The Kuril Islands and Governor of Primorye E. I. Nazdratenko: On the Issue of an Attempt to Change Governance

The process of forming relations between the center and the regions in the 1990s took place in the context of the active influence of the heads of the constituent entities on the country’s domestic policy. At that time, the leaders of the Far East, who were appointed to their positions in the early 1990s by Boris Yeltsin, sought to strengthen their position and political weight. For Yevgeny Nazdratenko, one of the ways to achieve this (among others) was to expand the territory of the region. The article examines Yevgeny Nazdratenko’s attempt to include the Kuril Islands in the territory of Primorye. It has been shown that this step was motivated not only by political considerations in the run-up to the elections, but also had an economic basis, as there was a struggle for resources in the context of the formation of power relations in this constituent entity of the Russian Federation (which included the Kuril Islands).