Russia will hold its first nationwide elections in more than four years next month, but political analysts are paying more attention to a series of curious changes in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle than they are to the campaigning.
While the elections are seen as a foregone conclusion that will decide little, tremors inside the Kremlin could be much more significant.
On Aug. 12, one of the president’s oldest allies, his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, was replaced with his deputy, Anton Vaino, who has a reputation as an able technocrat, but has little political heft.
Ivanov, who like Putin was a KGB agent — and was once spoken of as a potential successor — was given what appears to be a humiliating demotion to the transport and environment brief.
Ivanov was just the latest of Putin’s old friends to be shuffled aside.
Viktor Ivanov, another former KGB associate of Putin, was left without a job when his powerful anti-drug agency was disbanded; and the powerful railways boss Vladimir Yakunin was pushed aside earlier this year, refusing the consolation prize of a senatorship.
Analysts are split over the reasons for the changes. Some have suggested people such as Sergei Ivanov are being nudged aside to neutralize any potential spheres of opposition to Putin among his old friends. Others disagree.
“These people are the most loyal of anyone; they have survived so long exactly because they are so loyal,” political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann said.
Whatever the reason, the effect of Putin’s purge is the removal of those who have known him long enough to be able to raise doubts with him, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst who worked with the Kremlin for over a decade.
“The one thing that the new appointments have in common is that they have no political identity and no political weight. Putin’s friends around him were at least an informal check. When you have an absence even of informal checks, it’s dangerous. The center is being stripped of all restrictions and that can only be dangerous,” he said.
Even those close to the Kremlin remain in the dark about the real reason for the change, though this has not stopped the speculation. Some have even suggested the official statements could be true: Sergei Ivanov, is known to have a genuine passion for animals, had been in the job for nearly five years, and had suffered the death of his son in 2014. He may have just been tired.
“There is a demonstrative lack of explanation; the system can now make these major changes not only without explaining them to the population, but also without explaining them to the elite. We have nothing to discuss because we don’t know any facts,” Pavlovsky said.
As analysts parse the Kremlin moves, the country prepares for elections to the Duma, the Russian parliament, on Sept. 18. The vote is the first since December 2011, when evidence of falsified results brought tens of thousands of people into the streets of Moscow for the biggest protests in the history of Putin’s rule.
Four-and-a-half years on, a crackdown on demonstrations and the jailing of many 2011 leaders has sapped energy from the protest movement. One of its most charismatic leaders, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead just outside the Kremlin walls last year, and the small and beleaguered opposition has expended much energy fighting among itself.
The Duma is likely to be dominated by the usual suspects: the pro-Putin United Russia party and three other “systemic opposition” parties, which provide the semblance of real opposition, but usually toe the Kremlin line on important issues.
There are still a number of non-systemic opposition parties contesting the vote, including Parnas, Nemtsov’s party, which is now led by former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
They say that despite the fact the odds are stacked against them, it is still worth making the effort to get onto the ballot paper.
In central Moscow, Maria Baronova is running as an independent, backed by the Open Russia foundation of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Baronova was charged with disturbances over the 2012 protests; she avoided jail, but was banned from leaving Moscow during a lengthy court case. Now, her political platform is to push for improved social and medical services.
Baronova had to collect more than 14,000 signatures from residents of central Moscow in order to be considered for registration. After a marathon door-knocking session, Baronova collected the required signatures, delivering them on the final day. She said her hands were covered in blisters due to the requirement to sign every one of the 14,911 papers personally.
“I didn’t sleep for 81 hours; I stayed awake by having water poured over me and taking meldonium, but we finally managed it,” she said.
Putin’s ratings remain high, but support for United Russia is low.
Nevertheless, people lean towards apathy rather than a protest vote.
“The people who are anti-government usually just don’t vote at all,” Baronova said.
She and the other non-systemic opposition face an uphill battle to win any seats at all.
Even if they do manage to pull off unlikely victories, their lone voices are likely to be drowned out by a loyalist Duma. When it comes to government reshuffles, internal spats and the battle for control of financial resources appear far more pertinent than public opinion or real political competition.
“The ruling class lives in its own world and is fully isolated from the public,” Pavlovsky said. “The government has no executive power, the parliament is not a real parliament and there is no court system. It is the end of a model that has worked for 15 years. When we launched this so-called ‘managed democracy’ in the 2000s it was supposed to be a temporary, transitional model. It wasn’t meant to last forever.”
Baronova said she, and Khodorkovsky’s movement, were preparing for the future.
“If we campaign and launch projects now, then in 10 years we’ll have people who could take the country into their hands during a potential crisis period. If I can win, we’ll attract more people and there’ll be more people who believe in a positive and democratic future for Russia,” she said.
Presidential elections are due in early 2018, when Putin is expected to win another six-year term. If he succeeds, by the end of it he will have been in power for nearly a quarter of a century.
Most analysts do not expect the system to collapse any time soon, but given the economic decline and lower oil prices, Putin’s balancing act is likely to become more complicated, and spats between factions of the elite more vicious and more visible.
“What we are seeing is the system trying to survive on less money,” Schulmann said. “Effectiveness didn’t matter when you had loads of money coming in; now there is less to go round. Putin has to preserve the balance, and his job gets more difficult as there are fewer resources to go around.”
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