Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (review)

The divergent trajectories of Russia's regions since the fall of Communism have become the subject of intense debate. For some scholars, differences in socioeconomic structure are the predominant reason for these disparities; for others, geography is important; and for many others, the variety of elite composition is determinant. Yoshiko Herrera takes an original approach to this question by arguing that the explanation lies not in material circumstances but in the way that elites "imagine" their economic interests and their relationship with the federal center. Using this constructivist approach, she examines two regions with broadly similar economic conditions and analyzes their contrasting responses to the crisis attending the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the attempt to move toward a market economy in 1991–1993.

Sverdlovsk oblast in the Urals became the metallurgical center of Russia from the eighteenth century, and Samara oblast on the Volga developed as a center of manufacturing, particularly in the automobile industry with the establishment of the giant VAZ factory in Togliatti in the 1960s. Faced with similar challenges in the 1990s, Sverdlovsk declared itself a "Urals republic" and sought greater autonomy from the central government and equality with ethnofederal republics like Tatarstan, whereas Samara remained firmly loyal to the central authorities even though Samara probably had more cause for complaint (insofar as the central government took a greater share of tax income from that region than from Sverdlovsk).

This, then, is the context for Herrera's study. She undertakes a detailed analysis of regional newspaper commentary to study the differences in responses. Her data set has been elaborately coded and quantified to draw out the underlying assumptions and attitudes of the participants in these dramatic early post-Communist years in Russia. One might object that she places rather too much weight on what are, after all, ephemeral publicistic contributions, even if she identifies interesting differences of emphases in the two regions. At the same time, she underplays the actual arguments used by regional leaders—Eduard Rossel in Sverdlovsk and Konstantin Titov in Samara—and perhaps does not give enough weight to debates in the regional legislatures and other public forums. Nevertheless, on the basis of this analysis Herrera argues that variations in regional activism arise not from empirical differences in economic conditions but from the way that economic interests are constructed. This "imagined economies" thesis is at the center of the book's claim to originality, drawing on Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" framework for the study of nationalism.

Is this a convincing argument? Undoubtedly the book draws our attention to an issue of fundamental importance: that political positions are adopted on the basis not only of objective factors but also of subjective considerations that help to shape the way problems are framed. In the case of Russia, this proposition is given excellent contextualization, and the book provides a wealth of material that is of great value. We could even argue that we have two books. The first is a fascinating exposition of the theoretical basis of constructivism and the ways it can be applied to the study of regional diversity, and the second provides the empirical material about Sverdlovsk and Samara. We get halfway through the book before the first part gives way to the second. The fundamental question is whether the first and second "books" combine to provide a convincing explanatory framework for the differing political trajectories of the two regions.

A number of problems arise. The first is that Herrera does not develop the concept of regionalism. Russia has a long tradition of regionalism—that is, a sense of provincial identity and patriotism—which is particularly salient in the Urals because of its pattern of settlement and its role in the development of the Russian state. Regionalism in Russia is strongest at moments of state weakening, as during the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The state weakening after the collapse of Soviet power provided another opportunity for regionalism to manifest itself, and it remains...