The Future of Russia: Outlook from the Center and the Regions

Abstract

The issue of the transformations in Russia’s internal and foreign policy that occurred during the years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency has been repeatedly discussed among scholars and politicians inside and outside of the country, especially in the light of the Russian presidential elections held in early 2008. The internal factors that affected the processes of transformation are rather obvious, and are presented by the Russian ruling elite as including a campaign against the oligarchs who have taken control over significant portions of the Russian economy; the necessary improvement of the mechanisms of governance; the protection of Russia’s national interests; and the implementation of the model of “Sovereign Democracy.” At the same time, some elements of Russian policy remain strongly dependent upon the activity of other players in the international arena. Many analysts identify the causes of the recent striking turns in former and contemporary Russian policy as being directly connected with external factors and international realities. In 2007, a group of experts and scholars representing the State Universities of Voronezh, Kaliningrad, Saratov, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok, along with the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), embarked on an attempt to analyze some of the tendencies of Russian political and economic change, based on potential transformations within the international environment. This ambitious research project, which was named “The Future of Russia,” was sponsored by Russian INO-Center and its contributors—the Russian Ministry of Education, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—and brought together specialists in such fields as history, sociology, political science, and international relations. This paper does not address the project as a whole, but rather examines the findings that have been made during the work on one of the project’s subsections, entitled “Relations between Center and Regions in the Context of Development of the International Environment,” in which the author was involved as the head of the team of scholars from Saratov State University. The hypothesis for the research presented here rests on the premise that Russia’s internal transformation will depend on potential changes in the entire international system, making external influence one of the crucial factors in the development of relations between the regions of Russia and the nation’s federal administration. To better illustrate these trends, it was decided to categorize research into separate scenarios. Based on the hypothesis given above, four scenarios were elaborated as a starting point