The first Russian Republic, which began in the fall of 1991 and lasted until December 1993, was outside the organizing framework of the Soviet doxa. Instead, this was a period of contestation over power and the system of authority that would structure political and economic relations in the Russian Federation. Politically, it was a game of musical chairs: All the rules and paths to power had been upset, and no one knew which institution would turn out to be the relevant one. The Federation Treaty and the Constitution were works-in-progress, and there were many organizational choices facing political actors including multiple seats of authority in the region. But, who knew which chair would be left when the music stopped – would it be the executive or the legislature, the center or the regions? On the economic side, the de facto decentralization of economic resources that began under perestroika and accelerated with the decline of the CPSU represented the transformation from Soviet principles of redistribution to a Hobbesian every-region-for-itself state of anarchy that exacerbated regional inequality. During this period, regions came to appreciate the new opportunities that had opened up to them and the urgency of making choices; consequently, at this time they developed a sense of post-Soviet regional economic interests.

In this chapter, I analyze the post-doxa period of the first Russian Republic from the late fall of 1991 to December 1993 as a space for the development of new, differentiated, regional understandings, that is, heterogeneous conceptualizations and solutions to problems.