The verdict on local self-government will be carried out by governors

by Andrey Pertsev

At the end of March 2025, after more than three years of discussion, Vladimir Putin signed Federal Law No. 33, titled “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government in the Unified System of Public Power”. The legislation has come to be known as the “municipal reform”. Political observer Andrey Pertsev summarizes its preliminary results.

Concession to Tatarstan

The abolition of the first tier of local self-government — and the dissolution of thousands of urban and rural settlements at that level — was widely seen as inevitable. The initiative was driven by the Presidential Administration and personally endorsed by President Putin. In practice, many regions have begun implementing the changes, but some are facing pushback from local councils resisting the elimination of the level of government closest to ordinary citizens. In the Komi Republic, the process has been disrupted in three districts; protests are ongoing in the Ryazan region, and resistance has also emerged in the Pskov region. For now, settlements cannot be liquidated without the consent of the municipalities themselves.

The political bloc of the Presidential Administration, advocating a streamlined system of governance, has pushed to eliminate the two-tier structure as unnecessarily complex. They opted for the simplest approach — introducing a single-tier system at the federal level. A corresponding bill passed the State Duma and was signed into law by Putin on 20 March 2025. However, as reported previously, the initiative unexpectedly triggered protests from the leadership of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.

Initially, the speaker of the federal parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, who previously headed the political bloc of the Presidential Administration and has tense relations with its current leadership, spoke approvingly of the republics’ stance. The confrontation ultimately resulted in softening the conditions outlined in the federal bill. Volodin announced that the State Duma leadership (clearly in coordination with the Kremlin) had developed a cross-factional amendment allowing regional authorities to determine their own governance structure.

"It is proposed that regions be granted the right to independently determine their model of local self-government. Each subject of the Russian Federation will be able to decide whether to retain the two-tier municipal system with rural and urban settlements or transition to a single-tier system. The adoption of this amendment will resolve the disagreements that arose during the first reading of the bill," announced Volodin’s press service.

The Speaker of the State Duma indeed acted as an effective lobbyist for the leadership of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan at the federal level. However, this does not signify a victory for civil society regarding municipal reform. The political bloc did back down and refrained from imposing a federal mandate, but Tatarstan has received such concessions before. The republic was the last to maintain a federal treaty with the central government after similar agreements were abolished elsewhere. The head of Tatarstan held the title of president until February 2023, despite federal legislation banning regional leaders from using the title as far back as 2010. These privileges were surrendered gradually and with resistance—Moscow had to take into account the republic’s wealth and its role in ensuring favorable federal election results for United Russia and Vladimir Putin.

The electoral strongholds indeed secured the right to maintain a two-tier system as a means of balancing local elites and accounting for their interests. However, this is an exception, not the rule. Other municipalities that are still resisting the abolition of their settlements should not get their hopes up.

Refined Technology

Federal legislation delegates the decision on the municipal governance scheme to the regions themselves. However, none of the governors, except for Tatarstan’s Rustam Minnikhanov and Bashkortostan’s Radiy Khabirov, raised their voices in defense of the first level of local self-government. There are several reasons for this. First, most regions are headed by officials appointed after the Kremlin's political bloc came under the leadership of Sergey Kiriyenko. These so-called young technocrats often have no connection to the regions they govern and are therefore primarily oriented towards the leadership of the Presidential Administration's political bloc. Since the idea of the reform originated in the Kremlin, they are simply implementing it at their level. Second, many governors find the single-tier system with enlarged municipalities based on districts more convenient — the more direct the vertical, the easier it is to manage. Cases where government-backed candidates lost at the settlement level were not uncommon — it is impossible to oversee every town and village even from a regional capital, but such a loss, immediately covered by major media outlets, could result in repercussions from the Kremlin. Organizing elections in a unified "district-county" format is easier for the authorities; even if an opposition candidate wins in one of the single-member districts in a protest-prone area, they will be diluted among loyal elected officials from other districts. It is no coincidence that the idea of abolishing the first level originated from a governor — Moscow Region head Andrey Vorobyov was the first to start eliminating settlements back in 2016. Sergey Kiriyenko and his staff adopted the Moscow Region practice.

Once regional authorities are granted the right to introduce a single-tier system of self-government, it will quickly spread across the country. This has already happened with mayoral elections. In the early 2010s, opposition candidates frequently won municipal leadership elections. In some Russian cities, direct mayoral elections had already been abolished and replaced with a dual-headed governance system — where the mayor was considered the speaker of the municipal council, elected by deputies from among themselves, while the administration was headed by a city manager hired through a competition. The Kremlin actively promoted and implemented this system. However, in many cities, direct elections remained — their cancellation required approval by local deputies. But United Russia did not hold a majority in all assemblies, and even when it did, some party members were reluctant to abolish direct elections, hoping to participate and win themselves. As a result, in 2014, the Kremlin's political bloc, then led by Vyacheslav Volodin, granted regional legislative assemblies the right to cancel elections, excluding municipalities from the decision-making process. The outcome was immediate — within the first six months of the law's enactment, elections were canceled in 13 regional capitals, while mayoral elections were preserved in only 19. By 2016, residents of only 9 regional capitals could elect their mayors, and today only four such cities remain, with one of them, Yakutsk, already initiating the procedure to abolish direct elections.

The two-tier local self-government system will be dismantled following the same scenario. Moreover, the regional governance system is now more homogeneous. In 2014, the gubernatorial corps was quite diverse, and some regional heads could retain mayoral elections based on their own vision and pragmatism. For example, the now former governor of Khabarovsk Krai, Vyacheslav Shport, did not want to quarrel with the influential mayor of Khabarovsk, Alexander Sokolov, for whom direct elections were important. In Yakutia, maintaining mayoral elections, including in the regional capital, was essential for elite balance and channeling protest sentiments. Today, almost all governors are aligned with Sergey Kiriyenko, they lead United Russia branches and therefore will use party mechanisms to push regional legislative initiatives through parliaments. And again, many regional heads themselves are interested in abolishing the first level of local self-government.

Sentence for Execution

Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and several other regions — such as Yakutia — may, for now, remain enclaves of two-tier local self-government. However, federal lawmakers are already signaling that it will be easier to comply with the centrally backed initiative. The revised federal law assigns powers only to a single tier of municipalities, rather than clearly dividing them between levels. As a result, regions that choose to retain a two-tier system will now be responsible for independently defining how powers and responsibilities are distributed between municipal levels.

The formal authors of the municipal reform, Chair of the State Duma Committee on State Building Pavel Krasheninnikov and Chair of the Federation Council Committee on Legislation Andrey Klishas, are already warning of potential problems. "All the powers have been consolidated and unified in a single law, but it remains unclear which level — first or second — is responsible for their implementation," warns Klishas.

It is possible that regions that go against the federal will may struggle, fail to establish a division of powers in accordance with federal law, and ultimately transition to a single-tier system. Even Tatarstan, which, although able to resist Kremlin pressure for a long time, eventually surrendered both its presidential status and federal treaty.

Despite concessions to the leadership of so-called electoral sultanates, the Kremlin has not backed away from its decision to dismantle the two-tier system of local self-government. Instead of relying on State Duma deputies, it now intends to implement the reform through governors and United Russia representatives in regional parliaments and municipal councils.

How the Kremlin is cracking down on grassroots resistance

The adoption of the law on local self-government has already accelerated the elimination of municipalities across Russia. Local self-government has become a single-level system in 28 Russian regions. Another 17 regions so far rejected the unification plans (see the map - REM).

In 2025 alone, all former districts in the Belgorod, Pskov, Chelyabinsk, and Novgorod regions were transformed into consolidated municipal units. The same happened with most districts in the Kostroma and Lipetsk regions. Enlarged municipal units also appeared in the Omsk, Novosibirsk, Vologda, Kaluga, Altai, and Krasnoyarsk regions.

For some reasons, regional authorities in Northwest Russia, including those in areas bordering the European Union, have shown a greater eagerness than others to transition to a single-tier local self-government system. Yet it is residents of these very regions who are mounting the strongest resistance to the changes

A similar scenario is playing out across many regions. First, regional and district authorities attempt to quietly organize public hearings, inviting only selected participants to secure the necessary approvals. Where this tactic succeeds, rural councils are quickly convened to vote, and the transition to a single-tier system is formalized through legislation. Even when these “closed” hearings are disrupted by opponents of the reform, local councils often still approve the changes under pressure from higher authorities.

This is exactly what happened in the border districts of the Republic of Karelia, adjacent to Finland. In public hearings held in the Muezersky district, officials pushing for the reform faced a major setback: five out of eight settlements voted against the proposed merger. Nevertheless, after a majority of communities rejected the transformation of the district (rayon) into a single municipal okrug, Karelian authorities convened local council sessions, where all councils ultimately voted in favor of the reform. The same approach was used in the Medvezhyegorsky, Lahdenpohsky, and Kemsky districts.

In the Novgorod and Pskov regions, the resistance movement has been led by municipal deputies from the Yabloko party, making it more organized. In Novgorod region, Yabloko demanded that the Prosecutor’s Office declare the public hearings on the liquidation of urban and rural settlements, organized by the authorities, invalid and the decisions of the councils of deputies illegal. Residents of several settlements are challenging the results of the public hearings in court. Under pressure from active citizens, the Novgorod district election commission surprisingly registered an initiative to hold a referendum on the return of direct elections for the head of the district and the restoration of 14 rural settlements.

In the neighboring Pskov region, the election commission refused to hold similar referendums in the Sebezhsky and Gdovsky districts. Yabloko intends to form initiative groups to organize referendums in each of the abolished municipal districts, including resubmitting documents in places where referendums were previously denied. Representatives of the Communist Party have also joined the resistance to municipal reform in Pskov.

Where resistance cannot be overcome through procedural maneuvers, authorities resort to more familiar repressive tactics. In the Ryazan region, Yabloko deputy Konstantin Smirnov mobilized around 400 to 500 residents from various settlements to attend public hearings opposing the elimination of local self-government. At the end of January, a criminal case was opened against him, and he was placed in pre-trial detention for two months. Shortly afterward, the rural settlement of Dubrovichi, where Smirnov served on the local council, was swiftly dissolved.

In Altai, security forces opened a criminal case against journalist and founder of the weekly “Listok,” Sergey Mikhaylov, in 2022, accusing him of spreading false information about the Russian army. The official reason was material written by other journalists and published in “Listok”. Stanislav Andreichuk, co-chair of the movement for voter rights “Golos”, believes that the real reason was Mikhaylov’s stance against the local self-government law. The journalist advocated for the return of direct elections for mayors and heads of settlements in the Altai Republic.

In some regions, municipal deputies, seeing no legal way to resist the reform, are resigning their mandates. This happened, for example, in Khabarovsk Krai, where seven deputies resigned in protest.

In the Krasnoyarsk Krai, regional authorities have launched a “municipal blitzkrieg”, pushing through local self-government reform without any public consultation. As a result, out of the current 472 two-tier municipalities in the region, only 39 will remain. Meanwhile, Krasnoyarsk Krai is the second-largest region in Russia by area, where the distance between neighboring settlements can exceed 100 kilometers.

This decision has sparked spontaneous mass protests across the region, with numerous petitions from local residents. Even the Victory Day marches on 9 May turned into demonstrations against the reform. Members of the regional legislative assembly have reportedly received over 500 individual and collective appeals. The governor’s social media pages, initially flooded with negative comments, are now being artificially boosted with likes, while critical commenters are blocked. There are also reports of pressure on residents in some districts to prevent them from recording video appeals or gathering signatures.

Some municipal officials and deputies, including members of United Russia, have publicly spoken out against the reform initiated by the governor. The heads of rural settlements from the soon-to-be-liquidated Sukhobuzimsky District have openly expressed their disagreement with the reform. The mayors of Sukhobuzimsky District and Dudinka (both from United Russia) have resigned prematurely.

Against this backdrop, the reform’s initiators have opted not to slow down but to expedite the process. The second reading of the draft law has been moved up to 15 May, an unscheduled session, instead of the originally planned 29 May.

All in all, under the current regime, it appears that local self-government in Russia is doomed to disappear; its extinction seems only a matter of time.