a great deal of information and analysis on the local politics of the Volga-Ural ethnic republics. They should prove to be invaluable reference volumes for anyone working on the politics of this region.