The Russian Federation: Between Post-Empire and Deferred Nation

The article proposes an argument that the federal type of political structure is commonly a form of the disintegration of states, although situationally it may seem to be an acceptable institutional compromise between central and peripheral elites. Federation as a voluntary union of previously independent states is an exception to the rule, and the overwhelming majority of federations are the result of a failed attempt to transform estatefeudal empires into a unitary modern nation with a single civic culture that consolidates previous dissimilarities. Historical background indicates that federations are inferior in durability to unitary states, which is especially true about the so-called ethno-federations. Ethno-territorial principles at the heart of the federative model accelerate secession processes, hindering the consolidation of civic identity and institutionalizing the intractability of cultural conflicts. Studying the case of the post-Soviet Russia, the author demonstrates that it has not learned political lessons from the collapse of the USSR. The current model of asymmetric federalism is associated with the preservation of the principles of politicization and territorialization of ethnicity, which prevented the creation of the Soviet people as a new civic community, and drew the boundaries of future political fault lines. The Russian multi-ethnic nation continues to be pressured by the same centrifugal tendencies and on the same grounds as the would-be Soviet nation. This hinders the transformation of the multi-ethnic population into a modern civic nation that transcends cultural differences beyond the political. The accumulating rent-class conflict within the federative model is only postponed for the future. According to the author, in present-day Russian society there are no socially significant problems, the solution of which would require maintaining an asymmetrical ethno-federation. The unification of the principles of administrative-territorial structure would contribute to the consolidation of the Russian nation and the transition from manual center-periphery governance and imperial archaism, disguised as a federation, to the effective development of all regions and cultural communities of Russia.