Politically challenged: Post-Soviet Russia, petroleum and the periphery

Russia's transition poses important questions concerning changes in relations between the central state and actors in the periphery. The dissertation holds that the essence of political development in post-Soviet Russia comprises challenges to the central state from the periphery, and utilizes Russia's oil industry to investigate the extent to which the challenges have yielded for the periphery de facto political and economic autonomy in oil.; The examination includes a review of the Soviet Russian oil industry, and the changes in center-periphery relations spawned by perestroika and the dissolution of Soviet structures. Challenges by private financial interests in the periphery are then explored in the context of privatization, foreign investment, and such new central redistributive mechanisms as taxes, licenses for oil development, and export quotas. The dissertation then examines the struggles by three political subunits for jurisdiction over Russia's most lucrative natural resource: Tatarstan Republic, Tiumen Oblast, and Khanty-Mansii Autonomous Okrug.; The primary materials used include population and demographic data, Russian scholarly works on the internal politics of the three subunits, regional newspapers, legal documents (subunit charters, constitutions, treaties and agreements), and statements by the political leaderships published in the scholarly works and in the regional press.; The dissertation finds that the center's management of the challenges in oil failed to secure its strategic preferences for both fiscal revenue and domestic oil supply. Additionally, the center ceded much autonomy over oil through bilateral negotiations with the challengers in order to aggregate central revenue and retain a tenuous, asymmetrical federative arrangement. Further, although Russia's federal asymmetry remains ethnically based in a formal, legal sense, the research reveals that challenges to exact autonomy in the first post-Soviet decade were informed by material calculation and not primordial, ethno-national sensibilities.