Vladikavkaz Letter: Russia reins in regions as 1990s freedoms vanish

The small republic of North Ossetia in the Caucasus mountains last month became the first Russian region to vote down a Kremlin-backed Bill to allow digital vaccine passports to be made mandatory for entry to public places.

Then, the very same day, it also became the first to reverse such a decision.

Some officials blamed a technical glitch for the outcome of the initial vote, while others said deputies had reconsidered after learning more about the Bill, but local journalists and analysts said it was clear that urgent calls from an angry Moscow had prompted the repeat vote and change of heart.

"The people of Ossetia were proud of their parliament for two hours," tweeted prominent local blogger Alik Pukhaev.

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For 700,000-strong North Ossetia, and other republics in the Caucasus and elsewhere in Russia where tradition and identity are often matters of great pride, it was another signal that this country is now a federation in name only.

Three decades after Russia's then president Boris Yeltsin's urged local elites to "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow", his successor Vladimir Putin has all but erased regional autonomy, building a "power vertical" from the Kremlin to control all key decisions across the world's biggest country.

“Once again, Moscow has demonstrated to all national republics that there is no federalism in the country,” North Ossetian journalist Ruslan Totrov told Russian media after the U-turn by parliament in the regional capital, Vladikavkaz.

“Russia today is a deeply unitary state, despite the fact that it proudly calls itself a federation. You can forget about federalism here. A rigid vertical [of power] has been built – they called from above and said, ‘Come on, don’t rock the boat.’ Naturally, Ossetian deputies were forced to salute.”

As Yeltsin sought to shore up support around Russia after the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union, he granted varying degrees of autonomy to dozens of regions.

But Moscow’s political weakness and the country’s economic turmoil fanned fears that the Russian Federation could suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union, particularly after Chechen militants defeated federal forces in a 1994-6 war.

Assimilation

After Putin took power in 2000 and oversaw the restoration of federal control in Chechnya, he set about stripping other regions of their special status and ensuring Moscow had the decisive say in appointing regional leaders.

From 2015, almost all were banned from using the title of “president”, and in 2018 regions were barred from making the teaching of native languages compulsory in their schools.

Critics in the North Caucasus and other republics with large non-ethnic Russian populations, such as Tatarstan, said the moves were intended to downgrade and weaken local languages and cultures, as Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity became stronger elements of Putin’s rule.

Mostly-Muslim Tatarstan was one of the strongest defenders of federalism, but Moscow chipped away at its powers and in 2017 refused to extend the oil-rich republic’s special status.

In a now-rare spasm of resistance, Tatarstan’s parliament is currently pushing back against a Kremlin-backed Bill to finally strip the region’s leader of the title “president”, ending the unique exemption it has enjoyed on the symbolically powerful issue.

Yet critics say it is far too little, too late, by a regional elite that has enjoyed the perks of power while handing all real authority to the Kremlin.

"Before their very eyes, Tatars are now losing their Tatar identity, due to the loss of the Tatar language," says Rafael Mukhametdinov, a Tatar historian.

“When we lose our language, we will stop being an independent nation. Moreover, we do not have our own statehood ... and Russia is already carrying out cultural and linguistic assimilation at the legislative level in school policy.”

In Vladikavkaz, Pukhaev says that instead of empowering local self-government, Moscow “tries with one lever to govern an entire huge country”.

“Now we’re moving towards a unitary state, but anyone can see that a state as huge as Russia cannot be unitary. And when, instead of federalism, you build a power vertical, it becomes very inflexible, sluggish and incapable of solving local problems, and then tension grows,” he argues.

“There’s nothing bad in the people of [North] Ossetia or Tatarstan electing their own president. There’s nothing bad in the laws of Tatarstan being slightly different to the laws of [North] Ossetia. The main thing is that people’s rights are respected, and the basic principles of the constitution of Russia – but instead we see them changing the constitution,” he adds.

“Russia can only flourish as a federation. That’s understood perfectly well by people here, in Tatarstan and elsewhere ... The strength of a federal state is in its diversity.”