Putin’s ’40-Year-Old Managers’ Increasingly Important Players in His System, Bestuzhev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 1 – Putin’s “40-year-old managers” are increasingly important players in his political system, are committed to continuity so that they keep their positions, and are the reason why the current regime is unlikely to be replaced by a more liberal one unless the entire system is defeated and overthrown, Yevgeny Bestuzhev says.

            The 40-year-olds are “a comparatively new generation of the nomenklatura hierarchy,” the political scientist and former political prisoner says; but they are gradually becoming the dominant players “in the ruling conglomerate” and pushing other elite groups such as the FSB generals in the process (rusmonitor.com/norma-soprotivleniya.html).

            This can be most easily seen in their promotion of the normalization of war, an approach to rule which reflects their values nominally non-ideological but in fact underscoring the strength of ideology in the Putin system, one in which, to update Solzhenitsyn’s observation about Brezhnevism, a situation in which no one believed but everyone obeyed. 

            This group, he continues, lacks all moral principles and political convictions and grew up in the families of the late Soviet intelligentsia and former liberals of the Yeltsin era. It isn’t “connected with the Soviet communist orthodoxy” or “with the siloviki oligarchs of the 2000s and 2010s.”

            Because of these differences, some Western analysts like to suggest that this group could be the basis for a split in the Putin elite and the rise of a more liberal approach. But, Bestuzhev says, while the 40-year-olds are committed to any ideology, they are committed to keeping the system which has elevated them in place and do whatever they are told to do.

            “Paradoxically,” the Russian analyst says, that simply demonstrates how powerful Putin’s real ideology is. That ideology, he continues, “is based on imperial statism and neo-Stalinism with a strong element of Nazism and numerous elements of traditional autocratic monarchy.” In it, the use of force and aggression are goals in and of themselves,” not means to an end.

            The members of this group “are noticeably different from the chekist security officials who have dominated Putin’s state in the past. After all, the chekists have certain ideas about what is right and semblance of political views. They can assess any policy being pursed on the basis of their own professional experience.”

“For the 40-year-olds, nothing is important except for the position they have and the bonuses they get that they wouldn’t if they were outside of powers that be, and bonuses that are unattainable outside of power,” Bestuzhev argues.

 

“The chekists hate the West and Western values, but they recognize the West as a worthy opponent, respect Western power, and remember the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War. 40-year-olds, in contrast, truly despise the West, considering it weak and incapable of resistance. Unfortunately, the West has recently given many reasons to think exactly this way.”

Among the most prominent members of the 40-yeqr-olds, the analyst says, are Anton Vayno, head of the Presidential Administration, Sergey Kiriyenko, his deputy, Maksim Oreshkin, another Vaino deputy, and PA staffers Sergey Novikov and Andrey Yarin.