Regionalism and constitutional reform 1819-1826

AbstractRegionalism and constitutional reform, 1819-1826.The topic of this article is four projects of a territorial restructuring of the Russian empire along regional lines : those of Novosiltsev, Speranskii, and two Decembrists : Muravev and Pestel. These projects are used to demonstrate that political regionalism went much further than the 1816 project discussed in a previous article and the timid attempt made in the 1820s to create a regional administration in the whole empire. It also shows how unrealistic they were, except for one, that of Speranskii, which took effect in Siberia. This third article 1 ends with an analysis of the difficulties encountered by imperial administrators in their effort to reconcile concentrated with deconcentrated administration, and hints at the problem which Vladimir Putin will face in his attempts to create a new regional administration in the Russian Federation.