MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vasily Kononenko.) Land surveyors are digging in range poles around Khabarovsk. Metal poles with the frightening inscription "border" will soon surround the Far Eastern city, leaving only the Amur River free.
But this is not the national border, and the city residents are not trying to keep the Chinese out. Rather, it's all about the suburbs, as self-government for cities, districts and villages comes to Russia.
The fuss is all caused by Law No. 131, which comes into force next year. Residents of every municipal unit should know where their territory ends and the next unit begins. The border will now also delimit local authority and the right to collect money; the land tax is the main revenue item for local budgets. The battle for borders is already raging in some large regions of Siberia and the Far East, as well as in the south. But it is fiercest in the Moscow Region town of Krasnogorsk. Will this unprecedented experiment of power delimitation throughout the country go smoothly and without shocks?
President Putin's much-discussed "power vertical" is like a political detective novel, equally enjoyed by the young and the old, who still enjoy guessing where the fascinating plot will take them. As soon as feelings had subsided about returning some powers to regional governors, a new wave of interest in local self-government began to grow. How will life be organized on the lowest level, where people are close to and understand everything?
A similar document transferring power to local administrations was adopted ten years ago, but came to a sticky end. The upper echelons, especially regional heads, were not ready to share power, to say nothing of resources, property and the right to levy taxes and duties. It took enormous pressure from the federal authorities on parliamentarians and a few years of work to get a new law, originally slated to come into force on January 1, 2006.
Large-scale preparations were launched to shape "low-level" authorities: Elections to city, town and village legislatures, delimitation of borders between populated areas, delimitation of powers between different levels of authority, etc. Under the law, these elected bodies can own, use and manage municipal property. They can form, endorse and execute a municipal budget, introduce local taxes and duties, and decide on many other local issues, including undertaking some state powers.
Then the unexpected happened. At a June meeting of the State Council, some governors spoke firmly against implementing the law from next year. Their reasons seemed quite convincing. The arguments were as follows: "As the process of delimitating powers between the center and regions is not completed, it seems premature to start reforming local self-government immediately. Social losses will be inevitable!" "The regions do not have the personnel to form new bodies." "Delimitation of borders between villages requires much time and money." So, under pressure from the governors, the State Duma last fall adopted in the first reading amendments to Law No. 131 that postpone it coming into force by two or three years.
It was against this background that State Duma deputy Alexei Mitrofanov and a group of his associates decided to leave the Moscow elite and try to take power in Krasnogorsk.
As Mitrofanov put it: "Governors and district heads scuttled Law No. 131. In fact, they still remain essentially Soviet-era district and regional executive committees. But the Duma decisions do not mean anything to us. Law No. 131 has not been abolished and if there is a possibility to reform local authorities, it should be done. This is Russia's largest reform, and it will determine whether Russia will survive as a federal state. If we win the elections, we will immediately prepare and register our charter with the Justice Ministry. From that moment, 25 deputies will manage all the property that belongs to the town and surrounding villages."
Not far from Krasnogorsk is the summer house of Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has spent much of his life studying and promoting local self-government for Russia. Solzhenitsyn has summed up the role and importance of local self-government in maxims such as his famous "democracy of small spaces," and has said that, without it, "you cannot overcome the passion of the superior power to keep refusing; you simply cannot." Whether this time the vertical of power in Russia will be upturned successfully will become clear in September, when the State Duma reconvenes.
