In an interesting report published by Slon, Russian political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky recently cast doubt on whether the “siloviki” (“men of force”—the current and past cadre of security and military elites) ought to be considered a single force. Of course he is right, and one of my long-time hobby horses has precisely been to pick apart where and how they can cohere and conversely where the fault lines and rivalries fragment them. Nonetheless, one of the tools of modern Kremlinology 2.0 is to look for particular sodalities, clans, communities or blocs which often cut across functional and sometimes even ideological boundaries, in the hope of trying to understand the building blocks of modern Russian elite politics.

One approach is to look at people who passed through particular locations of institutions—witness the “Peterburgers”—and treat them as such a “club” (like all clubs, members can join several, and even drift in and out of them). In this context, the Presidential Administration, which “is responsible for providing the President with administrative support and enabling him to carry out his duties as head of state”—a bland formulation for what is, in many ways, Putin’s shadow government, the Deep State’s executive.

Read the full post »

The crowdsourced simulations consultancy Wikistrat ran an internal exercise in March on ‘When Putin Falls’, exploring the potential ways in which Putin may leave office before the end of his potential constitutional term as president and what this may mean for Russia. I was fortunate enough to lead the exercise and it was fascinating to see what over 70 analysts from around the world collaboratively came up with over ten days and work it into a document which does not so much seek to generate a predictive narrative for Russia across the rest of the decade, or even to express any belief that Putin would not serve out his term, but instead explore the range of trajectories the country could follow.

The full report is Wikistrat’s intellectual property, but the Executive Summary is freely shareable and so I am delighted to link it here:

When Putin Falls-Executive Summary

What happens when all the pieces start to come loose?

In Russian on the inoSMI website here.

Russian politics is pretty de-institutionalized as is, with real power in the “deep state” largely located within Putin’s court and a few other informal circles of common interest and converging intent. The formal structures of governance–from the cabinet to the United Russia bloc–more than anything else reflect rather than determine the balance of power in the system. Although there have been parallels made with the Brezhnevite period zastoya, the “time of stagnation,” of late my sense is less of stagnation–except in the thinking of certain key players–so much as decomposition. The once-monolithic edifice of the “party of power” is not just riven by fault lines of every kind–these were always there–but witnessing the opening of many of these divides.

Kudrin left and despite talk of his returning as PM, he is if anything signaling his disinclination to be co-opted on anything but his own terms. Surkov is out, maybe pushed, maybe jumping (my suspicion is that it was a little of both: better leave on your own terms if you think you are otherwise going to be sacked). Medvedev is still there in body, but hardly in spirit: Russia’s zombie prime minister. But in many ways more striking is the sense that second-tier figures are either leaving or else beginning to plan for a post-Putin era as the public disenchantment with the regime grows. Alexei Chesnakov, for example, has stepped down from the Presidium of the United Russia General Council. He complained that:

I have accumulated some baggage of stylistic disagreements with the party. I do not agree with some of United Russia’s legislative initiatives, including those concerning regulations of the media space and the Internet. Apart from that, most bills aren’t discussed at all by the party’s regional structures, which stymies a full debate

Poor dear; this commitment to pluralism does seem to be a recent epiphany. In practice, he was presumably motivated both by the departure of his patron Surkov and also the clear signs that he was not going to get a Senatorial position. The important thing, though, is that even a consummate careerist like Chesnakov is willing to move away from United Russia rather than, as was the norm in the past, swallow any doubts and make the best of the only game in town.

But in fairness what one could loosely call the “party of opposition” is suffering a parallel decomposition. Navalny is on trial, Udaltsov under house arrest, Sobchak retreating into glitzy domesticity, Gennady Gudkov contemplating a run for the Moscow gubernatorial position but otherwise in limbo, all under the Investigations Committee’s long, dark shadow (and lesser figures like Alexei Gaskarov, are being plucked off one by one). The opposition managed to hold another reasonably large protest in Bolotnaya earlier this month, and Navalny certainly has a following of his own, but otherwise the Coordinating Council, meant precisely to give the movement greater coherence and impact, has proven to be a waste of time and optimism. Max Katz, one of its founders, has publicly left it. This may not be the greatest loss in itself–Ben Judah memorably and not-unfairly once described him as a “lightweight pseudoactivist beloved of Moscow hipsters”–but illustrates the further disintegration of the opposition. While Vladimir Kara-Murza might inveigh that “liberal parties have no moral right to compete with each other” in today’s Russia, this is not an argument which presently seems to have much traction.

Of course, nothing is for ever and no processes cannot be reversed; we wait to see if the Navalny trial, for example, manages to become a cause celebre (though it looks as if the Kremlin has learned lessons in managing such events, and above all the power in making repression boring and dragged-out to reduce its impact). However for the moment, the trend in Russian politics is away from institutionalization and towards even greater fragmentation, away from competing visions and towards negative politics of smear, scare and kompromat, away from the emergence of ideological and programmatic blocs and towards a struggle of factional and individual “political entrepreneurs” eager to win short-term gain or to position themselves for a post-Putin tomorrow regardless of what happens today. This is a messy, unstable and unedifying spectacle.

Postscript: The All-Russia People’s Front

Today’s dutifully enthusiastic election of Putin to head the new People’s Front (or Popular Front for Russia)–by acclamation, with even the moderator saying “I’m going to ask the dumbest question ever: who do you want as leader?”–simply adds to this process. Increasingly the Kremlin seems to be adopting a policy of “institutionalized deinstutionalization”. What this mouthful means is that instead of parties, which are generally assumed to have policy platforms of some kind, and structures implying chains of command below the Boss, Putin wants to rely on a broad, amorphous movement whose platform seems little more than Narod! Rossiya! Putin! (“The People! Russia! Putin!”)–if anything even less specific than Uvarov’s “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.” Increasingly, the regime rests upon a platform of nationalism, xenophobia and Putin’s personality cult. These are all well-worn and increasingly rickety supports.