Ever More in Russian Elites Want Collective Leadership instead of Personalist Dictatorship, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 14 – Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who is now a fierce critic of the Russian president, says that ever more members of Russian elites and maybe eventually even Putin himself would like to see the country move toward a Politburo-style of collective leadership in place of the current personalist dictatorship.

            According to the commentator, “the problem for Russian elites is no longer so much whether they like Putin or not but rather whether it is possible to allow one individual to make decisions on his own if he is seen to be taking steps that threaten the system’s structure” and thus survival (pointmedia.io/story/6a7ed07e75d0d3346a25cb74).

Until recently, Gallyamov continues, “Putin’s monopoly on power provided elites with stability, but now that very monopoly is becoming the main source of risk.” And they are looking to what China has done to avoid the problems that can arise and share decision-making power among members of the top elite.

“After Mao’s death,” he argues, “his successors came to the conclusion that the country could no longer depend on the mental and physical condition of one person,” with “Deng Xiaoping convinced that “the source of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution lay not just in the personality of Mao but in the excessive concentration of power.”

            Russian elites, many of whom admire China and consider it worthy of emulation, are now thinking the same thing and want to see their country evolve in a similar direction. Among ideas circulating, Gallyamov suggests, is the notion of “merging all ‘patriotic parties’ into a single national party and creating a politburo officially.”

            With such an arrangement, the members of this body would “try to balance Putin” who “of course would remain first among equals but cease being the only indisputable master of the country. Major decisions would collective, literally through official voting. Let Putin have two votes instead of one but the rest should have a vote,” Gallyamov says.

            According to the commentator, Putin likely “will agree to this at some point” because he recognizes that a dead end is approaching. His departure from power is too radical a move, but shifting part of the responsibility for what should be done next can serve as a way out” for Putin.

            As an example of how this would work, Gallyamov says that it is likely that “Putin can’t stop the war by himself, so there must be an arrangement under which others can do it. If that happens, Putin’s pride will suffer less” as he can say he wanted to go on but others around him in the Politburo didn’t agree. 

Penza Blogger Creates a Chat to Protect Residents form Officials Seeking to Force Them to Sign Military Contracts and Fight in Ukraine – and People in Other Regions are Relying On it Too

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 12 – Stanislav Morozov has just created a chat on line that shows what officials are doing to hunt down and force men there to sign military contracts and go to fight in Ukraine and helping Russians there and elsewhere resist such actions by highlighting this abuse of power, according to the Horizontal Russia portal.

            In the first ten days, more than 1200 people signed up to his chat. Most were from the Penza Region, but Morozov says that Russians in other regions have asked that they not be dropped because they fear officials may use similar tactics on them in the future and want to resist as well (semnasem.org/articles/2026/08/12/idet-ohota).

            What the right-wing blogger is doing, the portal continues, is demonstrating to the Kremlin that it will not be able to “drive people to the war by force” and that if the Kremlin wants to continue the war, it must come up with a kind of agenda that the Russian people can and will support.          

            As of now, the Chat Morozova on the VK channel has not been blocked; and its editor, Morozov says, that he will not move to what might be a safer Telegram channel because far more Russians know how to interact with VK than are ready and able to use the latter means to get news and information.

            Morozov says that he asks those who go on his chat to be careful with their language lest officials target them and says that in the first 12 days of its operation, the chat has managed to protect at least one resident from forcible impressment into the Russian military and made far more aware of this danger.

            Commenting on this development, Aleksey Tabalov, who heads the School of the Conscript Project, said he welcomes what Morozov is doing because it will make it more difficult for the authorities to use their current forceful methods to raise men for the army in Ukraine.

            After this lesson from Penza, the activist says, officials are likely to become more careful and this new forceful mobilization will become “quiet and secretive,” with officials not risk acting brutally in public but instead visiting people in their homes or workplaces on the basis of lists provided by the draft agency.

Russia’s Pensioners have Seen Their Incomes Fall from 30 Percent to 25 Percent of Average Pay of Others over Last Five Years, Leaving Them Hardest Hit of All

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug.12 – As Russia heads toward another Duma election next month, the age group that has most actively supported Putin and his United Russia Party most actively is hurting as a result of the failure of their pensions to keep up with inflation-driven rises in the wages of working-age Russian, Mikhail Sergeyev says.

            The head of the economics section of  Nezavisimaya Gazeta says that at the time of the last Duma elections, those who had retired were receiving pensions that averaged 30 percent of the pay of those still working. Now that figure has fallen to 25 percent as pay and wages have risen as pensions have stagnated (ng.ru/economics/2026-08-12/1_9558_degradation.html).

            Sergeyev calls this development “a degradation of the level of pension support” and points out that “the older generation ahs turned out to be the chief victim given the  growth of incomes and pay” of working-age Russians, much of the increase of which has reflected inflation rather than increased productivity.

            Politicians across the spectrum including some from United Russia are engaging in pre-election populist promises to do something about this; but given budgetary stringencies brought on by Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, it is unlikely that they will be able to help the pensioners much given that any new infusion of cash will only fuel more inflation and leave them behind.

            Today’s pensioners may remember, Sergeyev says, that a decade ago, when pensioners were earning 38 percent of what wage earners received, Putin promised that they should be getting 40 percent. But in the years since while he has been in power, there share has not risen as he suggested but fallen further – and there is every sign that this pattern will continue. 

Putin’s War in Ukraine has Brought Down a New ‘Ice Curtain’ between Chukotka and Alaska but That is Far from Impermeable, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 12 – After a period of euphoria between the end of Soviet times and the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, contacts between the closely related native peoples of Russia’s Chukota and Alaska have been divided by a new “ice curtain” that fell after Putin expanded his war against Ukraine in 2022, Arseny Karsakov says.

            But this curtain is nowhere near as impermeable as was the Iron Curtain of cold war times, the Posle Media commentator says at the end of a lengthy and detailed survey of the relationships of peoples on the two sides of the Bering Straits since times immemorial (posle.media/article/when-the-whales-leave-again).

            According to Karsakov, memories of closer ties only a few years ago play a major role as do “the internet, kinship ties, certain international organizations and formal agreements which remain in place.” But the relationship has been seriously reduced, undermining these societies and reducing the chance that the world will benefit from their environmental practices.

            “The paradox is that resisting climate change and defending shared endangered animal populations require closer cooperation than ever before but the war in Ukraine has rendered such cooperation less and less possible,” Karsakov says with regret, although he acknowledges that some of the hopeful developments of the 1990s were already undermined by Putin’s securitization of this border region even before 2014.

            Research on the region and contacts between the peoples on the two sides of the straits have dropped. Travel has become almost impossible, but what has kept the hope for better times alive is that people in both Chukotka and Alaska use messenger aps on a daily basis to remain in close touch.

            If Moscow moves further against the Internet, that could inconvenience people in the center of Russia; but in Chukotka, it would destroy what has been a major support for the survival of the peoples of that distant region and even lead to the disappearance of some of them altogether.

Moscow’s System of Raising Manpower without Mobilization "Unstable," Ivanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 13 – Moscow is currently waging a major war in Ukraine “without a decree ordering a new draft and without criminal liability” for those who seek to avoid service, an approach “fundamentally different” from its own history and the experience of other powers, Konstantin Ivanov says.

            But the current system which involves “recruitment through cash compensation and the amnesty of criminals” is “unstable,” the Riddle commentator says.  To keep the influx of manpower going, the Kremlin has no option by to keep raising the payments, something that makes this system ever more expensive than mobilization (ridl.io/ru/institut-obmena-zhizni/).

            But the Russian government is pressing on with it because it is aware of the enormous political costs of declaring a mobilization, something it and the entire world saw when Putin declared one in 2022 and perhaps a million Russians fled to country to avoid service.

            “At the same time,” he continues, “any serious change in the configuration – the exhaustion of the subsidy pool, an economic downturn, or a decline in the willingness of the regions to compete on payments – would put the current arrangement for filling the ranks would call the current system into question.”

            Indeed, Ivanov argues, the current arrangement can function “only under specific conditions: an active war without general mobilization, the political impossibility of open conscription and the existence of financial reservs which allow human resources to be purchase don the market rather than extracted via political obligation.”

            “Should a new mobilization nonetheless occur,” the current arrangement “most likely would cease to be the dominant mechanism for replenishing the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces. Mobilization would close the current manpower gap against a shrinking pool of volunteers and growing losses.

            However, Ivanov suggests, the compensation approach likely “would remain as a means of dampening discontent among families. The contract option would probably also survive but only as a supplementary channel … With mobilization, “the one-time bonuses for signing up would likely be reduced as they place too high a burden on regional budgets.”

Artificial Intelligence Now Allowing Moscow to Increase Repression while Cutting Costs of Doing So, Russian Analyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 11 – At the end of July, Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, celebrated the fact that his agency had been able to integrate artificial intelligence and other IT technologies to improve its monitoring of society by processing data more quickly and cheaply than had ever been possible before.

            Aleksandr Mikhailov, a Russian analyst writing for The Insider, says that this is just one more indication that Russia, like other authoritarian states such as China and North Korea, is using AI to increase repression while at the same time cutting the costs of doing so (theins.ru/obshestvo/295475).

            In a 6,000-word article, Mikhailov describes both what these other states have been doing and how Moscow has copied them in order to make Putin’s authoritarianism not only more comprehensive than any before him but also to do so in ways that don’t require the same commitment of money and time to achieve that end.

            “Traditional methods of authoritarianism—censorship, espionage, propaganda, and forceful suppression—all required significant human and financial resources,” he writes. But “AI has changed the state of affairs” allowing authoritarian states to rapidly increase their repressive control but at far less cost.

            Mikhailov concludes with a sobering warning: “AI has exacerbated the historical confrontation between freedom and tyranny.” As a result, the democratic world no longer has the right to slow down: the algorithms of authoritarian regimes” “are already making decisions to suppress freedoms faster than democratic institutions have time to react.”

Kyrgyz and Uzbek Scholars Mull Promoting Citizens of Central Asian Countries to Identify as ‘Central Asians’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 10 – Researchers from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan believe that the countries of Central Asia should encourage their citizens to identify in the first instance as “Central Asians” so as to provide a foundation for the increasing cooperation among the states in that region.

            At a meeting is Bishkek, the Uzbekistan Institute for Strategic and Interregional Studies and the Kyrgyzstan  Institute for Strategic Initiatives, both of which serve as advisors to their respective presidents, met with representatives of the Swiss PeaceNexus Foundation and came up with a draft concept paper on this (cronos.asia/news/tsentralnoaziat-kto-on-takoy-i-zachem-nuzhen-regionu/).

            The draft concept calls for “coordinating efforts in the humanitarian, information, cultural, educational and other areas” to support among the populations of the five Central Asian countries “a sustainable sense of regional affiliation” and thus support the growing importance of Consultative Meetings of the Chiefs of State there.

            Not even all the participants in the Bishkek meeting think that the idea is a good one. The Kyrgyz hosts, for example, described themselves as “guests” rather than “participants” in the meeting and no one is sure what role Azerbaijan would have in such an effort even though it is increasingly integrated in the chiefs of state meetings.

            The concept paper defines a Central Asian as someone who “while maintaining his ethnic, civil and religious identity also feels that he or she belongs to the community of peoples of the region, one with a common historical memory, the values of good neighborliness and peace loving, and mutual respect for their cultural and linguistic distinctions.”

            Given that, it is unclear how far this project may go; and one thing limiting it still further is that like the meetings of the region’s chiefs of state, the Central Asian identity uses Russian as the common language, even though that language was imposed from the outside. Unless that changes, there is a danger that this idea could be hijacked by Moscow to weaken the states.

            But the participants at the Bishkek meeting expressed confidence that the Central Asian identity they want to promote would be very different from the slightly and even offensive "Central Asia" identity that some in Moscow promote and that, because of that, it may take off as more people become familiar with the concept paper.