Igor Yurgens
November 02, 2009
An influential think tank is advising President Dmitry Medvedev that he needs to establish an alternative power structure answerable only to him in order to reach his goal of modernizing Russia.
In a report for Medvedev, the Institute for Contemporary Development concludes that it will be impossible for the president to carry out any meaningful changes as long as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's siloviki cronies remain in key administrative posts. But attempting to dismantle Putin's vaunted power vertical would be difficult (if not impossible) and destabilizing at this point.
So the institute is advising that Medvedev set up his own personal power vertical.
Here is how "Nezavisimaya gazeta" describes the proposal:
The authors are not recommending the establishment of a shadow Cabinet or parliament. The experts are instead suggesting the formation of command centers to guide the processes of modernization. The centers should be divided into two groups: those dealing with current problems and those in charge of strategic planning. The former will handle the problems that cannot be delayed - homeless children, organized crime, etc. The latter will chart programs such as a new models for education, new concepts of military development, and alternative urban development strategies.
And here is "
Nezavisimaya gazeta" quoting directly from the report:
One structure will strive to prevent de-modernization, while the other will carry out modernization as such. They should operate in tandem. It is of utmost importance to leave the regular bureaucracy out of the process of modernization...By and large, structures of both kinds will represent a parallel power vertical that answers directly to the president, reacts to challenges, and maps out future developments. The functions of the regular bureaucracy, in the meantime, will come down to maintenance of the existing social systems - a mission that is vitally important but has nothing to do with modernization.
The Institute for Contemporary Development, of course, is headed by Igor Yurgens, an adviser to Medvedev.
Yurgens
made waves back in February by suggesting that Russia's implicit social contract, in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards, had been abrogated by the financial crisis. Political liberalization, Yurgens said at the time, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession.
His remarks were met with ridicule by Medvedev's powerful deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist and architect of Russia's authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy."
Undeterred, Yurgens and other public intellectuals like Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
continued to push for political liberalization in an increasingly public spat with Surkov.
I don't know what to make of the Institute for Contemporary Development's report just yet.
But what is interesting is that it appears just as reports are surfacing that Surkov is trying to make common cause with -- or attempting to co-opt -- key technocrats and economists close to Medvedev in order to enhance his own political position and weaken his opponents in the Kremlin.
Surkov has long been engaged in a low-intensity clan war with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the head of the siloviki clan of security-service veterans surrounding Putin.
According to a report by stratfor.com (which we blogged
here), Surkov is supporting economic reforms proposed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina as a means of weakening Sechin's control over key sectors of the economy.
How Yurgens' institute's report fits into this -- if it fits at all -- is anybody's guess at this point.
But after sparring for most of the year, Yurgens and Surkov appear now to share a common enemy -- Sechin and the siloviki.
Surkov, if the stratfor.com report is correct, appears to be proposing that they be taken on directly. Yurgens, on the other hand, is advising Medvedev to work around them.
And Putin, the one voice that really matters, has been characteristically sphinx-like in his silence.
-- Brian Whitmore
Oleg Panfilov (file photo)
October 30, 2009
Next week the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is expected to choose a new representative on freedom of the media. Of the six nominees, two are considered to have the best chances: Mikhail Fedotov, the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists and a coauthor of Russia’s surprisingly liberal mass media law (surprising because it has failed so spectacularly to protect freedom of the press) and Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and indefatigable monitor of media-rights violations throughout the former Soviet Union.
On the website “Yezhednevny zhurnal” today, National Circulation-Audit Service head Igor Yakovenko, himself a former Union of Journalists official and a former liberal Duma deputy, posted a nice commentary on the election that made several good points.
First, Yakovenko notes that the OSCE representative on freedom of the media is chosen by the governments whose abuse of media rights that representative should be exposing and condemning, rather than by the journalists he or she should be protecting. This fact means that Fedotov, who was nominated by Russia and who has made many compromises with power over the last 15 years or so, stands a good chance of being elected.
Surely Panfilov’s uncompromising monitoring of press-freedom abuses over the last decade or so is unlikely to win him any votes. As Yakovenko writes, “Those countries that his center monitors will, of course, vote against him.” So, we can count on countries like Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and all of Central Asia to join Russia in electing a toothless representative. Panfilov, incidentally, was nominated by Georgia, a country that has also been the target of some of his principled monitoring (in August 2008, RFE/RL interviewed Panfilov about media coverage of the Russia-Georgia war.)
Yakovenko notes that Fedotov’s main claim to fame, his coauthorship of the Russian media law, came 18 years ago and during that time, many in Russia have undergone “metamorphoses” straight out of Franz Kafka. More recently, Fedotov has been the Kremlin’s man:
On February 4 of this year, the United Nations held a hearing on the Russian government’s report on human rights in our country. The Russian government delegation made a point of bringing along Fedotov to defend the government’s point of view. Which he did, proclaiming from the podium all the guarantees of freedom of speech and journalists rights that exist in Russia and asserting that journalists can defend these rights in the courts. Dozens of murdered Russian journalists did not hear his words. Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues who are still alive did not learn about his statement, because NTV and other independent media have been closed down regardless of the low and without any judicial recourse. Many Russian human rights advocates who were present during this shame were convinced the Fedotov was talking about some other country.
It will be very interesting to see how the Western European countries vote (the OSCE has 56 member states). How many will see backing Moscow’s view on media freedom as a small compromise to make in order to secure a good gas deal or get a pipeline built? Especially since media freedom is, for the most part, not a problem in their countries with their own well-developed civil-society and legal mechanisms. If the Kazakh government doesn’t want a forceful media advocate, then why should France or Britain force one on them? (By the way, Kazakhstan
will take over the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE in January.)
Yakovenko’s article is headlined “Europe’s Choice” in a clear reference to William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice.” What will it be, Europe? Deals with Moscow or a chance to improve the lives of millions in the former Soviet Union?
--
Robert Coalson
Dmitry Medvedev (left) and Vladislav Surkov
October 27, 2009
Watching Vladislav Surkov's maneuvers can make your head spin.
One day the powerful deputy Kremlin deputy chief of staff is ridiculing suggestions that Russia needs to open up its political and economic system to deal with the ongoing economic crisis. On another he appears to be supporting that very idea, telling the ruling United Russia party that it needs to share power.
There is widespread agreement among Kremlin watchers that Surkov was somehow involved in the recent walkout in the State Duma by three "opposition" parties to protest alleged falsification in the October 11 local elections. But there is little agreement whether the move was initiated by Surkov to embarrass his foes, or an operation orchestrated by Surkov's opponents designed to weaken him.
Confused yet? Good.
Surkov made news again this week with an interview with the weekly "Itogi" in which he warned that Russia was falling dangerously behind in economic development and risked becoming a "resource power" if the economy is not modernized. In the same interview, Surkov also argued against liberalizing the political system, warning that it could plunge Russia into chaos.
So what is Surkov up to?
In a recently published four-part series titled "The Kremlin Wars," Stratfor.com offers up one possible answer.
According to Stratfor, the Kremlin is divided into two roughly equal clans -- one headed by Surkov and one led by his archrival, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin:
It is the classic balance of power arrangement. So long as these two clans scheme against each other, [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin's position as the ultimate power is not threatened and the state itself remains strong -- and not in the hands of one power-hungry clan or another.
In an effort to inflict a decisive defeat on Sechin and his "siloviki" clan, Surkov has reportedly teamed up with a group of technocratic economic liberals who are close to President Dmitry Medvedev.
This group of economists and specialists in civil law, who have been dubbed the "civiliki," include Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina, and Natural Resources Minister Trutnev.
As I have written
here, the civiliki also include Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov and other lower-level officials who studied law with Medvedev in St. Petersburg.
Stratfor argues that the economic crisis has led the Russian authorities to rethink the statist and top heavy economic model dominated by Sechin and the siloviki:
The global economic crisis has led the Kremlin to examine its decisions about running Russia's economy, financial sectors and businesses. A group of intellectuals including Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, called the civiliki, want to use the crisis as an opportunity to reform the Russian economy. The civiliki's plan will lead to increased investment and greater efficiency in the economy, but it will also trigger a fresh round of conflict between the Kremlin's two powerful political clans.
Surkov is less interested in economic reform than in buttressing his own power vis-a-vis Sechin. But, according to Stratfor, he sees the value in using the economic reforms proposed by the civiliki to purge Sechin and his allies from the commanding heights of the Russian economy.
One hint that something along these lines might be under way came in August when Medvedev instructed Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to open an
investigation into Russia's massive state corporations, a key power base for Sechin.
If Surkov is indeed gearing up for a decisive battle with Sechin and has teamed up with the civiliki to pull it off, this would explain his increased enthusiasm for economic reform. And the last thing he probably wants in such a situation is the unpredictability that any political liberalization would bring (thus the warnings about chaos).
The wild card in the equation, of course, is Putin, who would need to sign off on any campaign of this magnitude -- especially one targeting a close ally like Sechin.
I'm skeptical for the moment. But Stratfor argues convincingly that the economic crisis has shaken up the elite to the degree that such a move is at least plausible:
Economic problems have become so acute that Putin, for the first time since his rise to power in Russia, has had to step back and reassess whether his system of balanced power is the best way to run the country.
Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, whole Stratfor series is thought provoking and well worth a read.
-- Brian Whitmore
The graph shows higher support for United Russia in precincts reporting higher turnout.
October 16, 2009
After the December 2007 Duma elections and March 2008 presidential election (hello, Dmitry Medvedev!), some intrepid Russian bloggers and independent election observers performed some heroic work to highlight the extent of the election fraud in Russia. I wrote about their work here, paying particular attention to some meticulous statistical analysis that was done. If you want the full story, get a copy of “The Forensics Of Election Fraud: Russia And Ukraine” by U.S.-based professors Mikhail Maygkov and Peter Ordeshook and Dmitry Shakin of Moscow’s Academy of National Economy.
Now Russia’s bloggers are at it again, putting the microscope to the official results of the October 11 Moscow City Duma elections, in which, according to official results United Russia won 66 percent of the vote and 32 of the 35 council seats. That’s right, under the grossly unfair seat-allocation system that they instituted before the vote, 66 percent of the vote translates into 91 percent of the seats. Official turnout in Moscow was put at about 35 percent.
A blogger named kireyev posted on his LiveJournal blog an analysis of all the more than 3,000 polling stations in Moscow, using official data from the Central Election Commission. His figures show compellingly that the higher the reported turnout at a particular polling station, the higher the vote total for United Russia was there. That is, all the “above average” votes seem to have gone to the ruling party.
Kireyev then analyzed the 146 polling stations that reported 20 percent turnout or less, figuring that these precincts had the least fraud, at least in the form of ballot-box stuffing. He found that among these stations, the results were: United Russia, 46 percent; the Communist Party, 21 percent; the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), 9.8 percent; Yabloko, 8.3 percent; A Just Russia, 8 percent; and Patriots of Russia, 3.1 percent.
Another blogger, Andrei A., took Kireyev’s numbers a bit further and calculated that the actual turnout for the Moscow elections was about 20 percent and that United Russia polled about 42 percent. He estimated that the average fraud among all polling stations was 15 percent of the ballots, while the maximum fraud reached more than 30 percent in some precincts.
A third blogger, avmalgin, got a hold of the voter protocols for polling station No. 1,702 in Moscow. That document shows 192 votes for United Russia, 98 for the Communist Party, 50 for A Just Russia, 38 for Yabloko, 37 for the LDPR, and 11 for the Patriots of Russia. However, the website of the Central Election Commission, of which the blogger presents a screenshot, shows the exact same results for all the parties – except for United Russia. By official results, United Russia got 742 votes. That is, United Russia’s percentage was magically raised from 45 percent to 74 percent.
These bloggers and others like them are doing brave work. Central Election Commission head Vladimir Churov has already compared those who are reporting on the fraud to "terrorists" and has threatened to prosecute them.
With any luck, though, we’ll be seeing a lot more of this information in the coming days. If you spot any, please forward them to me.
-- Robert Coalson
Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov (left) and LDPR head Vladimir Zhirinovsky at a press conference in the State Duma on October 14
October 15, 2009
So now we're supposed to believe that Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Gennady Zyuganov are the last great defenders of Russian democracy? They were shocked, appalled, and offended that the Kremlin would --ghasp! -- fix an election and decided to make a stand.
Yeah, right. Clearly something else is going on here.
Following up on Robert Coalson's post earlier today, there are more than a few signs out there that Wednesday's walkout of the State Duma by the so-called loyal opposition -- Zhirinovsky's LDPR, Zyugnov's Communists, and A Just Russia -- was a stage-managed affair that was given a green light at the very highest levels.
For one thing, Zhirinovsky, who initiated the walkout, doesn't do anything of this magnitude without an underlying motive (and that motive is never the advancement of democracy), and without prompting from his masters in the Kremlin.
And as Danila Galperovich of RFE/RL's Russian Service points out in a commentary today, the floor speeches by LDPR deputies that sparked the walkout, ostensibly in protest of alleged falsifications in the October 11 local elections, "were obviously rehearsed note for note."
Moreover, the parliamentary rebellion received extensive -- and largely respectful -- coverage on Russia's main state-run television channels. In the tightly controlled world of Russian television, that doesn't happen by accident.
"Could Gennadi Zyuganov, Sergei Mironov, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky with their followers summon the guts for a grandiose scandal without a condescending nod from their curators?" Mikhail Rostovsky asked rhetorically in a commentary in today's edition of "Moskovsky komsomolets."
So what's really going on?
In his commentary (available in Russian here and in English here), Galperovich spells out two possible scenarios, both of which are tied to power struggles at the highest level of the Russian elite.
The first of these pits Sergei Naryshkin, the Kremlin chief of staff, against his deputy Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist.
In recent weeks, Russian media has been rife with speculation that President Dmitry Medvedev was about to sack Naryshkin as chief of staff and replace him with Surkov.
Naryshkin is closely affiliated with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the leader of the siloviki faction of security service veterans surrounding Russia's de facto ruler, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Most Kremlin watchers believe he was put in his post to keep an eye on Medvedev, lest he get any crazy ideas about acting like he is actually the president.
According to some press reports, particularly a recent story in "Nezavisimaya gazeta," Medvedev's first choice to replace Naryshkin was Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov, the president's law school classmate. But lacking such latitude, Medvedev reportedly settled on Surkov, a powerful figure and skilful bureaucrat who is also Sechin's bitter rival.
According to this scenario, Naryshkin tasked Zhirinovsky with initiating the Duma revolt. The goal was to discredit, embarrass, and emasculate Surkov, whose portfolio includes keeping Russia's political parties docile and obedient.
A second scenario outlined by Galperovich also features Surkov, but this time not as the target of this elaborate special operation -- but as its instigator.
According to this version, it was Surkov who "activated" Zhirinovsky with the goal of discrediting and weakening Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, head of the ruling United Russia faction and another close Sechin ally.
The Duma walkout was aimed at United Russia, which won a suspiciously large majority in local elections on October 11, and at Gryzlov in particular.
Surkov, the mastermind of Russia's authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy," has been engaged in a low-intensity bureaucratic war with Gryzlov for months over plans to revamp the country's party system.
In place of the current system of de facto one party rule by United Russia, Surkov has been seeking to create a pseudo multiparty system with several parties -- all beholden to the Kremlin -- "competed" for voters' allegiance.
United Russia would be the first among equals under the new plan, but it would share real power with other factions.
The lopsided victory United Russia scored in local elections was widely seen as an effort by Sechin and Gryzlov to crush Surkov's plan and maintain one-party dominance. And the LDPR inspired walkout, according to this scenario, was Surkov's counterpunch.
Both of these scenarios ultimately pit Surkov against Sechin. Both are also related to an ongoing struggle in the elite about Russia's future direction, with Sechin seeking to maintain the status quo, while Surkov (and Medvedev) appear to be seeking slight modifications.
According to the latest reports, Zhirinovsky (and A Just Russia) have agreed to end their boycott of the Duma, while the Communists are still holding out. The fallout in the coming days and weeks should provide more clues about which of these scenarios -- or another we haven't yet discerned -- is closer to reality.
-- Brian Whitmore