What exactly is an oblast, anyway?
This week’s Sunday supplement: a brief investigation of regional government structures in the former Soviet World.
A question about Russia and Ukraine I keep coming back to, even though – or perhaps because – it has very little to do with the war: what the hell’s an “oblast”?
The two breakaway puppet states that Russia used as its casus belli were the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic, located in Donetsk Oblast and Lugansk Oblast of Ukraine respectively. There’s a Moscow Oblast, too, which nearly surrounds but doesn’t contain Moscow. In fact, you’ll find oblasts right across the area once covered by the USSR, and in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia, too. So what is an oblast, exactly? And why do we use the Russian word rather than “county” or “region” or “province”?
For the moment let’s stick with Russia. The largest country in the world is divided into around 83 – I’ll be coming back to the vagueness of that number in a minute – units known by the awkward label of “federal subjects”. The largest by population is Moscow, home to 10.4 million people; the smallest is the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a stretch of Arctic coastline where fewer than 42,000 people live. They vary wildly in area, too. The smallest is St Petersburg, at just 1,439 square kilometres, or slightly smaller than Greater London; the largest is the Sakha Republic which, at 3.1 million square kilometres, is roughly five and a half times the size of France or, if you prefer, three quarters of the size of the entire European Union.
These 83, ish, units come in six different flavours. Most common are those oblasts we were talking about, of which there are 46. These are mostly named after their capitals, so it’s tempting to imagine them as sort of Russian equivalents to British counties, and start translating “oblast” as shire. Except, each comes with their own governor and state legislature, and also they’re massive: the Moscow one is over 44,000 square kilometres, which makes it bigger than the south east of England and East Anglia combined. Oblasts are generally ethnically Russian or at least Russian-speaking areas, the sort of core of Russia.
There are also the nine krais, a word which is generally translated as “territory” but literally means “edge”. These have basically the same powers and status as oblasts, and the only reason they’re not oblasts seems to be historical – it’s as if England had kept calling its border counties “marches” rather than “shires”.
Then there are the federal cities, which double as regions, in the same way Berlin is its own state. There are two of these, or possibly three: the reason for the numerical vagueness (see, told you I’d come back to it) is because one of them is Sevastopol, in the Crimea, and while the Russian state is intent on insisting that Crimea is its territory, pretty much nobody else is. Anyway, the two definite ones are St Petersburg and Moscow, each with a much bigger surrounding oblast. It’s as if Greater London were to be surrounded by an even bigger territory, making up much of the Home Counties and called, essentially, London-shire.
Next there are 21 (or 22) republics, which are, according to the constitution, autonomous. These are home to specific ethnic minorities, and each has its own constitution, language and legislature: the motherland is mostly there to represent them in international affairs, a sort of Russian devo-max arrangement. That, at least, is the theory; but this being Putin’s Russia I think the phrase we’re looking for is “citation needed”.
The 83 (85?) federal subjects of Russia. Oblasts are in yellow, krais in orange, federal cities in red, republics in green, autonomous okrugs in blue and the single autonomous oblast in the far south east in pink. Image: Roman Poulvas/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0.
Where it gets really confusing is with the four autonomous okrugs (districts, maybe?). These were originally subdivisions of other federal subjects like oblasts, but with some autonomy to give a measure of representation to particular ethnic groups... but even though three of them are still subdivisions of that sort, the fourth isn’t and also they’re all federal subjects in their own right. I can’t make head nor tail of this, or think of any comparable status from any other system of government I’m familiar with. It’s like Upper Michigan was a state in its own right while still also being part of Michigan but also not legally having to be. What? Just, what?
Lastly, in the far east on the borders of Manchuria, there is a single, lonely autonomous oblast: the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a sort of attempt at creating a Jewish homeland within the USSR. It never really came off, what with all the anti-semitism, and being about as far away as possible from the bit of Russia where most of its Jewish population actually lived, and so many Soviet Jews opted to emigrate instead: as a result, the oblast’s Jewish population peaked, after WW2, at around a quarter of the total. Today, despite its name, it is less than 1% Jewish.
Each of these federal subjects no matter how big or small gets two delegates in the Federal Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament. So no matter their differences, Russians and Americans should be able to bond over the fact that California/Moscow get the same number of seats in the upper house as Wyoming/the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and that is patently ridiculous.
The federal subjects are the top level division of government within Russia set out in the constitution, but there are actually bigger areas still. In 2000, early in his time in government, President Putin created seven federal districts, each covering a much wider area and each with a presidential envoy, to tighten the Kremlin’s grip on the regions. In 2010, these were reorganised to create an eighth covering the Caucasus. So while the various different types of federal subject have different levels of autonomy and power, all have less of either than they once did. Colour me stunned.
Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet countries tend to be more straightforwardly divided simply into oblasts. The reason we don’t translate it seems to be that there’s no English word it quite maps onto: they’re too big for counties, too weak for states. That said, province or region come closer, and we don’t use those either. I’d wonder if it’s an unconscious attempt to suggest the former Soviet world is different somehow – but we accept the idea France is divided into communes and departements, while translating German lander into states. So perhaps there is no logic. Perhaps the real reason we use the word “oblast” is simply path dependency: we do because we always have.
Anyway, that’s what an oblast is. Hope that helps.
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