Translated material
Matryoshka matrix
The fate of new consolidations of Russian regions depends on the choice of the country’s development strategy
The process of merging the Chita region and the Aginsky Buryat Okrug into the Trans-Baikal Territory is nearing completion at an accelerated pace. Next week, on April 4, the first general session of the parliaments of these regions will take place. It is planned, in particular, to adopt a tripartite agreement on the procedure for adopting the first regional laws, which will be in force until October - elections to the regional legislative assembly are scheduled for this month.Let us recall that the Trans-Baikal Territory officially appeared on the map of the country on March 1, and the corresponding referendum was held in the merging subjects of the federation a year before. This is the fifth region that has gone through the consolidation procedure according to a similar scenario . The first to take the path of unification were the Perm Region and the Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug , whose residents, in a referendum on December 7, 2003, approved the unification of their native subjects of the federation into the Perm Territory. In April 2005, a similar referendum was held in the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the autonomous okrugs attached to it - Taimyr and Evenki. Residents of the Kamchatka region and the Koryak Autonomous Okrug in October of the same year also expressed a desire to merge into one region , called the “Kamchatka Territory”. Finally, after the unification referendum held in April 2006 in the Irkutsk region and the Ust-Ordynsky Buryat Autonomous Okrug, the Irkutsk Territory also appeared in Russia - it has officially appeared on the map since January 1 of this year.
Initiatives in the field of regional consolidation were first announced back in 2003, although the very concept of this process is constantly being adjusted. Thus, initially the need for unification was justified by economic feasibility. Of the five renewed regions, all unification processes were more or less completed only in the first two - the Perm and Krasnoyarsk territories. So it’s difficult to judge the results yet.
Member of the Federation Council from the Krasnoyarsk Territory Vyacheslav Novikov does not see “any negative consequences” of the unification. “The positive changes after the unification are unconditional; they concern both the social and economic parts,” Mr. Novikov told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. -- There has been an investment boom; last year investments in the region exceeded 100 billion rubles. This is due to the fact that all investment projects are of a border nature and instead of three authorities there is now one, making it easier for investors to resolve all issues. As for the social part, initially hospitals and educational institutions were built based on the interests of the entire region, and then everything was divided. Now these barriers have been removed, and a person who comes from Evenkia is in the same budgetary conditions as a resident of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.” Mr. Novikov also notes that “if previously the level of budgetary provision in the northern regions of the federation was higher, and part of the territory of the Krasnoyarsk Territory lagged behind, now it is possible to level out the territories on this basis.”
In the Kamchatka Territory, the process of unification with Koryakia is still at the very beginning, but the representative of this region in the Federation Council, Boris Sorokin, is very optimistic. “The entire region is about 350 thousand people, and Koryakia is a little more than 20 thousand. To develop the KAO, we need to put billions into it, just bury it! - Mr. Sorokin told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. - Instead, all issues need to be resolved for the region as a whole, demographic shifts must be carried out, the lives of citizens improved, and the attractiveness of the region increased. There are a lot of questions, but I have no doubt that this unification is definitely positive. Kamchatka has always been united; it was divided into two entities artificially and completely thoughtlessly.”
Nevertheless, the director of the Institute of Regional Problems, Maxim Dianov, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent, expressed confidence that it is clearly too early to calculate the benefits of consolidating regions. “Everything is far from finished even in the Perm region, not to mention all the others. When unifying, a political decision is first made, then a referendum, then the preparation of a technical solution and the technical solution itself, plus at least another year is needed to see how the budget is spent. Only then can you compare. That is, we need at least two and a half to three years, and now there is still no place to identify those nuances that emerged as a result of the unification. For now they are leveled out by the euphoria of the unification.”
It is not surprising that in these circumstances the prospects for unification do not always cause delight among all parties involved in the process. Thus, for several years now the idea of uniting the Arkhangelsk region and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO) has been discussed. At the same time, the wealthier Nenets Autonomous Okrug, with a population of about 42 thousand people, fears that a significant part of its wealth will be redistributed in favor of the 1.3 million residents of the poor Arkhangelsk region. In March of this year, the Nenets election commission again received a proposal to hold a referendum on unification with its neighbors. Moreover, the organizers of this event deliberately expect that residents of the district will reject the idea of merging with the Arkhangelsk region.
Another precedent for the failure of the idea of consolidation is the unsuccessful attempt to annex the Republic of Adygea to the Krasnodar Territory. One hypothetical mention of such a possibility caused a wave of public protest in the republic, to which even the foreign diaspora of Circassians joined.
The elites of the Tomsk region are no less negative about the prospect of absorption by neighboring regions - Novosibirsk or Kemerovo. The local city Duma has recently even become more active in promoting a project to form an agglomeration by uniting Tomsk and its satellite city of Seversk. The essence of the idea is to create a single settlement with a population of at least a million people. Speaker of the Tomsk Regional Duma Boris Maltsev hopes that this will save Tomsk, which has a population of 500,000, from the prospect of becoming a simple regional center if the regions are consolidated.
Nevertheless, in recent years, the expert community has become more confident that the unification of regions will continue in the future. There is no shortage of projects. Thus, at various times it was proposed to merge the Altai Territory and the Altai Republic, to annex the Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrugs to the Tyumen Region, to include the Tomsk Region into the neighboring Novosibirsk or Kemerovo Regions. Most of the proposals concern territories east of the Urals, although the European part of the country may also be affected by this process. In particular, in 2005, the Presidential Plenipotentiary Representative in the Northwestern Federal District, Ilya Klebanov, spoke about the unification of the Novgorod and Pskov regions. And in 2004, the possibility of merging the Bryansk and Oryol regions was discussed - despite all the seeming exoticism, this project in history had already been implemented once in Soviet times. Also, proposals have been repeatedly made to unite the capital with the Moscow region and St. Petersburg with the Leningrad region, and in the future - to merge all these regions into a single agglomeration.
But if we ignore utopian projects, the unifying potential today should be considered almost exhausted. Maxim Dianov expressed this point of view in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, emphasizing that he means “the policy of joining an economically weak region to an economically strong one.” “Now, apparently, a different ideology regarding the unification process will be developed,” the expert believes. -- A strategy for the development of regions is being developed, which will be discussed at the state commission in the summer, then strategic directions will be highlighted: which direction are we going, what do we want to achieve by 2020-2025. Then it will be possible to talk about a new round of this process, about the unification of the subjects of the federation or, perhaps, the separation of existing federal districts.” At the same time, Mr. Dianov noted that in Russia “there may be about 20-25 subjects remaining, if we proceed from economic ideology.”