War of Laws

• 1. Introduction

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  The War of Laws was a conflict fought not with weapons but with paper: competing legislation, rival tax codes, and contradictory constitutional claims that tore the Soviet Union apart from 1989 to 1991. The first shot was fired in Estonia in 1988, when the republic became the first of the fifteen Soviet states to declare sovereignty over its own territory. Within two years, all fourteen others had followed. What happens when a government's laws stop being obeyed? What happens when fourteen governments simultaneously decide Moscow no longer speaks for them? And what happens when the vacuum left behind is filled by a new generation of ambitious politicians who find themselves trapped in the very same legal gridlock they helped create?

• 2. Sovereignty Spreads

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  Estonia's declaration in 1988 was the opening move in a process that would unfold across the entire Soviet map. One by one, the Soviet republics began passing laws asserting jurisdiction over their own territories. Moscow responded by declaring these laws unconstitutional. The republics responded in turn by stating that Moscow's rulings had no bearing on the matters at hand. The result was a cycle of legal challenges with no referee capable of settling the dispute.

  Native languages had been suppressed under Sovietisation, and the republics' new governments made their reintroduction a priority, replacing Russian as the official language of administration. That move carried unintended consequences. Large cities with predominantly Russian-speaking populations felt cut off from the new order. Some of those communities began pushing to carve out even smaller republics of their own, adding further layers of competing jurisdictions to an already tangled situation.

  The laws the republics were passing were frequently almost identical to the laws Moscow was simultaneously enacting. That produced what observers called a system of "parallel power": two sets of institutions making the same rules, each denying the other's legitimacy. Neither side was governing effectively, and the economic consequences of the resulting gridlock began to bite hard.

• 3. Tatarstan and South Ossetia

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  Tatarstan, whose population included a Muslim Tatar plurality, went further than most republics when it declared itself an independent state in 1990, claiming the right to self-determination and asserting ownership of its substantial oil reserves. It severed its ties to Russian law and Russian taxes, a move that was mirrored across many of Russia's 89 regions.

  On the 10th of November 1989, the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast submitted a formal request to be elevated to the status of an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Georgian SSR and the central Soviet government could not find a legal resolution. The constitutional dispute spilled beyond the courtrooms and legislative chambers and became the South Ossetian War, which settled into the category of frozen conflicts that outlasted the Soviet state itself. South Ossetia became a stark example of what the War of Laws could produce when legal deadlock gave way to armed confrontation.

• 4. Gorbachev's Losing Hand

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  Mikhail Gorbachev and the Communist Party had deliberately chosen to loosen their grip on the republics, but the consequences moved faster than they anticipated. As the splits deepened, Gorbachev put marketisation and constitutional reform on hold to focus on keeping the Union together. The New Union Treaty was drafted to transfer more control to the republics over their own affairs, an attempt to make remaining in the Soviet Union an attractive option.

  The gesture came too late. No amount of publicising the Treaty persuaded the republics to abandon their push for withdrawal. Into the authority vacuum stepped Boris Yeltsin, who built support for himself by openly denouncing Gorbachev. The Kremlin and Gorbachev responded with a formal censure of Yeltsin and his remarks, a response that did little to slow Yeltsin's rising influence.

  The August Coup, an attempt to overthrow Gorbachev outright, was defeated, but the destabilisation it caused drained what remained of Gorbachev's authority. Control shifted decisively toward the republics. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia received full independence. The twelve remaining republics accepted less rigid arrangements with what was left of the Soviet system, but the Union's days were counted.

• 5. The Belavezha Accords

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  On the 8th of December 1991, representatives of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus gathered and signed the Belavezha Accords, the document that officially declared the Soviet Union at an end. The agreement produced the Commonwealth of Independent States as its institutional successor. Gorbachev resigned from the Soviet presidency later that month, completing the transfer of power that the War of Laws had set in motion years earlier.

• 6. Yeltsin's New Gridlock

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  Boris Yeltsin came to power in Russia carrying the energy of a moment that promised a clean break from the Soviet past. Former Soviet officeholders were largely removed and replaced, but many proved adaptable, shifting to a nationalist position and retaining their posts in the reorganised government.

  Yeltsin found himself blocked at almost every turn by the Russian Parliament, and a new War of Laws began, this time between the president and the legislature, filtering down through every level of government beneath them. Searching for a way around the parliamentary obstruction, Yeltsin signed the Federal Treaty, offering significant concessions to Russia's subject regions in exchange for their political support. He went further still with the creation of the Russian Constitution, which extended additional powers to the republics that remained affiliated with Russia.

• 7. Putin and Reintegration

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  Vladimir Putin's rise to the presidency in 2000 brought the expectation of a harder, more unified Russia. The constituent republics had accumulated considerable autonomy after the Soviet collapse, but their constitutions still acknowledged some form of unity with Russia. Putin's administration moved to reverse the diffusion of authority.

  Tatarstan, the republic that had led the charge for regional autonomy under the banner of "official asymmetry", now found itself in the crosshairs of new federal legislation. The law, described as "federal intervention", granted the Russian president the power to remove any regional leader and dissolve a republic's legislature if that region refused to comply with Moscow court decisions on two separate occasions.

  The response in Tatarstan was a flood of court cases aimed at challenging the legislation, but the legal campaign produced the opposite of the intended result, eroding rather than strengthening the protections the regions relied on. Tatarstan was compelled to rewrite its constitution to reflect closer ties with Moscow. The capital, Kazan, made those adjustments while retaining some independent standing in specific areas. Nationalist movements emerged among the population, and the process of reintegration became a source of sustained friction that left the republic's relationship with Moscow unsettled well into the new century.