Transformation of LG in Russia and Participation of Citizens in Solving Local Problems in the Context of Standards of European Council.

The paper is devoted to the features of local authority development in Russia.  

We consider organizational forms of LG, territorial grounds of LG, political participating, activity of local elite and real role of local communities in political process.    Analyzing  the evaluation of local government we  pay attention to the context of reforms and to the evaluating of transit regime.  We describe shortly reforms of LG during last 20 years, paying more attention to the last changes, connected with unifying and centralizing system of LG. 

Mainly Reforming of  LG have been done according European principles of local governing, but real practice  shows us that kind of centralization and strengthening of power vertical even it was not in the line of  European Charter. Federal  juridical regulation of LG was too strict. Experts, representatives of LG have the same opinion about norms of last Federal Law which are too  superfluous,  don’t count with territorial peculiarities and restrict the freedom of regional and local power.  This fact can be confirmed by the great number of amendments to this law which tried to adopt it to the real conditions. 

Developing of self governing and local communities is connected directly with the  democratization  of political regimes.  Municipal authorities are still organized according the principles of hierarchy.

We point out some factors that determine the key features of municipal territorial practices: 1) social structure and mentality of local community and elites; 2) regime of  cooperation between regional and municipal power; 3) dominating system of settlement.  We also estimate some risks of centralization and restricting  direct elections and some prospects of  different institutes of civil society and new form of local activities.