Social and institutional contexts affect the development and mediation of local understandings of the economy, as well as the transformation of those understandings into political and economic interests. The perestroika era, and in particular the interplay of orthodox and heterodox attempts at reinterpretation, which eventually destroyed the Soviet doxa, opened the conceptual space for new understandings of the economy and for regional relations in the Federation. That heterogeneous understandings of the economy existed and that they were connected to movements for greater sovereignty has been demonstrated in Chapters 5 and 6. In Sverdlovsk in particular, there was a great deal of negativity in understandings of the economy, and these negative interpretations of economic conditions were linked to the arguments regarding the formation of a Urals Republic. But, in order to complete the story of the formation of economic and political interests and the economic basis of movements for greater sovereignty – that is, to understand the transformation of economic understandings into political interests – we must return to the specific institutional context of the first Russian Republic, 1991–3, outlined in Chapter 4, and consider how the events and institutional configuration of that period affected the construction of political and economic interests in greater sovereignty.

There was no set of fixed economic interests (either corresponding or not corresponding to objective accounts), which, when presented with an institutional opportunity, resulted in the movement for the Urals Republic.