This paper deals with Russian-speakers in Narva, a city in the northeast of Estonia. Most of the city population (c. 95%) speaks Russian as a mother tongue, while Russian-speakers are minorities in Estonia as a whole (c. 30%).
In this paper I consider whether Russian-speakers are “immigrants” or “national minorities” in the context of Estonia. W. Kymlicka points out that Russians did not see themselves as immigrants in any sense and Estonians rejected the idea that Russians should have the sorts of rights accorded to national minorities in the West. He also argues despite this major gap in perceptions, there is some evidence that the two sides are converging on something like the immigrant model of integration.
The paper begins with an overview of the migration process in Narva during the Soviet era, which is divided into three periods. Immediately after WW, an influx of immigrants from other regions of Soviet Union began. Most of the people came to Narva as workers from neighboring areas, enticed by the Soviet central government in the 40's and 50's. In the 60's and 70's many people were recruited by factories and enterprises and there were also family reasons for their immigration to Estonia. Thus, it is difficult to say which factors most influenced the migration processes and to clarify the intention of the Soviet authorities.
The second part of paper deals with language rights given by internal laws and international conventions. It is important to point out that the Estonian government ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities with the declaration that only citizens can be national minority members. This means that a part of the Russian-speaking population is not eligible for national minority status. However people actually use Russian not only in the private sphere, but also in the public sphere. In addition, the Estonian authorities do not control the situation so rigidly. They put an emphasis on enhancing knowledge of the Estonian language, while Russian-speakers are positive about learning Estonian.
Though it is too early to make any conclusions about the minority issue in Estonia, the differences in perceptions between national minorities and immigrants are decreasing, which means that problems have been solved from pragmatic viewpoints. However there are still plenty of stateless permanent residents, who are not EU citizens.

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As a result of a series of centralization reforms, initiated in 2000, a great number of studies have discussed that the center entrenched its control over regional subjects in Russia. Yet, several regional unrests observed in the recent years demonstrates an urgent need for an overhaul of the Russian center-periphery relationship, to which only limited attention has been paid yet. This study explains this instability by the increase of outsider governor deployments. Exploiting an original dataset of all governors from 1991 to 2019, patterns of outsider deployments and the effect of such deployments on the regional political processes are examined. Although President Boris Yel’tsin initially held the right to appoint and dismiss most governors in the first half of the 1990s, he did not try to dispatch outsider governors not firmly embedded in the regional societies. Whereas governors began to be elected through the popular gubernatorial elections in almost all of the regions since 1995, outsider candidates rarely won the posts of governors. In Vladimir Putin’s first and second terms (2000-2008), the power balance between the center and regions radically changed in favor of the center. In addition, scholars have argued that the center’s dominance over regional elites increased rapidly due to the de facto appointment system of governors was introduced in 2004. Nevertheless, even then, outsider governor deployments remained exceptional cases. Since the influence of United Russia as a dominant party was limited at that time, federal elites had to receive the endorsement of governors, as regional bosses, to secure the stability of the regime. However, after the triumph of United Russia in the 2007 parliamentary election and the advent of President Dmitrii Medvedev, the Presidential Administration embarked on active replacements of regional bosses with outsider governors loyal to the center. Consequently, while the center got capable of controlling regional political processes more tightly, these radical cadre reorganizations caused dissatisfaction and protests of regional elites, as a result of which electoral performances in the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections declined in the eyes of the center. As a compromise to massive protest movements brought about by the immense size of electoral frauds, popular gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012. However, the influence of the center over the recruitment of governors continues to be remarkable and the number of outsider governors is still growing. Yet, in the late 2010s, the decline of the regime’s popularity caused instability at the regional level, as demonstrated by the fact that several candidates backed by the federal government lost in gubernatorial elections. While outsider deployments have merits for the federal elites to control regional political processes through them as loyal agents of the federal government, their lack of embeddedness in local elite communities has detrimental effects on regional unrests. To test this argument, this study investigates the relationship between outsider deployments and regional electoral performances. The OLS estimate and Inverse Probability Weighted estimate demonstrate that outsider governors deliver fewer votes than local governors. Those findings imply that the center-periphery relationship in Russia is still in flux even though the rules of the game have changed since the 1990s.

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This paper attempts to clarify the political behavior of non-governmental and non-profit organisations in modern Russia based on a questionnaire-type survey carried out from December 2003 to March 2004 in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The survey was designed by Prof. Yutaka TSUJINAKA (University of Tsukuba), Prof. Itsuro NAKAMURA (University of Tsukuba), and Prof. William Smirnov (Institute of State and Law, Russian Academy of Sciences) with an aim to analyze the relationship between non-profit organisations and political actors: the central and local governments, political parties, politicians, the mass media, and others. The questionnaire is called the “Japan Interest Group Survey” (JIGS), because it was initially designed to determine the situation with interest groups in Japan. Since then, it has been developed into a global research project, conducted in 15 countries. Russia is among these countries in a similar survey form. In this paper, I examine the political behavior of Russian organisations using JIGS data. Many scholars have analyzed Russian civil society from multiple angles after the collapse of the USSR, based on the assumption that civil society would develop smoothly under a new political system. However, NPOs and NGOs did not grow as expected, because “marionette organisations” controlled by the government dominated Russian civil society. These organisations receive grants from the government directly or indirectly, and in many cases they are managed by retired government officials. Also, these organisations invariably support the government and often participate in government-sponsored conferences as “civil society representatives.” Researchers have claimed that such organisations do not contribute to the development of the civil society, whereas organisations opposed to the government depend largely on donations from abroad. Furthermore, scholars have demonstrated that the Russian people rarely trust outside organisations and systems, but tend to trust personal networks with relatives, friends, and acquaintances. This is seen as one of the reasons why the Russian people tend not to participate in NPO activities. As a result, it is the accepted view that Russian civil society is weak owing to weak NPOs and NGOs. While I recognize that Russian civil society is quite different from civil society in the developed Western countries, it is still important to analyze the actual situation of NPOs in Russia, where there were 85,185 “non-profit organisations” and 108,736 “public associations” in 2012. It is safe to assume that these organisations have some influence on Russian politics, and the question of their lobbying behavior remains open. Thus, I consider here the subjective influence of these organisations on problem-solving, the proposal or altering of policies, the frequency of their contact with administrations and political parties, political activities during elections, and lobbying methods. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address all the questions and responses to the questionnaire-survey, but I attempt to discuss the organisations’ political actions based on the above six points. In conclusion, I found that Russian organisations are very confident in problem-solving in their working areas and that they succeeded in proposing or altering policies more often compared to similar organisations in other countries. They have frequent contact with administrations, especially locally, and they often engage in exchanges of opinion. On the other hand, the organisations do not have close contact with political parties and do not participate in political campaigns during elections. Also, the organisations prefer the outside lobbying method (through mass media, demonstrations, etc.) to inside lobbying (through the politicians, political parties, administrations, etc.).

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本稿は，2015年第4四半期に実施された企業調査の結果に基づき，対ロシア経済制裁が企業経営に与える影響を検証した．分析は主に次の点を明らかにしている．第1に，企業経営幹部は，経済制裁が自社の経営に与える負の影響を，世界金融危機や欧州ソブリン危機と同程度において深刻な問題として評価している．第2に，金融危機の影響とは異なり，経済制裁の影響の評価には地域差が認められない．

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