DYNAMICS OF FEDERAL RELATIONS IN PUTIN'S RUSSIA *

This study explores changing features of federal relations that has developed under Putin and their implications for the future political development in Russia. Federal relations have been one of the most popular topics of Russian studies, particularly in the early 1990s and in the 2000s. Since 1990, Russia conducted unintended experiment of applying both ‘extreme’ shapes of federalism: decentralized federalism between 1990 and 1993, and centralized one since 2000. After the collapse of the soviet system, research focus has shifted from the centre to peripheries. Since the early 1990s, increasing numbers of studies were conducted to examine regional politics and socio-economic and ethnic disparities. In particular, the republics’ challenge to Moscow’s domination attracted interests of researchers, partly because the relationship between Moscow and republics has been believed to constitute a basis of federalism in the soviet system. After Putin’s federal reform, however, the focus has shifted from the regions back to the centre, i.e., from the discourse of ‘strong regions’ to that of ‘strong centre’. Under Putin, centripetal forces dominate the dynamics of federal relations, which altered the main stream of Russian politics discourse from regionalization of reform to democracy in various fields of reform. A brief literature review also shows such changes. First, the degree of centripetal forces and the evaluation of centralization policy constitute a main part of discussion in the 2000s. To this question, a common understanding has been spreading that Putin’s policies have Seongjin Kim