Column by Oleg Sapozhkov on curtailing municipal foreign trade freedoms

Reforms carried out for the sake of opportunistic goals sometimes miss areas that are far from the opportunism. During the municipal reform launched in 2016–2017 in order to combat “ungovernable” municipal deputies — this happened, we recall, on the eve of the 2018 vote — the problem of the authorities was the European Charter of Local Self-Government signed by the Russian Federation, which prohibits the transfer of resolution of local issues higher vertically . To bypass it, it was necessary to consolidate local self-government, enlarging it to municipal districts, and centralize their financing.

However, the issue of whether cities have foreign economic powers—roughly speaking, the right of their mayors to negotiate cooperation with the mayors of other cities—was dropped from this political agenda. They remembered it only a year ago, when it turned out that the Russian Federation had “friendly” and “unfriendly” countries, and the municipal authorities had the opportunity to interact with the whole world at the local level without any supervision. At the same time, the sanctions caused by the Russian military operation in Ukraine, the withdrawal of foreign suppliers and the resulting shortage of goods apparently caused attempts to intensify external relations at the local level, enough to be noticed in Moscow.

The result was a package of documents that was discussed in the federal center for a whole year – in late August and early September they began to appear on regulation.gov.ru (see Kommersant of August 28) and then concerned regional powers. Last week, this activity also reached the municipalities: the Ministry of Economy published amendments to its regulations, giving it the authority to “develop and implement state policy and regulate local governments in the field of international and foreign economic relations” – from maintaining a register of agreements with foreign municipalities and to control their content (by this time the charter had been denounced for half a year, see Kommersant of February 17).

It would be naive to assume in Russia in 2023 that there would be municipal authorities who, using the powers left to them, would rush to cooperate with “enemies”, frightening the center. Rather, it is about giving the Ministry of Economy the authority to determine how mayors should properly cooperate with the remaining “friendly” partners – especially since some problems in relations with them are noticeable. Thus, the Russian Federation cannot, for example, limit the import of Chinese goods for its own sake, since it is tied to the supply of Chinese components. Regional and local autonomy, of course, could complicate an already problematic negotiation, and this at least seems to explain why the ghosts of municipal freedoms need to be disturbed.