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United Russia, the party led by Prime Minister Putin, decided in August, 2010 not to submit the name of the governor of Kaliningrad, Georgy V. Boos, for reappointment. The decision appeared to put pressure on governors to do more to ensure the satisfaction of those they govern, or to at least keep a lid on dissent. Governors had been popularly elected in Russia until a 2004 decree by Mr. Putin, then Russia’s president, that gave the president responsibility for appointing them. In that decree, the president is to select governors from a list of candidates drawn up by the governing party. Critics have said that the practice has made governors beholden to the Kremlin and insensitive to the popular sentiments. This can be problematic on two grounds.

In an empire-scale polity the size of Russia, which is inherently diverse,  insensitivity to popular sentiments can create pressure that could cause the federation to eventually explode. Being geographically separted from the rest of Russia and comparable to a small country, Kaliningrad is undoubtedly in a position to have expectations arise from its people concerning some extend of self-governance. As Russia treats its constituent republics like a republic’s provinces, the people in the republics are likely to take offense and demand more in terms of self-governance more in line with that of the EU’s states.

Secondly, the appointment power evinces a democracy deficit. The inability to elect governors was one of the central grievances when 10,000 people protested in Kaliningrad in January, 2010 to call for Mr. Boos’s ouster. Konstantin Doroshok, the head of the Kaliningrad branch of the opposition group, Spravedlivost, said of United Russia’s decision to deny the governor a second terms, “On the other hand, it is important to understand that the people have not been given the most important thing: the real opportunity to independently elect governors.” To the extent that the protest was over the constitutional change rather than Georgy Boos in particular, United Russia may have taken the wind out the Baltic sails without having to directly address the raison d’etre of the complaint. Even so, the pressure for more self-governance is likely to intensify in Russia’s republics. In excessively consolidating, Russia may go the way of the USSR.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/europe/17russia.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=russia&st=cse

As of 2011, Russia had 11 time zones, from the Polish border to near Alaska, a system so vast that a traveller could get a walloping case of jet lag from a domestic flight.  In 2009, Russia was considering shedding some of its time zones.  People running businesses in the far east were complaining because the regulators were typically in Moscow, which could be several hours behind.    The issue blossomed at the end of 2009 into an intense debate across the Russian Federation about how Russians saw themselves, about how the regions should relate to the center, and about how to address the age-old problem of creating a sense of unity in a diverse federation that had been consolidated politically.  In short, the issue concerned the challenges involved in a consolidated empire. 

The sheer amount of territory in an empire that is made up of republics that are on the scale of independent states or countries makes “one size fits all” from the center extremely difficult.  It might have been different when kingdoms and empires were smaller—such as the medieval sort (e.g. the Swiss confederation and the Netherlands—both empires on a medieval scale but states in modern terms).  For China, the US, the EU and Russia, the extent of geography is a limitation on how much centralized authority is possible.  The Chinese government maintains one time zone for China, when there could easily be four or five.  In the case of Russia, such consolidation would mean that people in some places would be getting up and having breakfast in the middle of the night!   Even reducing the number of zones could make it more difficult on some, given the short duration of daylight in the winter.   Consider, for example, the trouble of going to and from daylight savings time in the US and EU.  Eliminating a few time zones in Russia would be to act as though a few hours difference doesn’t matter much.  The far east may already be two hours off of the correct biological time—meaning the most fitting with the human biological clock. 

In the end, the problem is one of consolidating an empire-scale polity.  Given the inherent heterogenuity involved in such an expanse, there are limitations in what can be done centrally.  Moscow can’t simply issue an order and expect that every Russian city will be awake and thus able to reply immediately.  Resentment toward central control in such cases (i.e., empires) is quite natural.  Indeed, proposals to modify the time zones have stirred deep suspicions, especially in the Far East and Siberia, where people have long resented Moscow, much the way people in places like Idaho distrust the goings-on in Washington.  So the issue is not simply one of whether time zones should be adjusted.  The tensions come when an empire seeks an inordinate amount of centralized control—more than that which is consistent with natural differences.  A consolidated empire on the modern scale (i.e., early-modern kingdoms being the scale of the units) is an artificial construction.   The time zones, I submit, should be oriented to biological clocks, while the federal system is given greater weight (i.e., more autonomy for the republics and regions).  “We have to look at this from a biological standpoint, how it is going to affect health,” said Yekaterina Degtyareva, 27, a personnel manager who lives in Novosibirsk, the most populous city in Siberia, and often travels to the Far East and Moscow. “If it is going to be a centralized, so-called totalitarian decision, then nothing good will come of it.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/world/europe/07zones.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=russia%20time&st=cse

Dmitri Medvedev, President of the Russian “Federation,” fired Yuri Luzhkov in September, 2010, after the mayor of Moskow (legally a governor of a region) questioned the president’s fitness and thus rattling the tightly controlled government.The conflict had turned into a highly unusual spectacle because such defiance of the country’s leadership by a senior official rarely occurs in public. “It is difficult to imagine a situation under which a governor and a president of Russia, as the chief executive, can continue to work together when the president has lost confidence in the leader of a region,” Mr. Medvedev said. The state-controlled television channels, which rarely if ever voice criticism of party leaders, suddenly went after Mr. Luzhkov, signaling the Kremlin’s displeasure with him. They broadcast programs that questioned Mr. Luzhkov’s performance and suggested that he was responsible for corruption in Moscow.  To be sure, Luzhkov had endured sustained criticism for reigning like an autocrat, muzzling dissent and allowing blatant corruption to flourish. During his tenure, his wife, Yelena Baturina, obtained much of the construction business in Moscow, becoming one of the world’s richest women.However, it was criticism of Medvedev, rather than corruption, that costed Luzhkov his job.  We can conclude that the governors of Russia’s regions, which are equivalent to the states of the EU and US, are in no way free of the central government.  In federalism, the federal states are semi-sovereign.  The Russian Federation is thus not a federation; rather, it is a consolidated empire like China.  Because an empire is of such scale that it is inherently heterogeneous (diverse), consolidation has the drawback of not allowing for the diversity to express itself politically.  As the pressure builds, the seeds are laid for the eventual demise of the polity.  The EU is in much better shape in this respect, as its member states still have sufficient sovereignty to enact laws that reflect their particular conditions.  Lest it be said that the long tradition of the EU states’ governmental sovereignty is a sufficient buttress against consolidation, the delegates at the US’s Constitutional Convention relied on the citizens’ identification with their states against encroachment by the new general government of the federal system.  History and people’s political identification may seem solid to us, but what holds for us may one day be an afterthought. While we can learn from history, it does not have its own staying power; it is in this sense artificial—a creature of the mind.  One might counter that the history of centralized rule in Russia (and the USSR) played a role in the demise of Russian federalism.  I would counter that it is the present locus of power that decisive.  Consider, for example, the present power of the US Government as against the history of state power in the US wherein the federal government handled mostly foreign affairs.  That history could not stand up against the encroachments of centralized power.  I predict that the EU, should it endure, will suffer the same plight.  Russia is simply further along.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/europe/29moscow.html?_r=1&hp:

On Decemer 31, 2010, a Russian judge sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian tycoon who had been imprisoned in 2003 after defying Vladimir Putin, to an additional six years. According to The New York Times, "It was a politically tinged decision that undermined President Dmitri Medvodev." Leonid Goman of the Right Cause Party in Russia agrees. "It was obviously a political, not a judicial, decision." In general terms, "corruption is endemic, government power is often abused and senior politicians are rarely, if ever, held accountable for misdeeds."  The sentence is an indication that Prime Minister Putin was still in control of Russia.  His message: wealthy businessmen should not interfere in Russian politics.  Khodorkovsky had financed opposition political parties; he was at one time the richest person in Russia, having been one of the oligarchs who bought government assets after the fall of the USSR at a fraction of their worth.

This case points to the importance of separating a judiciary from executive and legislative branches of government. The fragile nature of a judiciary's credibility is also in the mix, as it was undoubtedly diminished by the sentence. While doing the bidding of a powerful government offiical may well be in the short term interest of a judge, such a practice contributes to the downfall of a country's judiciary. The president of a country is charged with presiding over its system of government to protect it as a going concern.  Matters such as the credibility of an entire branch of government ought thus to be on a president's radar screen.  In the case of Russia, the problem was that the Prime Minister may have been running the show and tacitly undermining the president by expediently abusing the judiciary while keeping the president from acting to safeguard the long term viability of the government. Politics over leadership; short-term over long-term. All too often in many countries, presidents do not attend to the overall viability of their systems of government, preferring instead to engage in partisan politics. The Russian case illustrates the cost.

Source: Clifford Levy, "Russia Extends Prison Sentence of Tycoon 6 Years, The New York Times, December 31, 2010, p. A1.