Putins Militocracy

Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White1

Abstract: Two specialists on Russian society and politics analyze the composition of
Russian officialdom since 1991, focusing in particular on changes in recruitment
practice that have taken place under President Vladimir Putin. On the basis of elite
interviews and contemporary scholarly and media analysis of the Putin regime, the
authors examine trends in the number of government personnel who have a military
or security background. Also investigated are trends in the presidential administra-
tions hold over federal agencies and representation of former military-security per-
sonnel at regional levels within the Russian Federation.

S ince his victory in the 2000 presidential election, Vladimir Putin has
drawn a stream of people in uniform into Russias power structures.
At present every fourth member of the Russian elite has a military or
security background, and their numbers are continuing to grow. Why did
this happen, and what are the implications of a system of this kindwe
shall call it militocracyfor Russia?

THE PRESIDENTIAL PROJECT

Putin inherited the Russian presidency because a strategic group of
the Yeltsin elite chose him for the role of successor. The question, indeed,
had been resolved in principle long before the election. The search had
begun in 1998, when the authors of the idea of the transfer of power to a
chosen successor defined the main characteristics of a suitable candidate.

1
Olga Kryshtanovskaya is Director of the Department of Elite Studies of the Institute of
Sociology (Russian Academy of Sciences), Moscow (e-mail: olgakrysht@mtu-net.ru). Stephen
White is Professor of Politics at the University of Glasgow (e-mail: s.white@socsci.gla.ac.uk).
An earlier version of this article was presented to the annual conference of the British
Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (Cambridge, UK) in March 2003 and to
a seminar in the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, in April 2003.
The authors wish to acknowledge with thanks the comments received from colleagues, and
also the financial support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council under award
R000220127 in association with the Ministry of Defence under award JGS902.

289

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2003, 19, 4, pp. 289306.

Copyright 2003 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
290 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

He (definitely not she) should be a fairly young military person with

political experience, entirely loyal to the current regime, andif possible
clever, pragmatic, and flexible. The casting of candidates began with the
appointment of Nikolay Bordyuzha in 1998 as Secretary of the Security
Council. Aleksandr Lebed, Yevgeniy Primakov, and Sergey Stepashin
were also considered (Moskovskiye novosti, no. 49, 2002, pp. 89). In the end,
it became clear that Putin was the candidate who came closest to fitting the
specifications, and Yeltsin revealed him as his personal choice in an
interview with the initially reluctant FSB director (Yeltsin, 2000, pp. 357
8). Why did the Yeltsin regime decide so firmly that the new president
should be a figure from the military and security world?
In the Soviet Union, the military had always been one of the pillars of
the regime but had never pretended to a direct role in politics. Military
people were rarely appointed to high state positions, they were poorly
represented in the Soviet parliament and the Communist Partys Central
Committee, and state and military and security institutions themselves
were normally under the charge of civilians and party functionaries. In the
KGB, similarly, leading positions were regularly filled by candidates with
no military or security background. According to our data, as many as 41
percent of those appointed to executive office in the KGB during the last
three years of the Soviet period had been recruited from party or Komsomol
positions.2
The army and the force ministries (silovyye struktury) began a
general decline under Gorbachev that subsequently accelerated under
Boris Yeltsin, due to a sharp decline in funding, recruitment, and internal
discipline (Odom, 1998; Duggleby, 1998). The KGB itself was divided into
a series of separate agencies including a Service for Foreign Intelligence
(SVR), a Federal Security Service, a Federal Border Service, a Federal
Agency of Government Communication and Information, and a Federal
Tax Police Service, with responsibilities and structures that were constantly
altered by legislation and presidential decrees (Mukhin, 2002, pp. 135153;
Albats, 1995; Knight, 1996, 2000). All of these changes took place against
the background of a collapse in the power of the state itself as the regions
asserted their independence, tax revenues declined, and public order
became increasingly uncertain. These processes were so widespread that
they began to represent a danger not just to society, but to the elite itself.
Indeed, in the final years of the Yeltsin presidency, it began to appear that
without a reassertion of state authority the elite might entirely lose its
dominant position.
The creation of the military-president project was influenced by the
myth of Yuriy Andropov as a ruler whogiven timecould have
reformed the Soviet system and avoided its disintegration, and who would
certainly have arrested the fall in living standards, the emergence of social

2
Here and elsewhere we draw on the database of the Department of Elite Studies of the
Institute of Sociology (Russian Academy of Sciences).
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 291

and national conflicts, and the increase in organized crime and general
uncertainty of the years of perestroyka and post-communist reform
(Medvedev, 1999, pp. 1011, 396). According to the Kremlin strategists
plans, Putin would be presented as a reanimated Andropov, and one
wholike his predecessorwould engage in the consolidation of society,
the restoration of public order, and the strengthening of state power, using
the mechanisms of the Soviet system whenever necessary. The realization
of such a plan was expected to satisfy the demands of society as well as the
requirements of the elite itself. In turn, the transfer of power from Yeltsin
to a successor from the security apparatus led to fundamental changes in
the elite as a whole.

THE FSB-IZATION OF POWER

The idea of a military-security president was certainly welcome to a
Russian public that was desperate for stability to be restored, even if it
involved some curtailment of their new post-communist liberties (in the
spring of 1999, 37 percent thought the organs of state security had too
little influence, while fully 50 percent thought the same of the army:
Monitoring, no. 1, 2000, p. 91). The reputation of the armed forces and state
security as honest and apolitical professionals who carried out their
instructions conscientiously helped to differentiate them from other elite
groups, whose image was closely associated with theft, corruption, and
demagogy. Not only this, but under the conditions of a general collapse of
state institutions and the disappearance of the Communist Party and its
own hierarchy of command, both the armed forces and the state security
apparatus had retained an organization based on vertical subordination
and regional structures that penetrated the entire society, allowing them to
be used as a structure of national government. They became, in effect, the
basis of public order for the new regime.
According to the plan, a president with a military-security background
would not only regularize the work of government but also draw its staff
increasingly from the same source, making use of the military propensity
to obey superiors and act as a collective. The mass recruitment of the
military into state service was also a result of the lack of a pool of eligible
candidates. One of the strengths of the Soviet nomenklatura had been its
methodical work with the cadre reserve at all levels of government.
Perestroyka destroyed this system, and the years that followed completed
its destruction. Under Yeltsin a rather different elite came to power,
recruited from a wide variety of social groups and for the most part without
any serious management experience. Many were politically inexperienced
academics who soon found that the experience of running a scientific
laboratory was no preparation for the management of a country (Novoye
vremya no. 16, 1997, p. 16). They owed their sudden prominence to Yeltsins
determination to appoint ministers who had no career association with his
Soviet predecessor (Kostikov, 1997, p. 271).
292 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

In these circumstances, it was especially important for a new president

to be able to develop a support group on whom he could rely for advice
and from which he could recruit officials to staff the federal agencies of
government. The first to be called upon, for understandable reasons, were
the people Putin knew personally and trusted as his colleagues and fellow
Petersburgers. As a result, the new president became increasingly depen-
dent for immediate support upon the officer corps, leading officials of the
law enforcement and force ministries, and managers from the military-
industrial complex. A coalition of supporters gradually emerged around
the figure of the new president, drawn for the most part from among former
colleagues and friends who were able to make a great leap forward in
the wake of their patron.3
Putin was not unique in recruiting his own people into leading
positions in the new administration. Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin had
also brought their compatriots and career associatesa Dnepropetrovsk
or a Sverdlovsk mafiato work beside them in the central institutions
of party and government. Putins elite, however, had a number of distinc-
tive characteristics. As we see in Table 1, the main distinguishing features
of Putins elite when compared with that of the Yeltsin regime are the
rather smaller proportion of intellectuals with higher degrees, the even
greater predominance of men under Putin, the more provincial origins of
Putins cadres, and the increasing proportion of the elite that claimed a
military or security background.
An increasing number of businessmen in government reflected social
change as much as the personal preferences of the president. The increase
in the proportion of men, of provincials, and of the less highly educated
among the Putin elite, by contrast, was a direct consequence of the sharp
increase that had taken place in the share of the military in all elite groups
(see Table 2). As we can see, connection to the military became an increas-
ingly prominent characteristic of the political elite from the late Soviet
period. Between the years of perestroyka and the middle of Putins first
presidential term, the overall share of military personnel increased almost
sevenfold; at the very highest level, within the national leadership, the
increase was even more dramatic. Growing numbers of military and secu-
rity representatives at all levels of government reflected an increase in the
number of military and security agencies themselves, but also the increas-
ing popularity of military and security officials as deputies or governors.
After Putins election in 2000 they began to move into economic and
political life in unprecedented numbers.

3
For a well-informed account of these developments, see Mukhin (2003).
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 293

Table 1. The Russian Elite under Yeltsin and Putin (in percent)

Yeltsins elite, 1993 Putins elite, 2002

Average age (in years) 51.3 51.5

Women 2.9 1.7
Of rural origin 23.1 31.0
With a higher education 99.0 100.0
With a higher degree 52.5 20.9
With a military education 6.7 26.6
With an economic or legal education 24.5 25.7
With an elite higher education 35.4 23.4
From St. Petersburg 13.2 21.3
Business representatives 1.6 11.3
Military/security representatives 11.2 25.1

Source: Data collected by the Elites Department of the Institute of Sociology of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. The elite is defined for the purposes of this analysis
as the members of the Security Council, both houses of the Federal Assembly, the
Russian Federation government, and heads of the subjects of the Russian Federation
for the respective years. Elite higher education is defined as including Moscow
University, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Maurice Thorez
Institute of Foreign Languages, the higher educational institutions attached to the
Communist Party and Komsomol, the Academy of the National Economy under the
USSR Council of Ministers or Russian government, the Academy of Social Sciences
under the Central Committee of the CPSU (now the Academy of State Service under
the President of the Russian Federation), Moscow Finance Institute (now the Finan-
cial Academy under the Russian government), the All-Union Academy of Foreign
Trade, and the Diplomatic Academy. The figures show the composition of each group
two years after the accession of Yeltsin and Putin respectively.

THE PRESIDENTIAL VERTICAL: MILITARY AND

SECURITY REPRESENTATION IN GOVERNMENT
Under the Soviet system, government was almost entirely subordi-
nated to the chairman of the Council of Ministers (there were only three
exceptionsforeign affairs, defense, and the KGB, which were headed by
members of the Politburo and unofficially subordinated to the General
Secretary). In post-communist Russia, in effect, two governments emerged:
the government of the prime minister, and the government of the president.
This situation was first introduced by Boris Yeltsin, who in a decree of
August 1991 subordinated the KGB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and
Ministry of Defense directly to the Russian president on the territory of the
RSFSR (O komanduyushchem, 1991). Arrangements of this kind were
formalized in the federal constitutional law of December 1997, On the
Government of the Russian Federation, article 32 of which provided that:
294 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

Table 2. The Share of the Military in Elite Groups (in percent)

Upper Lower
National Govern- Regional house of house of Average by
leadership ment elite parliament parliament cohort

Gorbachev 4.8a 5.4b 0c 4.7d 3.7

cohort, 1988
Yeltsin 33.3e 11.4f 2.2g 2.5h 6.3i 11.2
cohort, 1993
Yeltsin 46.4j 22.0k 4.5l 7.3m 6.8n 17.4
cohort, 1999
Putin cohort, 58.3o 32.8p 10.2q 14.9r 9.4s 25.1
2003

Sources:
a
The 21 Politburo members as of 1988, excluding the General Secretary (Chernev, 1996).
b
The 74 members of the USSR Council of Ministers as of the end of 1989 (Sovyet minis-
trov SSSR: Spravochnik, 1999, pp. 515).
c
The 174 first secretaries of CPSU committees in the union republics, krays, oblasts,
cities of Moscow and Kiev, and okrugs as of September 1989 (Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 9,
1989, pp. 5185).
d
The 2245 USSR peoples deputies as elected in 1989 (Narodnyye deputaty SSSR: Sprav-
ochnik, 1990).
e
The 15 members of the Security Council as of 1993 (database of the Elites Department).
f
The 35 members of the Cabinet of Ministers of 1993 (Politicheskaya Rossiya segodnya:
ispolnitelnaya vlast, konstitutsionnyy sud, lidery partiy i dvizheniy, 1993, pp. 78117).
g
The 89 heads of subjects of the Russian Federation as of 1993 (Politicheskaya Rossiya
segodnya, 1993, pp. 117266).
h
The 175 members of the 1993 Federation Council (Federalnoye sobraniye Rossii: Sovyet
Federatsii i Gosudarstvennaya Duma, 1995, pp. 13212).
i
The 445 deputies of the 1993 State Duma (Federalnoye sobraniye Rossii, 1995, pp. 213
540, 582583).
j
The 28 members of the Security Council of 1999 (database of the Elites Department).
k
The 50 members of the Russian government as of April 1999 (database of the Elites
Department).
l
The 88 heads of subjects of the Russian Federation, excluding Chechnya (database of
the Elites Department).
m
The 82 members of the 1999 Federation Council, excluding governors (Rossiya na
rubezhe XXI veka. Senatory Rossii, 2000).
n
The 450 Duma deputies of 1995 (Dumskiy vestnik, 16, no. 1, 1996, pp. 529).
o
The 24 members of the Security Council of 2003 (database of the Elites Department).
p
The 58 members of the Russian government of 2003 (database of the Elites Depart-
ment).
q
The 88 heads of subjects of the Russian Federation, excluding Chechnya (database of
the Elites Department).
r
The 168 members of the Federation Council (Kommersant-vlast, 26 February 2002, pp.
2952, with subsequent changes).
s
The 448 deputies of the State Duma as elected in December 1999 (Federalnoye sobraniye:
Sovyet Federatsii. Gosudarstvennaya Duma. Spravochnik, 2000, pp. 272346).
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 295

Table 3. The Structure of the Russian Government, 2003

Total Subordinated to PM Subordinated to president

number Number In SC Number In SC

Ministries 23 18 1 5 4
State committees 7 6 1
Federal commissions 2 2
Federal services 13 5 8 3
Russian agencies 8 7 1 1
Federal supervisory 2 2
bodies
Other federal bodies 6 1 5

Total 61 41 1 20 8

Source: Sobraniye zakonodatelstva Rossiyskoy Federatsii, no. 21, 2000, art. 2168, as modi-
fied by ibid., no. 49, 2000, art. 4799; no. 43, 2001, art. 4071; no. 45, 2001, art. 4251; and no.
12, 2003, arts. 1099-1102. Security Council (SC) membership is as identified in ibid., no.
18, art. 1840, 26 April 2001.

The President of the Russian Federation as Commander in Chief

of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the Chairman
of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, in accordance
with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, federal constitu-
tional laws [and] federal laws, directs through his decrees and
instructions the activities of federal ministries and other federal
organs of executive power responsible for defense, security, inter-
nal affairs, foreign affairs, the prevention of emergencies and
liquidation of the consequences of natural calamities (O Pravi-
telstve, 1997).

In this way, the bifurcation of the Russian government was formally

institutionalized. By May 2003, 20 of the 61 federal organs of executive
power had been subordinated to the president, representing almost a third
of the government as a whole (see Table 3). The government of the prime
minister, incorporating the remaining ministries, was responsible prima-
rily for economic management, leaving the main force structures, whose
leading officials formed the core of the Security Council, within the gov-
ernment of the president. As Table 3 makes clear, members of the Security
Council who were at the same time members of the government belonged
to precisely the section that was controlled by the president: eight of the
nine ministries or other agencies whose leading officials were members of
the Security Council were also members of the presidential team.
296 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

In the presidential government as it stood after the extensive

changes that took place in the spring of 2003, force structures were repre-
sented not only by the ministries of defense, internal affairs, and the FSB,
but also by the ministry of civil defense, emergencies, and liquidation of
the consequences of natural disasters, the state courier service, the foreign
intelligence service, the federal railways service, the federal tax police
service, the federal border service, and the federal agency of government
communications and information, and by Russian agencies for military
supplies, conventional armaments, management systems, and others. The
presidential government by this time incorporated not only the mili-
tary section of the cabinet of ministers, but also the Security Councila
collective organ that was headed personally by the president.
The Putin period also saw a rapid increase in the number of military
and security figures at subordinate levels of government. Appointments at
the ministerial level were widely discussed in the media; the appointment
of military and security officials as deputy ministers or heads of depart-
ments attracted much less attention. On the evidence of our study, among
all deputy ministers appointed between 2000 and 2003, more than a third
(35 percent) had a military or security background. Military or security
people were most actively recruited into the Ministry of Economic Devel-
opment (four deputy ministers); two joined the Ministry of Industry and
three the Ministry of Communications, headed respectively by Putins
fellow Petersburgers German Gref, Ilya Klebanov, and Leonid Reyman.
Deputy ministers with a military or security background were also
appointed in the Ministries of the Press, Foreign Affairs, Transport, Prop-
erty Relations, Justice, Transport, and other agencies. Most of these new
recruits were from the security organs (the FSB or SVR); in all, they
accounted for nearly half (45 percent) of all deputy ministerial appoint-
ments to the civilian branches of the federal government.
The fact that Putin is a former director of the FSB, and was before that
a senior official in the KGBs foreign service, has also influenced the pattern
of appointments in the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Defense. The
Defense Ministry was headed by General and former Deputy FSB Director
Sergey Ivanov, with General Mikhail Dmitriyev of the Foreign Intelligence
Service as deputy minister; in the Foreign Ministry, the second-ranking
position was taken by former SVR Director Vyacheslav Trubnikov.
On the evidence of our interviews, the majority of these appointments
had been recommended by the Kremlin and not by the corresponding
minister; and those in question remained within the active reserve (ODR),
a status that had first emerged in the Soviet period. The ODR consists of
officers who, without ending their service in a military or security agency,
are seconded to another organization. The difference between them and
their new colleagues is that they have additional duties: the compilation of
a monthly report for their service of origin. At the same time they retain
their officers privileges (a second salary, additional payments for rank and
length of service, and an identity card that provides not only an entry
permit to government offices but also a guarantee of personal immunity).
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 297

Leading officials from the ODR play the role of grey cardinals in this
connection, taking their place among the ranks of ministerial deputies but
with additional powers that allow them to act as the eyes and ears of the
presidential administration.

PUTINS POLITBURO
The Soviet political system was based upon an institutionalized hier-
archy of power embodied in the nomenklatura. At the top of this pyramid
was a group of senior party officials, called the Politburo, who exercised
supreme executive authority. The most important was the General Secre-
tary, but his personal authority was limited, and he could not make
unilateral decisions without considering the views of his colleagues. Deci-
sions were taken by vote, collectively, with any differences resolved by a
structure of subordinate committees (Lowenhardt et al., 1992, ch. 7). The
composition of the Politburo depended on the positions that were consid-
ered to be crucial at a given moment. Usually these included the Central
Committee secretaries who monitored ideology and the economy, the
chairman of the government and his deputies, the ministers of foreign
affairs and defense, the chairman of the KGB, the chairmen of both cham-
bers of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and six or seven party leaders from the
union republics, first of all Ukraine (Kress, 1980).
The hierarchy of power in post-communist Russia has been less closely
studied, and outside observers have no direct means of access to the
mechanism of decision-making itself. The structure and composition of the
ruling group, however, is reasonably distinct. The Putin regime is in the
first instance a system of personal rule based upon the presidency. The
institutions of government are immediately subordinate to it, taking deci-
sions that fall within their respective spheres of competence. There is one
agency, however, that brings together a group of officials of particular
significance and plays a special role in the overall direction of the work of
government. This is the Security Council of the Russian Federation, which
in number and composition has become a reasonably close approximation
of the Politburo of the Soviet period. The Security Council, just like the
Politburo, brings together the key officials of the second tier of government
and is headed in a similar way by the countrys leading politician, the
General Secretary or (since 1991) the Russian President.
In Table 4 we set out the structures of the Politburo and of the Security
Council as they have evolved since the late Soviet period. In order to
facilitate comparison we have dispensed with titles and replaced them with
functional equivalents. The figures who by the early years of the new
century had become an almost automatic presence in the Security Council
included the following: heads of department within the presidential
administration, the state officials who were responsible for ideology and
the economy, the prime minister and selected deputy premiers, the heads
of the force ministries, the minister of foreign affairs, the heads of both
legislative chambers, and the heads of key regions.
298 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

Table 4. The Structure of the National Leadership, 19812003 (in percent)

Putins
Yeltsins Security Security
Soviet Politburo Council Council

1981 1988 1993 1999 2003

Departmental heads, 24 43 7 4 4
ideologists, secretaries
Force ministries 14 10 43 46 46
Other ministers 19 29 50 39 8
Parliamentary heads 5 5 7 8
Regional leaders 38 14 29
Representatives of science 4 4
Total (number) a 21 21 14 28 24

a
Excluding the CPSU General Secretary and the Russian President.

As this classification makes clear, Putins Security Council at the start

of 2003 had many similarities with the Soviet Politburo in its number and
composition. At the outset of his rule, Yeltsin favored government minis-
ters, including heads of the force ministries. By the last year of his time in
office, he had increased the representation of the force ministries and
introduced the heads of the two parliamentary chambers, but had not
admitted the countrys regional leaders. Putin maintained the representa-
tion of the force ministries, which was a departure from Soviet practices,
but reverted to the Soviet period in the representation he accorded to the
countrys regional leadership.
There are other analogies. The Soviet Politburo had a strict internal
hierarchy, with two sets of members: full members (who had the right to
vote), and candidates. For much of its existence, members were listed
within each category by their political standing, rather than alphabetically.
The Putin Security Council also has a two-layered structure, consisting of
permanent members (5) and simple members (19). Only the members
of the first group are arranged in a hierarchy. According to the presidents
decree of April 2001, permanent members of the Security Council are listed
in the following order: the Chairman of the Government of the Russian
Federation, the Secretary of the Security Council, the Minister of Foreign
Affairs, the Minister of Defense, and the Director of the FSB (Ob utverzh-
denii, 2001). This leaves little doubt as to the relative standing of the
administrations leading members. The heads of the two parliamentary
chambers, for instance, though constitutionally superior, emerge as less
important figures than the ministers of foreign affairs and defense and the
FSB director.
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 299

The reason the Security Council has acquired so much influence in

recent years is connected with two factors in particular: the war in Chech-
nya, and a series of technical catastrophes. The Chechen conflict exposed
serious deficiencies in the competence of the army and the security ser-
vices. At the same time there was an unending succession of disasters
connected with the countrys worn-out infrastructure, which led to what
had been a little-noticed agency, the Ministry of Emergencies, becoming
one of the most important of the force ministries. The ministry quickly
developed a network of regional units throughout the country, and its
head, Sergey Shoygu, became one of the countrys most prominent politi-
cians, with the rank of general. In 1999 he headed Unity, the bloc put
together by the Kremlin to withstand the challenge of FatherlandAll
Russia at the Duma election, and later became one of the leaders of United
Russia, which promotes Kremlin policies at all levels of the political
system. The Security Council itself, a body of predominantly military
figures dependent on neither the Russian government nor the presidential
administration, was potentially in a position to take over the supreme
direction of all aspects of the nations affairs.

THE PRESIDENTIAL VERTICAL: MILITARY

APPOINTMENTS IN THE REGIONS
The arrival of the military was especially notable in the regions, where
the representation of personnel among heads of subjects of the federation
has more than doubled since Yeltsin left power. By early 2003, nine of the
88 regional heads (excluding Chechnya) had a military or security back-
ground. A military backgroundand even more so, an FSB background
was now regarded as a very considerable asset in competing for high office,
and one that was thought to ensure the political support of the Kremlin
(although this was not always the case). The effects were clearly apparent
in gubernatorial elections. Before 2000, military and security figures had
won elections of this kind, but with some difficulty (Aleksander Lebed in
Krasnoyarsk kray, or Vladimir Semenov in Karachay-Cherkessiya). After
Putins elevation to the presidency the election of candidates with a mili-
tary or security background became increasingly frequent. In November
2000 Admiral Vladimir Yegorov won Kaliningrad; in December 2000 the
head of the local FSB, Vladimir Kulakov, was successful in Voronezh, and
General Vladimir Shamanov in Ulyanovsk. In the spring of 2002 two more
FSB generals became governors: Murat Zyazikov in Ingushetiya and Viktor
Maslov in Smolensk region (Profil, May 13, 2002, p. 7; May 27, 2002, p. 6).
Military and security candidates had been advancing on other fronts
as well. Vice-Admiral Mikhail Motsak, a submariner who had been chief
of staff of the Northern Fleet, became first deputy to the presidential
representative in the North-Western Federal District (Kommersant, January
24, 2002, p. 2). Valeriy Golubev, who had served in the KGB up to 1991 and
was a longtime Putin associate, became the Leningrad regional assemblys
300 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

representative in the Federation Council (Vremya novostey, April 24, 2002,

p. 4). And in a move that reflected the new attitude to broadcasting and the
flow of information more generally, General Aleksander Zdanovich moved
from the FSBs board for assistance programs to the vice-chairmanship of
state television and radio. Zdanovich, it was reported, would deal with
relations between central television and the regions, although it could not
be ruled out that security issues might come to the fore in other cases as
wellif, for instance, reporters decide[d] to convey to viewers their own
viewpoint instead of the states (Vremya MN, June 4, 2002, p. 15).
But the most rapid advance of the military took place with the estab-
lishment of presidential representation in the federal districts in 20001, in
what represented the establishment of an entirely new level of government.
Each of the seven federal districts came to be headed by a plenipotentiary
representative, with up to ten deputies. In addition, each representative
had a staff of about 150, including federal and main federal inspectors and
their assistants. The total membership of this new elite group, accordingly,
was about 1500 people (Ekspert, no. 5, 2001, p. 67; Yezhenedelnyy zhurnal,
April 30, 2002, pp. 68). Of the seven presidential envoys, five were gener-
als, among them Viktor Cherkesov, a close Putin associate who had directed
the St. Petersburg FSB from 1992 to 1998, and in the 1970s had been
notorious for his fierce war on dissidents while a senior official of the
Leningrad KGB (Kommersant, May 19, 2000, p. 1). Among their deputies,
70 percent were senior officers in the military or security services. And
among the federal inspectors supervising individual subjects of the feder-
ation, more than a third (35 percent) had a military or security background.
To strengthen coordination of the force and law enforcement agencies,
councils for security were established in each federal district, with mem-
bership drawn from all the corresponding institutions (including the heads
of military garrisons, of the regional administrations of the FSB and Interior
Ministry, and of the Procuracy). Presidential envoys, in this way, brought
together the resources of the central government in each of the federal
districts, strengthening their influence over regional structures. At the
same time, the regional branches of the force and security agencies moved
under the control of presidential envoys, leaving governors with much less
influence over the internal affairs of their own regions. Changes of this kind
allowed the Kremlin to secure a comprehensive network of levels of
influence throughout the federation, and one that was largely staffed by
military or security people.
Putins federal inspectors began to examine the activity of regional
administrations, and immediately found a mass of departures from
national legislation. A conflict between the federals and the regional elite
soon developed in most regions. Governors had been humiliated by the
loss of their previously virtually unlimited power, and by the way in which
not only officials of the presidential administration and envoys but also
federal inspectorsfor the most part, young and inexperienced officials
were intervening in local affairs. The governors were also annoyed by the
vagueness of the functions of the envoys and inspectors, which allowed
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 301

them to intervene in any regional issue as they saw fit. The Tatar president,
Mintimer Shaymiyev, was particularly critical of the new system, remark-
ing that the parallel functions of federal and regional structures were giving
rise to a new army of officials and to a complete shambles in the
distribution of governmental responsibilities (Yezhenedelnyy zhurnal, April
30, 2002, p. 8).
From the federal point of view, a confusion of functions had its advan-
tages, as it gave the president more room to maneuver in his management
of the regions. The real function of the envoys was not so much to carry
out particular control functions as to lend support for the president wher-
ever the situation required it. Apart from the tasks identified in the Reg-
ulations on the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the
Russian Federation in a federal district (O polnomochnom, 2000)
working to advance the work of government in foreign and domestic
policies, checking on the implementation of federal decisions, and organiz-
ing appointmentsthe envoys carried out a number of less clearly speci-
fied special tasks. These included the supervision of regional elections
in light of the Kremlins requirements, using their administrative
resource.
As well as establishing new federal structures in the regions, the Putin
administration began to reassert control over the officials who headed
regional agencies of law enforcement, and who had come increasingly
under the influence of governors in the Yeltsin years. Nor was this surpris-
ing, in that a substantial part of their housing, transport, and other benefits
were allocated by the head of the region. The linkages with central govern-
ment became increasingly attenuated, and the dependence of federal offi-
cials on regional authorities became so great that governors began to press
openly for the transfer of appointments within the force and law enforce-
ment agencies to the competence of the region (see for instance Profil, May
13, 2002, p. 23). If the regions had succeeded in pushing through a change
of this kind, the last ties between federal structures and the center would
have been broken. In the event, a new power vertical was established
that derived in part from the introduction of new federal structures and in
part from the subordination of existing officials to the central authorities.

TOWARDS A MILITARY-BUSINESS COMPLEX

The restructuring of military and security agencies in the early 1990s
led to an outflow of thousands of former officers into the reserves, although
few were yet of retirement age. Many of them found a ready market for
their services within private business, where they were placed in charge of
security, economic intelligence, and analysis, and at salaries that were
sometimes ten times higher than what they were paid in the government
service (Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 26, 1994, p. 1). The value of these officers
was that they not only were professionals in their own right, but also had
many personal associations with government and law enforcement agen-
cies. Entrepreneurs themselves had few connections of this kind, though
302 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

the success of their business depended directly on the state. Former KGB
officers were particularly welcome: their intellectual and professional qual-
ities were widely respected, and their special skills especially valued.
The stratum of military and security officials in business increased from
year to year, as those who had already been appointed used every oppor-
tunity to draw their colleagues in behind them.
Former officers who found employment in the private sector did not
lose contact with each other or with the institution they had left behind.
On the contrary, they often relied on the assistance of colleagues who still
work[ed] at the old place (Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 16, 1993, p. 6), with
contacts that developed as their new responsibilities extended. Serving
officers had been rather isolated according to the sub-organization in which
they served: security officials interacted with security officials, policemen
with policemen, and army people with army people. Now the military
cohort inside private business actively sought out associations with their
counterparts elsewhere. Retirees working in the commercial world became
a kind of fraternity, based on mutual understanding and assistance.
They began to meet regularly and to develop a wide range of contacts
within government and law enforcement. They also created a whole series
of veterans organizations that have been successful in placing their
candidates in elected bodies (see Kommersant-vlast, December 23, 2002, pp.
6576).
The mass movement of military personnel into business was not an
operation planned by the state, and it would be an exaggeration to suggest
that the regime deliberately introduced officers into the private sector with
the aim of using them in the future as its agents of influence (though there
were such cases). No one calculated in advance the consequences of such
a militarization of business. And not all retirees who had moved into the
private sector retained their earlier associations; many were assimilated
and lost touch with their former colleagues. But on the evidence of our
interviews, the majority of military and security officials did indeed retain
their earlier associations. The basis on which they formed a new solidarity
with businessmen was the ideology that, perhaps surprisingly, they came
to share.
The military had been one of the most ideologized of institutions in
the Soviet period, with a strong emphasis upon the inculcation of patri-
otic values. Very few were critical of the Soviet system, still fewer were
dissidents. And they adapted with some difficulty to their movement out
of full-time service in the 1990s. The more such people worked in business
and became accustomed to high salaries, chauffeured limousines, and
other benefits, the more they became reconciled to the economic changes
that had taken place since the end of communist rule. But at the same time
they could not entirely abandon the values to which they had been com-
mitted throughout their previous careers. They detested turncoats who
changed their opinions in line with changing orthodoxies, and according
to our interview evidence they were proud that they still voted Communist.
Their Marxism-Leninism gave way to a set of values that contained more
 PUTINS MILITOCRACY 303

elements of Slavophilism and patriotism, combined with an economic

philosophy that accepted the necessity of private property and the market.
Putin himself underwent the same kind of transformation, moving
from the KGB to the staff of one of the best-known dissidents, Anatoliy
Sobchak. The metamorphosis in his views was typical of former officers
during the reform years: an ambivalent consciousness shaped to accom-
modate both the newly established market and older ideas of state power
and social justice. Putin, like many officers of his generation, became both
a leftist and a rightist. Brought up on the ideology of socialism, he adapted
to the democratic spirit of the times and learned to speak in the language
of Western values; but his thinking remained an eclectic combination of
different, even contradictory elements. Precisely because Putin had trav-
eled the same path as other military and security officials, he was a figure
to whom they could easily relate, and they became his most consistent and
loyal supporters.

PUTINS WELL-ORDERED POLICE STATE

The changes that took place in security structures in March 2003 were
a further demonstration of Putins determination to place the tasks of
national government within a military-security framework. In a presiden-
tial decree, the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Infor-
mation (FAPSI) and the Federal Board Guard Service were dissolved and
merged with the FSB, from which they had originally emerged. FAPSIs
former head, Vladimir Matyukhin, moved to a newly created State Defense
Procurements Committee in the Ministry of Defense; the head of the border
guard service, General Konstantin Totskiy, became Russias ambassador to
NATO. At the same time, the federal tax police and its head moved into
the Interior Ministry (Voprosy, 2003a, 2003b; O merakh, 2003). FAPSI,
according to reports, had designed and maintained the GAS Vybory
(State Automated electoral system) that was used to aggregate the votes
cast at national elections, which meant that the outcome of the Duma and
presidential elections of December 2003 and March 2004 had been placed
in the hands of the security police (Vremya MN, March 12, 2003, p. 3).
It is too soon to argue, as did a liberal Duma deputy recently, that the
FSB has virtually taken on the form of what used to be the KGB (The
Guardian, March 12, 2003, p. 15)as of spring 2003, the Foreign Intelligence
Service and the Federal Protection Service remained outside its scope. But
the kinds of changes that have been taking place in the structures and in
particular among government personnel have serious implications for
Russias post-communist political system. If it was only a few generals who
had moved into politics there would be no reason to attach a larger
significance to their recruitment. But what has been taking place is not a
small number of individual movements, but a wholesale migration that
now accounts for 15 to 70 percent of the membership of a variety of elite
groups. As the laws of dialectics used to insist, a change in quantity must
necessarily lead to a change in quality. In this respect the authoritarian
304 KRYSHTANOVSKAYA AND WHITE

methods that are inherent in military structures might be transferred to

society as a whole.
As the military and security officials of the Putin enrollment have
acquired some experience of democratic politics, and as they have worked
in business or even abroad, their authoritarian tendencies in many
instances have been moderated. In any case, any attempt to achieve total
control would be incompatible with the limited framework of law that now
exists and with the attitudes of the international community. But all the
same, accepting the existence of institutions they cannot govern directly,
the Putin militocracy has not abandoned its attempt to achieve a dominant
position in the post-communist order. The control they exercise takes a
variety of forms: commissars within the armed forces, Kremlin over-
seers in the federal districts, the use of the power of office at local and
national elections, centrally orchestrated attempts to create the institutions
of civil society, and the introduction of agents of influence in business and
the media. These methods are a well-established part of the repertoire of
the security services of other countries and are certainly familiar to the
current president.
The neo-authoritarianism of the Putin militocracy coexists with a
pluralism of opinions and with the existence of private property and civil
liberties. Democratic institutions continue to operate, and democratic free-
doms formally exist. But the federal authorities feel increasingly confident
of their dominance and of their ability to achieve the kind of election results
that are consistent with their longer-term objectives. Putin, indeed, has
already established a network of management based on the military and
security services that gives him control over virtually all the key social
processes, leaving democratic institutions that have an increasingly formal
character. One model of this faade democracy was the USSR, with three
nominally independent branches of government, elections (although
they were not competitive), and constitutionally guaranteed individual
freedoms. The more it becomes a militocracy, the more post-communist
Russian politics will take on the characteristics of the wholly formal democ-
racy of the Soviet period.

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