The role of historical legacies in the process of decentralisation in Russia: compliant activism in the context of the crises of the 2020s

This study explores the case of recent trends in Russian centre–periphery decentralisation under Vladimir Putin: increasing regional rhetoric (2018) and delegating authority to the administrative regions (in 2020 and 2022). Why and how in the last six years (2018–23) have there been recurrent instances when Russia’s government has delegated authority to subnational regions? Why does the central government perceive the risk associated with distributed power as acceptable? We hypothesise that this outcome is driven by the existence of a specific bureaucratic culture of compliant activism inherited from the Soviet past. The existence of this culture makes decentralisation less risky for the centre. We provide some empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis. The article develops the theory of compliant activism and the role that the Communist legacy played in modern decentralisation in the prewar period (pension reforms in 2018), the COVID-19 pandemic (confinement restrictions in 2020) and during the invasion of Ukraine (military mobilisation in 2022). The article offers an empirical test for the case of pension reforms and lays the ground for future research on the impact of crises on decentralisation in non-democratic regimes.