From Plan to Confederation: Siberian Republicanism and the Tyumen Settlement
From The Long Union, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
From Plan to Confederation traces the fragmentation of economic authority within the Union of Soviet Sovereign States between 1992 and 2014, a process driven by the contradictions of an imagined looser federation that was given no mechanism to coordinate policy across its constituent republics. The Novo-Ogaryovo Accords had preserved the legal structure of a union while stripping it of enforcement. What followed was a generation-long drift toward de facto republicanism, most visibly in the energy sector, where Siberian republics controlled the only assets worth exporting and the centre in Moscow controlled neither the budget nor the will to manage them.
The Compromise of Sochi of 1993–1994 had attempted to resolve the collision between price liberalization and central planning through a dual-track pricing system: some goods moved at market rates while others remained under state control. The arrangement was economically incoherent and administratively impossible. By the late 1990s, every republic pursued its own pricing structure. The Union Rouble crisis of 1998 made clear that the centre could not enforce fiscal discipline; a currency reform was necessary, and when it came, it discredited the idea of central economic coordination without restoring actual authority. Moscow's planners had failed to prevent the crisis and could not manage the recovery.
Oil became the wedge issue. The Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005 had tied Union exports to Chinese industrial credit, substituting Beijing's creditors for Western banks—a shift that appeared to stabilize the confederation but in fact created nine separate relationships between individual republics and China rather than one Union relationship. Siberian republics discovered that their direct value to Chinese planners was higher than their subordinated value to Moscow. The oil price cycle of 2005 to 2008, and again from 2010 onward, amplified this calculation.
The intellectual architecture for confederation emerged from the Siberian Economic Council, a quasi-official body that began as a coordinating mechanism and became a rival power centre. Dmitri Sergeyev, its chief economist from 2008 to 2014, articulated the case for what he called "confederal logic": if the Union could not enforce fiscal transfers and could not prevent republics from negotiating directly with foreign buyers, then the framework should acknowledge this reality rather than pretend to central authority that did not exist.
Sergeyev's writings in the journal Siberian Development Quarterly argued that the existing system wasted political capital on impossible demands for compliance. The Union of Soviet Sovereign States Ministry of Energy, already weakened by the Confederal Drift, was attempting to regulate exports it did not control and to redistribute revenue it had never received. Sergeyev proposed instead a formal devolution: grant Siberian republics explicit authority to sell oil and gas on their own account, retain a modest percentage for the Union budget, and end the pretense of central planning. The arrangement would be legal; it would reflect reality; and it would strengthen the confederation by replacing coerced unity with consensual participation.
The Siberian republics—Russia itself, and the smaller Kazakh Sovereign Republic, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—controlled ninety percent of the Union's exportable energy. They had the leverage to enforce such a settlement, and by 2013 they exercised it.
References
- 1.Energy and Fragmentation: The Confederal Logic of Russian Federalism"]], author unknown, 2016, Union Institute for Economic Policy, pp. 140–167.
- 2.From Moscow's Margin to Economic Power: The Tyumen Compact and Siberian Autonomy]], Katya Vishnyakova, 2017, Siberian Academic Press, pp. 85–119.
- 3.Siberian Development Quarterly]], vol. 12 no. 3, Dmitri Sergeyev, 2010, pp. 34–52.
- 4.The Confederal Drift: Twenty Years of Union Economic Fragmentation]], Moscow Centre for Post-Soviet Studies, 2015, pp. 211–248.
- 5.Archive of the Russian Sovereign Republic Council of Ministers]], File 2014-0387, Tyumen Compact negotiations, March–June 2014.