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Long-Lived Governors
For many regional leaders, 2003 was an election year, or more precisely, a reelection year. The stability of regional governments led us to compile a rating of the longest serving regional leaders. Two other ratings round out the picture of regional political life.
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| Aleksei Kudenko |
| First place in our rating of regional leaders went to a native of the Caucasus. Magomed-Ali Magomedov, Chairman of the State Council of Dagestan (formerly Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium of the Dagestan ASSR) is the longest serving leader of a Russian region |
Almost everyone in the ranks of long-lived governors is a product of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS). A party career brought many of the 20 people in our rating to the governor’s chair; one of them, Governor of Orel Region, Egor Stroev, was even a member of the Politburo before he became head of his native region. Governor of Novgorod Mikhail Prusak became governor as a result of his Komsomol past. His long political career began when he was elected a deputy of the USSR from the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League (Komsomol).
Business managers who entered politics in the early 1990s include President of Bashkortostan, Murtaza Rakhimov (prior to this, he was general manager of the Ufa Oil Refinery), and governors of Yaroslavl Region and Khabarovsk Territory, Anatoly Lisitsyn and Viktor Ishaev, respectively.
Governor of Samara Region, Konstantin Titov, was the head of a laboratory before entering politics, while President of the Republic of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, was even expelled from the KPSS when he was a student at Moscow State University for International Relations (MGIMO). Before being elected governor, he was a very successful businessman and for a while was head of the Russian Chamber of Businessmen.
Many of the governors on our list headed their regions by decree of Boris Yeltsin after the 1991 putsch. They include Anatoly Guzhvin, Viktor Kress, Vladimir Chub, and Eduard Rossel. Most of the Yeltsin appointees subsequently remained fairly loyal to the first Russian president. Eduard Rossel, one of President Yeltsin’s closest associates, even fell into disfavor for a while. In 1993, the Governor of Sverdlov Region was removed from office for trying to set up the Ural Republic, which the federal government regarded as a show of separatism. However, in the same year, Rossel was elected to the Federation Council, then became head of the regional Duma in 1994, and again became governor in 1995. Relations between Rossel and Yeltsin once again became friendly.
However, Russia’s first president was never able to deal with the separatism of Mintimer Shaimiev and Murtaza Rakhimov. President Putin was left to struggle with Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, which had grabbed as much independence as they wanted on Boris Yeltsin’s advice.
These same regional leaders are also notable for their party-building activities; many were involved in forming the All Russia (Vsya Rossiya) opposition movement, which, in alliance with Yury Luzhkov’s Fatherland (Otechestvo) movement, had counted on winning a majority in the Duma in the 1999 parliamentary elections. Eighteen regional leaders joined the Vsya Rossiya movement, including many of the long-serving ones, e.g., Anatoly Guzhvin, Viktor Ishaev, Leonid Polezhaev, Aleksandr Filipenko, and Vladimir Chub. Another one, Anatoly Lisitsyn, joined Otechestvo; and still another “old timer”, Konstantin Titov, tried to set up his own electoral bloc, Voice of Russia (Golos Rossii), which had a number of leaders of regional legislative assemblies as members. The governors’ Otechestvo–Vsya Rossiya (OVP) bloc posed such a threat to the government that the Kremlin had to scramble to set up and promote the Unity (Edinstvo) movement by all possible means just before the elections.
Edinstvo’s second-place standing in the 1999 Duma elections and Vladimir Putin’s victory in the presidential elections in 2000 profoundly changed relations between the ruling powers and the governors. Many of them hurried to swear allegiance to the Kremlin. Moreover, governors who had openly expressed their sympathies for the left in Yeltsin’s time even ended up in the ranks of the pro-Kremlin Edinaya Rossiya party, which was formed by the union of OVP and Edinstvo. For example, Orel governor Stroev headed the western party list of Edinaya Rossiya in the 2003 Duma elections.
However, membership in a party was no guarantee of an easy life for all the “old-timers”. For example, Murtaza Rakhimov’s position has noticeably weakened in the last while. He was the most outspoken critic of Putin’s reforms of the country’s power vertical and the establishment of federal districts. After a lengthy battle with the center over bringing Bashkortostan’s constitution into line with the federal situation, things became very difficult for Rakhimov, who was running for election for a third term. He obtained Moscow’s support in Bashkortostan’s presidential elections (they were held simultaneously with the Duma elections on December 7) only in return for guarantees that Edinaya Rossiya would win an absolute majority of votes in the republic.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s situation has also become difficult. In last year’s presidential elections in Kalmykia, his reelection was vigorously opposed by the so-called St. Petersburg group in the Kremlin led by deputy head of the presidential administration, Viktor Ivanov. Deep in the Kremlin, they prepared scenarios that called for eliminating Ilyumzhinov from the elections after replacing the heads of the republic’s enforcement agencies and taking complete control over the election process. The only thing that saved the president of Kalmykia was the support of former head of the Kremlin administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, who considered reelection of the incumbent president to be less dangerous than a change of power by force.
President of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, is probably the only leader who remained on speaking terms with the Kremlin as an equal after the change of power in the country. He agreed to bring the constitution of independent and sovereign Tatarstan in line with the federal constitution, but the Kremlin paid a high price for this. It was under President Shaimiev, whose second term in office ended in 2001, that an amendment was introduced to the law “On the General Principles of Organizing Legislative and Executive Bodies of Subjects of the Russian Federation” allowing governors to be elected for a third or fourth term.
Alla Barakhova
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 12, 2004
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