Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 4 – Vladimir Putin
has in fact adopted a new approach to the appointment of regional leaders,
Tatyana Stanovaya says, but it isn’t about promoting younger technocrats to
these jobs but rather about lowering the status of governors at a time of resources
shortages and the continuing “de-federalization” of Russia.
In a Republic commentary, the
Russian analyst argues that the Kremlin put out the alternative view that it
had no choice but to install younger specialists in place of aging politicians
at the gubernatorial level, but “to put it mildly,” she says, “this is not
quite the case” (republic.ru/posts/86759).
Instead, she argues, what is going
on is a Kremlin effort not to bring to the fore “a new plead of young and
talented leaders in the framework of some independent cadres campaign” to
improve the economy but rather one intended to reduce the governors still
further to cogs in the power vertical run from the center and ensure Putin gets
the participation rates he wants.
There is no indication, Stanovaya continues,
that Moscow is seeking to improve conditions in the regions with its changes. Instead,
it has removed “governors who weren’t able to guarantee to a sufficient degree
predictable results, who were caught up in intra-elite conflicts and were not
keeping the situation under control.”
Thus, the Kremlin has been focused
not on installing young people but on those who lack independent political
skills, compared to those they replace, and therefore are less capable of
pursuing any independent policy. The new
men are thus more likely to implement without any questioning whatever the
center wants.
But there is another reason,
Stanovaya says, why there appears to be an emphasis on youth. More senior
people with more experience in political life often present more problems to
the Kremlin than younger ones. Given the devaluation of the position of governor,
younger ones will take it when older ones will prefer to do something else.
If in the past, a governorship was “a
trampoline for advancement,” now it is something with enormous burdens but one
that provides few occasions for moving upward.
That’s why, the analyst argues, younger people will jump at such a
position while older ones won’t. As a result, Russia is becoming “a country of
deputies” rather than one with heavyweights in the regions.
The new people are executors not
politicians, “bureaucrats not leaders,” and thus are significantly less
positioned to pursue any independent line.
They can thus be counted on to follow any radical shifts the Kremlin may
decide on.
There is another factor at work here
as well, Stanovaya says. “The distancing of the president from domestic affairs
has untied the hands of his administration in cadres policy,” opening the way
for a very different kind of struggle over appointments to posts of all kinds,
including governors.
In the past, each appointment
involved people at the highest levels; but now, shifts at the regional level “have
become less personified and more functional, connected not with specific
situations but with the typical problems common for the entire process of
selecting governors,” a shift that has opened the way for “a new role of
interest groups.”
“If earlier interest groups were the
initiators” of changes, she says, “now they play a more expert function in the interests
of organizing relations with Putin’s Kremlin entourage.” The new people don’t have “patrons.” Instead,
they are “recommended” by this or that group, something that promises to change
their behavior in office as well.
Their loyalties are less closely
defined and more “polycentric,” because they aren’t tied to one individual
power holder but rather come out of a more general area of expertise.
In this process, Stanovaya says, there
have been two basic approaches. In the first, Moscow installs someone not
connected with the region or public policy and thus treats him as an executor
within the power vertical. In the
second, where there are “more complicated inter-elite relations,” local elites
appear to continue to play a greater role.
This new approach to gubernatorial
appointments will make future changes easier and changes likely more frequent. But it “will not create any basis for more
effective economic or social policies or even for electoral success. It only
simplifies the system of relations of the Kremlin with its subordinates.”
“The former influential and
legitimate governors” are being replaced by “a faceless part of routine
executors of the vertical.” But this
carries with it the risk that crises in the regions may grow as the economy
deteriorates, the analyst says.
That is because, she says, “the
technologization of power is a process which lowers the resistance of the
milieu for the adoption of administrative decisions, but also creates fewer
conditions for development and the solution of political and economic tasks.”
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