Zee Beam News

February 27, 2009 - Russia Profile by Vladimir Frolov - Last week the Kremlin publicized a list of 100 potential appointees to senior government positions—the top part of a much more extensive list of people making up the presidential personnel reserve, which Dmitry Medvedev sought to establish right after taking office last year. What is the significance of Medvedev’s activism in personnel policy? Is it a sign of his growing strength or a sign of desperation over his inability to change the entrenched bureaucratic system? Medvedev said that he had personally approved the first 100 candidates and planned to meet with them in the near future. He nominated one of the candidates on the new list, the 33-year-old Federation Council Senator Andrei Turchak, as governor of the Pskov region. Fifity-year-old Garry Minkh, the oldest person on the list, was appointed the Kremlin's envoy to the State Duma last week. An extensive lineup of Russia’s top business executives was included in the top 100 list, including former RusAl Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alexander Bulygin, Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh, VTB-24 CEO and former Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov, Sistema CEO Leonid Melamed, Vimpelcom/Beeline CEO Alexander Izosimov, and Lev Khasis, the CEO of the X5 Retail Group, which runs the largest chain of supermarkets in the country. Other candidates included four State Duma deputies (three from United Russia and one from the Communist Party), an assortment of young technocrats from government ministries, and even well-known economic liberals like Sergey Guriev, the provost of the Russian Economic School. Women such as Olga Dergunova, the former head of Microsoft in Russia and a senior executive at the state-owned VTB Bank at present, account for ten percent of the candidates on the list. None of the candidates is an active or former member of the security services, the pool from which Vladimir Putin used to draw most of his men into government (Igor Barinov, the Duma Deputy from United Russia who opens the top 100, served in Russia’s special forces, but has no KGB background). In an unusual occurrence, the top 100 list was publicly presented to the media by the Kremlin’s Chief of Staff Sergei Naryshkin, who promised to reveal the entire list of the presidential personnel reserve. The Kremlin is trying to convince the public that it knows how to respond to the growing personnel crisis in the country, and is prepared to significantly broaden the base from which it draws talent. Last week, Medvedev fired four regional governors and replaced a cabinet minister (Alexey Gordeev from the Ministry of Agriculture, a holdout from Boris Yeltsin’s era, was appointed the new governor of the Voronezh region) in an effort to boost the effectiveness of the regional governments in handling the financial crisis. Medvedev later told the Federation Council that “there will be an ongoing rotation in the cadre. In a situation where the impacts of the crisis are not subsiding but intensifying, the leaders of the Russian regions are required to have the ability to be able to work under these new conditions - to be able to work collectively and in a highly disciplined way,” he said. Citing anonymous sources, the Vedomosti daily reported that Medvedev plans to tap his list to overhaul much of the Russian political elite as soon as next month, when “some major changes in the government are planned.” Where do prime minister Putin and his friends from the “siloviki” stand on this? Have they signed off on the list, or do they not really care about it, since they know that it is intended largely for public consumption and will not be used in real personnel decisions? Is this a “parlor trick,” or a real effort to replenish the elite? How will this effect Russia’s political system and the government’s handling of the economic crisis? Will personnel reshuffles in the regions help stave off large scale social protest? What is the meaning of bringing star business executives and economic liberals into government? Is it a sign of new openness to talent from outside of the traditional elite structures, or a desire to maintain a semblance of political choice? Are there international precedents for Medvedev’s presidential personnel reserve for public service? Is there a precedent in Russia’s own history? How is this issue dealt with in Western political culture? Is this in any way similar to the U.S. presidential transition?