| When political life in a country is strictly controlled by the supreme power, this life becomes not only virtual, but also ritual. The actions of local authorities turn into rites of loyalty, a demonstration of quasi-actions to strengthen the power vertical.
A striking example of such a completely meaningless ritual from a practical point of view was shown to us by North Ossetia. Disregarding the day off, the republican parliament on Saturday unanimously adopted a bill in the third reading, according to which the head of the region will be called not the president, but the head of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania.
“There should be one president in a country, dozens of presidents in one state - this is political and legal nonsense,” this is how the speaker of the North Ossetian parliament, Taimuraz, explained to deputies (who, of course, according to the classical tradition of Eastern parliamentarism, were not going to argue) Mansurov. And he was wrong. Because the Ossetian parliament acted exactly like the hero of the famous song by Leonid Utesov, who, before the start of the performance, proudly declared: “I am not a coachman, I am a driver of a mare.”
For Russia, the substantive problem, or, as the Ossetian speaker put it, political and legal nonsense, is the very structure of its statehood, and not the number of presidents and not the names of the positions of regional leaders in general. In scientific language, the structure of Russian statehood is called an asymmetrical federation. Nowhere in the world is there a situation in which, in a federal state, different regions of the country would have fundamentally different constitutional statuses. In Germany, all regions are called states, in the USA - states, while in Russia there are still republics, regions, autonomous regions and autonomous districts. At the same time, despite the total purge of regional legislation undertaken by the Putin administration, the Republic of Tatarstan still has more rights than, say, the Tambov region.
This state of affairs contradicts not only the content of the federal state structure, but also the practical policy of the Kremlin in building this very vertical of power. Now all regional heads - governors, presidents, khans, caliphs - are actually appointed by the Kremlin. This fact, as well as Moscow’s policy in the field of interbudgetary relations, aimed at concentrating financial resources in the federal treasury and only then redistributing them among the regions, destroys the principles of federalism. And according to the Constitution, which was going to be rewritten, but never got around to it, Russia still remains an asymmetrical federation.
In such a situation, a meaningful decision by the parliament of North Ossetia would not be to rename the president as the head of the republic, but to rename the republic to the North Ossetian region. After all, it is quite obvious that the real powers of regional heads are not determined by whether they are called presidents or something else. Now they are determined by the Kremlin, and ideally they should be determined by law.
The above applies to the post of President of Russia. In this case, the point is also not in the title of the position, but in the real constitutional powers and methods of their implementation. Therefore, in Russia there may be at least 20 presidents, or even none - the essence will not change.
But in any case, the parliament of North Ossetia, with its action in keeping with the spirit of the times, forced attention to the key problems of Russian statehood. Russia's state structure is too cumbersome and complicated, while its multinationality and multi-religion make it necessary to approach another very fashionable political process today - the consolidation of regions - with extreme caution.
The problem is not that there are too many presidents in a presidential republic, but the problem is that there are too many states in a state. Semyon Novoprudsky
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