No Ethnic Russian Region has an Elite Ready to Seek Independence, Kynyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 7 – Despite suggestions that predominantly ethnic Russian regions will pursue independence, Aleksandr Kynyev argues in a new book that no ethnic Russian region is now ready to do so because none have an elite that could make a decision to do so, although he concedes the situation could change if developments in Moscow lead to turbulence.

            The much-published Moscow political scientist says that the Putin regime has destroyed the regional elites that arose in the 1990s and transformed them from groups drawn from local people and allying political and economic bodies into technocratic managers with little or no loyalty to the region (semnasem.org/articles/2024/08/07/kto-upravlyaet-regionami-kynev).

            In a 656-page volume entitled Who Administers the Regions of Russia The System of Administration and Administrative Stability of the Authorities of Russian Regions (in Russian; Moscow: 2024), he traces in detail the evolution of regional leaders from the 1990s to the present day.

            In that period, Kynyev says, there have been major “changes in the relations of governors with regional elites” and that “over the last 20 years in particular, governors have been converted from fully powerful masters of territories into managers with political responsibility and regional parliaments have almost ceased to influence the formation of regional governments.”

            These changes mean, he says that no Russian region is ready now to pursue independence and that those who argue otherwise “as a rule” are either living with out of date ideas about regional elites that may have been true in the 1990s but that “today no longer have almost any meaning.”

            “Currently, governors do not have either their former legitimacy or power. They do not have legitimacy because there are no normal competitive elections but rather plebiscites about an appointed figure. And they do not have power because all key regional officials are assigned on the basis of agreement with federal agencies” and are seldom kept in place longer than a year or two.  

            Kynyev points out that at present, “about 60 percent of governors” are outsides and “even among deputy governors,” this figure is 28 percent. There is no way that these people are loyal first and foremost to the region because they do not expect to be there for very long but rather to be rotated out by Moscow.

            The old system has certain advantages in that those in charge came from local elites and were motivated to be concerned about its development in the first instance. But there was a major drawback: such people were far more corrupt because of their interrelationships with other elite groups within the region.

            The new system, the political scientist continues, is much less corrupt, but it also has people in charge who are much less motivated to develop the region: they know that neither they nor their children or grandchildren are going to be there, and they can’t communicate with the population nearly as well, a real shortcoming in times of crisis.

            If Moscow enters into a period of turbulence, however, all this could change; and governors could decide to behave very differently, Kynyev acknowledges. But for the present, the heads of predominantly ethnic Russian regions aren’t a threat to the Kremlin; and the Kremlin has every reason to be confident about them.

            The situation in the non-Russian republics is different, he suggests; but they were not the subject of his research in this instance.