Not long ago scholars had little access to information about the Russian regions. In Soviet times, a handful of studies had dealt with regional and local government within the Soviet state, but the lack of accessibility of the oblasti, kraia, and avtonomnye respubliki made the empirical base for such studies rather flimsy. Local newspapers, as former Sovietologists remember well, could not be exported, and a trip to Saratov or Vladivostok to interview the party bosses on the details of decision- making in the provincial party bureau was not likely to yield dividends. Our view of politics and society in the USSR, as a result, was pretty much limited to what went on within the “Garden Ring” of Moscow. Up to the end of Soviet rule, Merle Fainsod’s seminal study of provincial life in the 1930s, based on the Smolensk Party Archives captured by German troops in 1941, stood more or less alone.