Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 26 – Appointments
and dismissals of key officials provide insights into how the Kremlin makes
decisions more generally because in contrast to other sectors, hirings and
firings are almost always carried out, Nikolay Petrov says, adding that the
recent wave of changes at the top thus provides a large amount of data on these
key aspects of the Putin system.
Two weeks ago, Petrov, the head of the
Moscow Center for Political-Geographic Research, published an article in which
he outlined what he sees as the emergence of a neo-nomenklatura system that is
gradually moving from a Brezhnevite to a Stalainist model. (On this, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/08/putins-neo-nomenklatura-system-shifts.html.)
He has now
followed this up with a discussion of how cadres decisions are now taken in the
Kremlin and what that says about Vladimir Putin’s intentions and the future development
of his system (vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2016/08/24/654236-novaya-nomenklatura-prinyatie-reshenii).
Both the most recent wave of
personnel changes and “the large series of cadres decisions of the last two
years look consistent and well thought out, a pattern that testifies at a
minimum that they have been taken within the framework of a common logic and
from a single center.” And while Putin has the last word, he does not make all
these choices independently.
That task is simply too large: “the
nomenklatura positions the president appoints have increased sharly” and the
number of presidential representatives both formal and informal, including in essence
the governors has grown as well.” But Putin sets the direction and the
parameters within which all these choices are made.
“The personal participation of the president
in the adoption of cadres decisions doesn’t mean one man rule and his absolute
independence in taking them,” Petrov says. Various groups in the bureaucracy
are involved, and Putin can’t ignore them. Many decisions are thus “the result
of a struggle in the apparatus and competition of various groups within the
elite.”
Putin is a past master at patience,
Petetrov argues. He thinks about cadres appointments for a long time and “tests
the reaction to possible appointments on various people from his entourage.” He
could dispense with this perhaps, but he has to take various factors into
consideration – image, balance, message, and so on – and testing names on
others is helpful.
A particular reason he has to do
that, the analyst suggests, is that cadres changes at the top involve cadres
changes below. When one leader is replace by another, that has consequences for
others who have been or will become their subordinates. It is best if this is considered in advance
rather than after the fact.
The timing of appointments, Petrov
says, can be triggered either by objective external circumstances or by “subjective
factors,” including personal relationships.
Often people are changed not because of themselves but because of a new
direction in overall Kremlin policy in a particular area. “The real goals
[involved] typically aren’t announced.”
The only cadres appointments where
the process has been specified in law concerns the naming of governors. There
the 2004 rules are generally followed but not always, especially if key groups
lobby for or against a particular appointment or reappointment directly with
the president. Then almost anything can happen.
According to Petrov, the most
important change in the cadres process in recent times involves a shift from
carrots to sticks. In the past, the Kremlin generally used a system of carrots,
offering someone on the way out something else. Now, what has emerged is a
system involving sticks “or their absence.”
That increases the likelihood that
the system will move in one of two directions in the coming months: either in
the direction of “authoritarianism for which a shift to mass repressions
regarding cadres will be necessary or toward authoritarian modernization in
which cadres will have to bend the knee and adapt.”
Which one will occur, Petrov says, is
uncertain, but he suggests that “we should be able to see it already before the
end of the year.”
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