Window on Eurasia: Two Russian Regions Exchange Territory in Response to Campaign from Below

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 3 – Responding to a five-year-long campaign by residents of a village on the border between them, two predominantly ethnic Russian regions, Smolensk and Kaluga, have agreed to swap territory so that people living there will be formally part of the oblast to whose officials they already report.

 

            Kaluga oblast will give up 415.1 hectares to Smolensk and receive in exchange 386.5 hectares. The two oblast governments have now agreed to this measure, and it will go into effect after it is confirmed by the Federation Council (ria.ru/politics/20141030/1030984360.html, rg.ru/2014/10/30/reg-cfo/border-anons.html, and polit.ru/article/2014/11/02/top9/).

 

            This will correct a bureaucratic nightmare that the 200 residents of the Kalugovsky settlement have been living in. That village has been located on the territory of the Urgansk district of Smolensk oblast but administratively it has been subordinate to the Mosal district of Kaluga oblast.

 

            That has meant that the village residents have faced extraordinary difficulties in registering themselves, registering and transferring property, and ensuring that particular plots of land are in fact respected by the authorities.  Now the villagers as a result of this border correction will find their lives eased because they will be administratively subordinate to the oblast on which their village will be located.

 

            Residents have been pressing for this change since the spring of 2009 to correct the lines that Moscow had drawn much earlier: Smolensk Oblast was formed in September 1937, and Kaluga Oblast was formed in July 1944 largely coterminous with what had been the territory of Kaluga Guberniya before 1929.

            Three things make this otherwise minor territorial adjustment important. First, it calls attention to the fact that borders in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have often been changed because they were all too often drawn without consideration of the needs of the local population.

 

            Second, the development highlights that territorial subordination and administrative subordination were often not identical. In this case, residents lived on the territory of one oblast but reported to officials in another, a situation that by its very nature creates problems and uncertainties.

 

            And third, and this is the most important aspect of this swap, the current shift came about as a result of a campaign by local people and local officials.  Not only does that show what such activism can achieve, but it suggests that there could soon be more such challenges to the existing borders of federal subjects from below, one more unintended consequence of Putin’s regional amalgamation campaign and his annexation of Crimea.