Russia’s battle of the ministries

Powerful groups seem increasingly willing to break the unspoken rule against public infighting. This does not bode well for Putin’s regime.

In Russia, if a public figure is being prosecuted or punished, two things used to be true: they opposed Vladimir Putin’s rule or his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and they were not a high-ranking official.

The arrest last month of the deputy defence minister, Timur Ivanov, for allegedly accepting a bribe, ominously defied these rules of thumb. It also highlighted deepening tensions among powerful groups in Russia amid a lack of coherent leadership from the despot in charge.

Make no mistake: Putin has no serious challengers. When he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 22nd 2022, even his own Security Council was surprised. Russia’s political and business elites were then forced to sacrifice many of their prewar privileges and start building a new Russia that corresponded to Putin’s vision of history and international relations. They had no choice.

If the elites had no choice, ordinary Russians certainly did not. When they learned of the invasion, they poured into the streets to protest, only to be faced with a harsh crackdown. The protests mostly stopped and Russians resigned themselves to an unwanted war, a declining quality of life and worsening development prospects. Many began quietly relocating their businesses and moving their money to such places as Armenia or Kazakhstan.

No clear strategy

Putin has made plenty of pronouncements about his war goals, from achieving the ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ of Ukraine to standing up to the west as it attacks ‘traditional values’ and violates the international laws that it enforces on others. According to Putin, Russia—together with emerging-economy partners such as China and Brazil—is leading the creation of a new, multipolar world order.

What Putin has not offered is a clear strategy for achieving these goals. Nor has he provided Russians with any vision of how they should live, or how Russia should operate, within this new world order. With no shared roadmap to follow, many Russian actors are being forced to improvise, often in ways that conflict. For example, as the Kremlin pushes ‘de-privatisation’, or the nationalisation of private firms deemed relevant to national security, Russia’s central-bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina, is fighting to limit state involvement in business wherever possible, to forestall the collapse of Russia’s fast-shrinking market economy.

Conflicts are perhaps most apparent within the military establishment. Last year’s rebellion by the late Wagner Group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a case in point. Prigozhin did not want to take down Putin but he did want the head of the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. And given the centrality of Wagner mercenaries to the Russian war effort, he was convinced he could get it. Instead, he and several other Wagner leaders perished when their airplane exploded in midair two months after the aborted coup.

Enormous fortune

This brings us to Ivanov, a longtime ally of Shoigu who amassed an enormous fortune overseeing construction, property management, housing and procurement for Russia’s military, and who topped the list of Russia’s richest civil servants with an annual household income of 136.7 million rubles (then around €2 million). All those riches did not go unnoticed. Already in 2019, an investigation by Proekt Media highlighted major discrepancies between Ivanov’s reported income and his wealth.

Back then, a useful apparatchik such as Ivanov was unlikely to face punishment, as he was nothing if not useful. Under his leadership, Oboronstroy, the Defence Ministry’s largest infrastructure and construction holding, rapidly built the Sevastopol Presidential Cadet School following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Ivanov also impressed Putin with the quick construction of the Defence Ministry’s military-themed Patriot Park, which opened in 2016, and of a mammoth cathedral, dedicated to the armed forces, in the park’s grounds.

But with the Ukraine war dragging on, and Russia gripped by uncertainty, the state is no longer the monolith it once was and powerful groups seem increasingly willing to break the unspoken rule against public infighting. This includes Rosguard (the national guard), the FSB (the internal security service) and the FSO (the security service for government officials), which allegedly were also behind Prigozhin’s mutiny.

Ideal opportunity

In March, Putin gave the FSB a mandate to fight corruption. FSB leaders seem to have concluded that this was an ideal opportunity to weaken the Ministry of Defence, beginning with its richest and most ostentatious leaders. Going after Ivanov made it easier to undermine Shoigu, who somewhat predictably lost his post as defence minister. He gave way to a potentially more effective minister, Andrei Belousov, a former economist. Belousov was in charge of the economy in Putin’s previous government, and his appointment suggests a drive toward efficient and sustainable militarisation of Russia’s economy.

Shoigu, for his part, has assumed a ceremonial position atop the Security Council, which only the president controls. Moreover, Shoigu’s alleged nemesis, General Aleksei Dyumin, the governor of the Tula region and once a supporter of Prigozhin, has moved up, becoming Putin’s aide responsible for military production.

These reshuffles suggest that the Kremlin seeks to strengthen the state’s organisation around the war agenda. But intra-elite discord does not bode well for Putin. Russian history suggests that policies pursued without sufficient consultation or clarity can become a threat to a leader’s rule, with support quickly turning into opposition.

‘Czarist’ policy

After succeeding Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor and decided unilaterally to launch de-Stalinisation. In support of his anti-repression agenda he appointed the Belousov-like civilians Aleksandr Shelepin and Vladimir Semichastny to head the KGB,  the main Soviet security agency.

Unlike the Ukraine war, de-Stalinisation was a worthy endeavour. But it would have been more widely embraced with a country-wide debate about the role in Stalin’s crimes of all his lieutenants, including Khrushchev, and an effort to build a broad consensus. That didn’t happen, and hardliners, along with Shelepin and Semichastny, ousted Khrushchev in 1964.

Similarly, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was viewed as a ‘czarist’ policy imposed on the Soviet nomenklatura from above. Gorbachev wanted to free Russia from the shackles of communism but offered no viable blueprint for the future he desired, and he also reshuffled bumbling apparatchiks with hollow results. Ultimately, the programme fatally undermined the Soviet Union—but not before spurring resentful hardliners to attempt a coup in 1991.

Putin admires Stalin, not Khrushchev or Gorbachev. But it is from Khrushchev and Gorbachev that he might learn the most.

Republication forbidden—copyright Project Syndicate 2024, ‘Russia’s battle of the ministries’