Olga Kryshtanovskaya

From Soviet Nomenklatura to Russian Elite

REVOLUTIONS, for Pareto, were above all a matter of elite change.1 And for many there was a revolution in this sense in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, with changes in government and a shift towards pluralist and democratic politics throughout the region. Several years on, the change looks less decisive. Former communist parties have returned to power in Hungary, in Poland, in Lithuania, and in Bulgaria. In Romania, there has been a change of leadership but less clearly a change of political regime. Former communists maintained their position in Serbia and in Slovakia, and-with a change of nomenclature-in most of former Soviet Central Asia. In Russia itself the Communist Party left office, but it revived in early 1993, polled strongly in the elections in December of that year, and was by far the largest party in the Duma elections that took place in December 1995. The Russian public, for their part, remained committed to the concept of a USSR; they rated their political system less highly than the one they had experienced in the Soviet years; and in any case they thought the communists were still in power.2 There were differing views about the extent to which communists or former communists were, in fact, still in power throughout the Central and East European countries. There was relatively little direct continuity in the Czech republic, where the communist party quickly became a marginal force,3 and only a limited degree of continuity of leading personnel in Poland.4 In Russia, some argued similarly, there

Putin's Militocracy

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 administrations hold over federal agencies and representation of former military-security personnel at regional levels within the Russian Federation.

Parties and Politics in Post-communist Russia

A survey carried out in 12 urban areas in December, 1992, suggests that parties are widely believed to be playing a role of little significance in Russian politics, and that there is little interest in their activities. Of those that did express a view, communist supporters were likely to be older, poorer, less well educated, and more working class than the supporters of other parties; Yeltsin supporters, by contrast, were richer, better educated, and younger, with supporters of the remaining parties less clearly differentiated. Communists, equally, were more hostile to the market and to political democracy, and more likely than others to deplore the loss of Russias great power status, with Yeltsin supporters again least likely to do so. The outcome is a “party system without parties,” with an electorate divided socially and attitudinally but those differences not reflected in a stable pattern of attachments to the political parties that have so far been established.

Changing the Russian Electoral System: Inside the Black Box

THE NEW LAW ON ELECTIONS TO THE STATE DUMA of May 2005 was hardly unexpected. Its major features had already been identified in President Putin’s wideranging speech to an expanded meeting of the Russian government in September 2004, in which he set out a series of changes that must follow the challenge to state authority that had been presented by the Beslan hostage-taking tragedy at the start of that month. In circumstances of this kind, he told his audience, their system of government had to be ‘not merely adapted to work in crisis situations’ but ‘fundamentally restructured’, so that it could prevent the breakup of the state and the collapse of Russia itself. A ‘crucial element’ in this restructuring was a reconstitution of the governmental system at all levels so that it formed a ‘single system of authority’. The leading officials in every region should be nominated by the head of state and then approved by local parliaments, and there should be stronger national parties. This was one of the ways of ensuring ‘real dialogue and interaction between the authorities in the struggle against terror’. This would in turn require an entirely proportional system of elections to the national parliament. Even before Putin’s important speech it had been clear that changes were going to be proposed in the election laws, and that the elimination of the single-member constituencies would be one of them. Putin himself had called for a change of this kind in an address to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC, Tsentral’naya izbiratel’naya komissiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii) in May 2004. Also, speaking in mid-August, the chairman of the CEC, Alexander Veshnyakov, announced that he would be seeking ‘far-reaching amendments’ along these lines, including not only the abolition of the single-member constituencies but also direct elections to the Federation Council; the

The Russian Elite in Transition

When Putin came to power he and his associates agreed to follow an ‘Andropov’ strategy, seeking to restore the firm central direction that had been characteristic of the late Soviet period. Over the course of his presidency they gradually eliminated the opposition they confronted among governors, the oligarchs and the media, and increasingly entrusted leading positions to representatives of the armed forces and security. Despite the differences among these siloviki, they shared an authoritarian approach to government and a common wish to take advantage of the economic opportunities that had formerly been closed to them. They did so particularly through the control they came to exercise over the major state companies, on whose boards they became an increasingly substantial presence. Putin avoided the discredit he would have otherwise incurred at home and abroad by standing down as president in 2008, but his intention appears to be to return not later than the end of President Medvedevs term of office and after the presidential term has itself been extended.

The Formation of Russia’s Network Directorate

The Soviet system was nominally a socialist democracy in which authority was exercised by a government that was formed by popular elections held at constitutionally prescribed intervals. In practice it was dominated by the network that was represented by its ‘leading and guiding force’, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and within the party by a ruling group that monopolized all positions of authority. Party members as a whole made up about 10 per cent of the adult population; however, all of them were obliged by the party rules to accept and implement the decisions of higher party bodies, and to refrain from any attempt to organize with other members (which was known as ‘fractionalism’). In practice, there were considerable differences within the ruling group that directed the entire network. Some of these stemmed from the competition for further advancement; others owed more to loyalties of a sectoral or regional kind that were supposed to unite groups such as the ‘steel eaters’ and place them at odds with the representatives of consumer goods industries. But in the last resort, their loyalty to the network as a whole was greater than their loyalty to any part of it; and if it was not, there were various party and extra-party sanctions that could be applied in order to secure obedience.

Generations and the conversion of power in Postcommunist Russia

Abstract The Soviet political system was nominally one in which all the generations were engaged in political activity. But with the slowdown in advancement in the Brezhnev years the leadership became increasingly middle‐aged, and the changes that took place under Gorbachev had much to do with the efforts of younger officials to move into the higher positions that had been denied to them. The end of the Soviet system has led to a sharp fall in the representation of younger people in elected institutions as the quota system was abandoned, although the elite itself became a younger and better educated one. In a parallel process, former members of the ruling nomenklatura moved into positions of economic power Young people, however; are disengaged from the political process, and as newer patterns of recruitment become established the average age of elite members is likely to increase and the interpenetration of business and political elites to extend further.

From Power to Property: The Nomenklatura in Post-Communist Russia

For Pareto, revolutions were above all a matter of elite change.1 And for many there was a revolution in this sense in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, with changes in government and a shift towards pluralist and democratic politics throughout the region. Several years on, the change looks less decisive. Former communist parties returned to power in Hungary, in Poland, in Lithuania, and in Bulgaria. In Romania, there was a change of leadership but less clearly a change of political regime. Former communists maintained their position in Serbia and in Slovakia, and, with a change of nomenclature, in most of former Soviet Central Asia. In Russia itself the communist party left office, but it revived in early 1993, polled strongly in the elections in December of that year, and was by far the largest party in the Duma elections that took place in December 1995. The Russian public, for their part, remained committed to the concept of a USSR, they rated their political system less highly than the one they had experienced in the Soviet years, and in any case they thought the communists were still in power.2

The Tandem and the Crisis

Unlike his predecessor Vladimir Putin, Dmitrii Medvedev had relatively little success in promoting his own supporters to leading positions. His meetings with defence and security officials took place less frequently, and were more highly formalized; he met key economic ministers less often than his predecessor, and continued to meet them irregularly even during the worst of the international economic crisis. Responses to the crisis, in practice, were devolved to government commissions, which met daily. Putins political weight was meanwhile enhanced by his appointments to leading companies and by the substantial majority in the Duma that had been secured by United Russia, of which he was the leader. The ‘tandem’ was an unstable construction that depended entirely on the relationship between the two leaders; but it survived the economic crisis, in large part because Russias soft authoritarianism allowed no space for an independent media and a political opposition to resist and delay its decisions.

Losing power in Russia

During the Soviet period the retirement of the countrys political elite took a variety of forms, including transfers to honorific positions in which they typically retained their privileges. Under Gorbachev a dramatic increase in the number of retirements exceeded the capacity of such positions to absorb them. The number of retirements increased still further under Boris Yeltsin, and earlier courtesies were no longer observed; the first voluntary retirements began to take place, and repressive retirements. ‘Reservations’ began to be developed at the same time, from which former officials might be recalled to government service; retirement no longer meant political death. But the development of private business, and of representative institutions, also opened new opportunities for leading officials to resist their marginalization, and even oppose the Kremlin. Putin has since restored stability within the elite, and it is likely that leading officials will reward him for this ‘stability of cadres’ with their continuing loyalty.