A major initiative of Putin and the presidential envoys in his first term was the effort to bring local laws and ordinances into compliance with federal law. The procuracy in particular played a key role in this process.99
The process of trying to harmonize federal and regional laws did not begin with Putin’s federal reforms. For example, in January 1998, Procurator-General Yuri Skuratov claimed that in the previous two-year period, procurators throughout Russia had annulled more than 2,000 laws and resolutions that violated the Constitution. The Kremlin under Yeltsin was well aware of the problem, and Putin even organized a conference on the issue when he worked for the presidential administration in Yeltsin’s second term. Thus, Putin’s claim that procurators in the year 2000 were “starting from scratch” in this process was a clear overstatement. Still, although efforts were occasionally made to focus on these legal discrepancies, the central government was too weak at the time to make significant progress; a legal expert in Yekaterinburg noted that under Yeltsin, there was “a lack of political will from the center” on this issue. It was also true that some Yeltsin advisers were not overly alarmed by the situation, arguing that national laws took precedence over regional and local laws, so if they were in conflict, the lower one was invalid anyway.100
Putin gave new impetus to the process of legal harmonization, and the personnel and organizational changes discussed earlier in many cases severed or weakened governors’ control over the local procuracy. In 2002, both the Main Federal Inspector for St. Petersburg, Nikolay Vinnichenko, and the ViceGovernor Anna Markova credited this campaign with bearing fruit. Markova’s office expended considerable effort on the process, which it undertook by going back to the late Soviet period and systematically working through decrees and
For other treatments of this issue, see: Alexei Trochev and Peter H. Solomon Jr., “Courts and Federalism in Putin’s Russia,” in Reddaway and Orttung, 2005, pp. 91-122; Kahn 2002, pp. 234-278; Hahn 2003.
Lapidus 1999, p. 78; Interview M-19; V. V. Putin, “Vystupleniye Prezidenta Rossiyskoi Federatsii V. V. Putina na kollegii General’noi prokuratury RF,” February 21, 2002; Interview Ye-4; Interview M-30.
Laws year by year. Further, Markova contended that the judicial system and the procuracy could not have accomplished this work on their own, given their other responsibilities. Law enforcement officials in Nizhny Novgorod similarly lauded the process of bringing laws into compliance. The head of the Volga Okrug procuracy, Deputy Procurator-General Aleksandr Zvyagintsev, headed a commission to bring laws into compliance throughout the okrug. Specialists and experts were enlisted in the process, and the commission sent representatives to the okrug’s republics. The commission also reviewed new and draft legislation. Previously, according to these officials, no one had paid attention to this issue except specialists. In this respect they viewed the creation of the okrugs and envoys as a success. Similar procedures were established in the Urals Federal District, with an expert commission working with the procurator, the Ministry of Justice, and the polpred to review old laws and bring them into correspondence with federal law.101 Envoys themselves reported major successes in this campaign during its first few years, claiming to have brought hundreds of laws into compliance with federal ones.102
There was considerable regional variation in both the nature of the law standardization process and the extent of the problem. In some okrugs, the envoys worked most closely with the procuracy, in others with the Ministry of Justice, and in yet others, joint commissions from the two agencies were created.103 In addition, some regions had many violations whereas others had few, and some regional leaders resisted changes whereas others adopted them willingly. Not surprisingly, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the process was much more contentious than in most other regions. Moreover, regional leaders could seek special exemptions from the presidential envoy; in Moscow, for example, Mayor Luzhkov was allowed to continue his anticonstitutional policy of restricting internal immigration of Russian citizens to the capital.104
President Putin hailed the work of the procuracy on the standardization of laws, claiming that it “played the most important role in implementing the important task of creating a unified legal space in the country.” At the same time, his Urals envoy Latyshev noted some flaws in the process. In particular, he observed that many so-called violations of federal law contained in regional law occur because of the absence of corresponding federal law. Similarly, then Samara Governor Konstantin Titov complained to Kiriyenko that in some cases it was the federal, not the regional, laws that contradicted
Interview P-5; Interview P-11; Interview NN-7; Interview NN-8; Interview Ye-4; Interview Ye-5; Interview Ye-9.
Taylor 2005, pp. 73-74.
Interviews cited in note 101. The different procedures by Federal District also are discussed in the different chapters of Reddaway and Orttung 2004.
“Bringing Regional Laws into Line,” RRR, 6, 18 (May 16, 2001); Interview NN-i; Artem Vernidub, “Korruptsiya dolzhna byt’ upravlyayemoy,” gazeta. ru, May 15, 2002; Taylor 2005, p. 74; Elena A. Chebankova, “The Limitations of Central Authority in the Regions and the Implications for the Evolution of Russia’s Federal System,” Europe-Asia Studies, 57, 7 (November 2005), pp. 935-936; Baker and Glasser 2001.
The Constitution. He also complained about overzealous behavior on the part of procurators. Further, Yekaterinburg legal specialists Konstantin Kiselev and Viktor Rudenko noted that most of the violations in regional law were technicalities, and that other violations arose because federal laws were amended after regional laws were passed, thereby rendering noncompliant laws that were previously congruent with federal law. Rudenko also noted, in tune with Titov’s complaint, that okrug and regional level procurators were “overfulfilling the plan” to demonstrate their loyalty to Moscow. Similarly, experts in Novosibirsk thought that the Siberian polpred Drachevskiy had overstated the importance of the campaign, given that most of the legal discrepancies did not result from political disagreements but rather technicalities similar to those pointed to by Kiselev and Rudenko. Although the process may have been useful in Novosibirsk, it was neither controversial nor symptomatic of fundamental disagreements between the region and the center.105
The process of harmonizing federal, regional, and local laws in Russia will be an ongoing one. Putin’s federal reforms, if nothing else, did focus attention on the importance of these legal questions, although, as noted earlier, some experts thought the issue was overblown. In the long run, what is needed are institutionalized administrative and legal processes for dealing with these issues, not public campaigns, and such processes did indeed emerge. Far Eastern envoy Pulikovskiy created a mechanism by which the Ministry of Justice reviewed both draft and new legislation in his okrug’s regions. Similar processes were created in the Siberian, Urals, and Volga Federal Districts. In Saratov, a committee including members from the procuracy, the Ministry of Justice, the legislature, the governor’s administration, and the envoy’s office was established to harmonize laws.106 In short, the envoys, in conjunction with procuracy officials, played a useful role in coordinating the work of executive and legislative branch officials at multiple levels to make Russian law more coherent. By the end of the Putin presidency, legal experts concluded, Russian law had become substantially unified and centralized; indeed, perhaps too centralized for a notionally federal state.107 What is most important, of course, is a different and much harder task than centralization alone: regular and predictable implementation of the law.
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