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In the past, Russia’s internal
ethnic-national territories were classified by size and status into
autonomous republics, autonomous provinces, and national districts.
Today all the autonomous republics are simply termed republics. In
many, the indigenous ethnic group comprises a minority of the
population. Republics and autonomous districts are units created
specifically to give certain political rights to populations living
in territories with significant ethnic minorities. Typically,
republics enjoy higher constitutional status and are treated as
though they had a share of sovereignty. They have the right to adopt
their own constitution so long as it does not contradict the federal
constitution. |
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The elevated
status of ethnic-national republics is partly the legacy of the
early 1990s, when all the republics within the Russian Federation
adopted declarations of sovereignty and two of them (Tatarstan and
the Chechen Republic) made attempts to declare full or partial
independence from Russia.
In this
period, when the new Russian constitutional order was particularly
fragile and fears of regional separatism were acute, the central
government was compelled to negotiate special arrangements with some
of the ethnic-national territories. Moscow signed bilateral treaties
with Tatarstan and Bashkortostan under which it conceded special
privileges in return for their loyalty. Ethnic-national territories
were also able to negotiate special arrangements under which they
were exempt from certain taxes, or permitted to retain a higher
share of earnings from the exploitation of the region’s natural
resources.
By contrast,
purely administrative subdivisions such as oblasts (regions),
populated mainly by ethnic Russians, have no special constitutional
status. Not surprisingly, there is constant rivalry between the
oblasts, on the one hand, and the republics on the other.
Leaders of oblasts complain that republics enjoy special
privileges, which enable them to circumvent federal law or receive
other benefits in the form of federal subsidies.
The tensions
between the two kinds of “subjects of the federation” generated by
the inequalities in their constitutional status are likely to
continue unless the central authorities can find a way of persuading
the governments of the republics to relinquish their privileged
constitutional status.
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