Kremlin Appears to Be More Open to Promoting Locals Rather than Outsiders to Head Russian Regions, Toth-Czifra Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 15 – Something unusual happened in Russian regional politics in May, Andras Toth-Czifra says. Instead of appointing outside technocrats known colloquially as “Varangians” to the top jobs in Kemerovo, Kursk and Tula oblasts, Putin named as governors officials with local roots.

            While it is still too early to say how far this change will extend, the US-based Hungarian analyst says, it represents an obvious departure from the policy of appointing outsiders to gubernatorial and other top jobs in Russian regions that the Kremlin has practiced most of the last decade (ridl.io/ru/zakat-varyagov-menyayushhiesya-tendentsii-regionalnyh-naznachenij/).

            (For documentation on that policy and discussions of its implications for the Russian political system now and in the future, see cyberleninka.ru/article/n/fenomen-gubernatorov-varyagov-kak-indikator-retsentralizatsii-opyt-1991-2018-gg/viewer and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/08/no-ethnic-russian-region-has-elite.html.)

            Appointing such outsiders was clearly part of Moscow’s effort at centralization and control, but in recent months, there have been significant “pushbacks” by officials and activists in the Altay, Pskov, Kostroma and Irkutsk oblasts, something that has led Moscow to consider using more “federalized locals,” officials who come from the region but worked in the center.

            Toth-Czifra says that “appointing local governors after years of relentless centralization does not carry with it large risks, especially as all three of the recent appointments involved people who had worked closely with their Varangian predecessors” and can be expected to follow their lead.

            Moreover, he continues, “the policy of replacing locals with Varangians may simply have run its course and reached its natural limits.” However, because, before the new appointments,
“47 of Russia’s 83 regions were led by Varangian governors, theoretically there is still room to dismiss locals.”

But at the same time, Toth-Czfra says, “the Kremlin has a different kind of deal with most «republics with an ethnic character», such as Tuva, Tatarstan or Chechnya, where local leaders are firmly in charge of political and sometimes even economic resources, but deliver resounding electoral victories when the Kremlin wants them to.”

However that may be, it does appear that “the era of corporate-style interchangeable cadres as the sole idealized model of public administration officials may be coming to an end. The attempt to make Russia’s nascent digital authoritarianism run itself, is, yet again, coming up against the stiffness of the personalist autocracy that the country is increasingly becoming.”