In December 1991, seventy years of communist rule in the Soviet Union came to an abrupt end. The center could not hold, things fell apart, and it was not clear what new beast was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. As the Communist Party ceded executive functions to newly emerging state institutions, regional elites within the Russian Federation, the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics, suddenly found key roles available to them in the active building of a new Russian federal state. The future seemed to be wide open, and several regions seized the opportunity to make political and economic demands on the center in the form of movements for greater autonomy and sovereignty.

Yet not all regions of the Russian Federation sought greater autonomy, and this diversity of outcomes poses important questions which the scholarly literature has, for the most part, neglected. Put most generally, why did some regions come to believe that greater autonomy or full sovereignty was the best way to fulfill regional political and economic interests, while others did not? The experience of Russia's 89 regions in the early 1990s presents a puzzling pattern of variation in autonomy and sovereignty movements. The apparent role of economic factors in autonomy and sovereignty movements is particularly intriguing. There was remarkable heterogeneity in expressed economic interests, even though many regions bore striking similarities in their structural economic conditions, institutional configuration, and political history.