Many Russian Governors View Their Posts as Temporary Assignments and Their Populations as ‘Aboriginals,’ Krichevsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 18 – Most governors of Russia’s federal subjects are “people pulled from comfortable positions in Moscow and dispatched to the regions,” an assignment they view “not so much as exile but as a temporary business trip,” according to Nikita Krichevsky, a senior Russian economist who has specialized on regional affairs.

            As a result, he says, such people “view the local residents as if they were aborigines” and avoid establishing “any contacts” with them or with local elites, something that inevitably lands them in difficulties that they assume they can always solve by asking Moscow for help (club-rf.ru/detail/7836).

            According to Krichevsky, these attitudes reflect a problem with deeper roots in their biographies: “many of the current governors, born in the 1970s and 80s, are children of the "single-parent" generation, where mothers and grandmothers were responsible for their upbringing … with such an upbringing, there can be no talk of responsibility.”