Whenever Anton Alikhanov looks up from his desk in the governor’s office in Kaliningrad, he sees a bright green A4 folder hanging on the wall. President Vladimir Putin brought the file, bursting with petitions he received from Kaliningrad residents, during his first visit in August to the Russian enclave since appointing Mr Alikhanov to run it.
“It hangs there, framed and under glass, as a reminder of the essence of our job,” he says. “Work — that’s the green folder.”
For Mr Alikhanov, it makes sense to project a single-minded focus on the tasks set by the president. Upon his appointment as Russia’s youngest-ever provincial chief at the age of 30 in October 2016, he joined the breed of fresh-faced new administrators Mr Putin is installing to prepare the country for an eventual political transition, when the president finally decides to stand down.
As voters prepare to go to the polls on Sunday, that makes him a member of a group that could end up being much more influential for Russian politics than the results of the presidential poll.
In Sunday’s vote, Russians are expected to re-elect Mr Putin, who has controlled the country since 2000, for another six years. By barring Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician most likely to build a following of his own and by imposing an ever tighter grip on the media, civil society, parliament, regional and local government, the Kremlin has ensured that there is no credible challenger on the horizon.
Even though Mr Putin’s next term has to be his last under the constitution, it remains unclear whether he will want to leave in 2024. But given that Mr Putin will be 71 by then, the political elite expects him to start transforming a system of governance that has grown overly dependent on him personally.
“[While] Russia is not on the edge of regime change, the regime is changing,” wrote Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin spin-doctor, in a recent paper. “The coming presidential elections will mark the arrival of post-Putin Russia regardless of whether Putin remains the head of state for the next six or 16 years.”
The president, whose relations with the west are deteriorating after the poisoning in the UK of a Russian former double agent, has sent strong signals that such change is afoot. Laying out plans and priorities not just for the next presidential term but for a decade ahead in his state of the nation address on March 1, Mr Putin repeatedly spoke of “the future government” or “the new government”.
The scion
Sergei Ivanov Jr, 37
Chief executive of Alrosa
Sergei Ivanov had no mining experience when he was appointed head of Alrosa, the world’s biggest diamond miner, but he had the right name. His father, also called Sergei Ivanov, is a long-time friend and aide to Vladmir Putin, a fellow former spy who served as the president’s defence minister and chief of staff. Aged 37, Mr Ivanov is the youngest chief executive of any of the biggest Kremlin-controlled companies and corporate Russia’s most prominent princeling, the so-called sons of officials close to Mr Putin.
Graduating in 2002 straight into a plum job at a state-owned investment fund, Mr Ivanov spent his twenties and early thirties jumping between government-controlled companies such as gas giant Gazprom and Sberbank, the country’s largest lender. Even after his father was shifted into a less prominent role, Mr Ivanov was appointed head of the $11bn diamond miner last March by prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. At his unveiling, a bashful Mr Ivanov asked if he was to start work immediately. “Come on, of course!” chided the premier.
On domestic and economic policy, he defined big-picture targets without giving detailed instructions. Mr Putin has been retreating from the micro-management of domestic issues that characterised his rule for so long, and has almost exclusively concentrated on foreign policy and security.
“They are focused on strengthening the political institutions,” says Tatyana Stanovaya, director of the analytical department of the Centre for Political Technologies, a Moscow consultancy. Such efforts are very different from enhancing democracy. “The system needs to be rejigged in a way that makes it capable of running on its own, without him but on the track he has determined,” adds Ms Stanovaya.
At the heart of such restructuring efforts is the cohort of young politicians that Mr Alikhanov belongs to. Although they significantly differ from each other in style, political analysts see them as a new class of technocrats.
As such, they mark a departure from the senior officials who have dominated the presidential administration and the cabinet. Those incumbents have long been split into two camps, with Mr Putin’s fellow alumni of the security services on one side of the divide and a more liberal economic bloc on the other.
If the new generation comes to dominate, “Russia would be a country governed by McKinsey consultants who are loyal to Mr Putin and will preserve his policies once he is gone”, say Mr Krastev and Mr Pavlovsky.
To get there, the young appointees will be thoroughly tested. With Mr Putin’s green folder on the wall as a constant reminder, Mr Alikhanov sees his Kaliningrad posting as a chance to prove himself. “I think it is entirely correct when people are not allowed to grow just in the capital but sent to the regions, to give them the possibility to test themselves, to get training, to understand life outside the big Moscow offices,” he says.
“If they master this work, that’s good; if not, then they’ve failed the test.”
The judo partner’s son
Andrei Turchak, 42
Senator for Pskov
The son of Anatoly Turchak, who started judo training in then Leningrad with Mr Putin and worked with him in the early years of the future president’s political career, Mr Turchak junior has risen early and fast. He was appointed governor of the north-western region of Pskov in 2009. In 2010, prominent journalist Oleg Kashin was gravely injured in an attack involving an iron bar, later found to have been ordered by people working for the company Mr Turchak’s father had long headed.
After nine years as governor, Mr Turchak became a senator for the territory last autumn, and a new position of deputy chairman of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, was created for him. Simultaneously, he became secretary of the general council of United Russia, the ruling party, which has a stranglehold of parliament. In his party position, he is vying for influence with Vyacheslav Volodin, the Duma speaker and former senior aide to Mr Putin.
The personnel shake-up ordered by Mr Putin has been little short of dramatic. Over the past three years, he has replaced 36 of the country’s 85 regional governors and 20 of the new provincial chiefs are aged under 50. The reshuffles have lowered the average age among governors from 55 to 46.
Other branches of government have also seen an injection of fresh blood. In August 2016, Mr Putin replaced Sergei Ivanov, 65, a fellow former KGB official and one of the most heavyweight members of the ruling elite, as his chief of staff with Anton Vaino, a little-known former diplomat, now 46, who had mostly worked in secretarial and protocol functions. In the cabinet, Maxim Oreshkin, a deputy finance minister, became economy minister in November 2016 at the age of 34.
More appointments are expected: after Mr Putin’s inauguration for his new term, the cabinet has to resign. The president has said he intends to retain his long-running associate Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, but Mr Medvedev’s team could see large-scale changes.
Most Russian analysts say none of the newcomers is a candidate to succeed Mr Putin — yet. “It is far too early for that,” says Evgeny Minchenko, a political consultant. “For now, he’s laying the groundwork by introducing a new generation of officials.”
Mr Minchenko points to neighbouring Kazakhstan, where Nursultan Nazarbayev, the 77-year-old leader who has ruled the former Soviet republic since its independence in 1991, has been trying to develop institutions fit for survival without him and pondering potential successors for years. “Putin will be watching very carefully anything that happens over there,” he says. “It may hold some lessons for him.”
The former bag-carrier
Anton Vaino, 46
Chief of staff to Vladimir Putin
Mr Vaino was born into a family of senior Soviet officials, but his appointment as Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff in 2016 appears to have been the result of his loyalty and efficient service as a bag-carrier for the president. Mr Vaino was born in Tallinn as the grandson of the former head of the Communist Party of Estonia.
After graduating from MGIMO, the university that trains Russia’s foreign policy staff, he embarked on a diplomatic career, mainly working on Asian affairs. Since 2002, he has worked directly with Mr Putin, working as a protocol officer first in the presidential administration, then in the government when Mr Putin switched to prime minister, and then returning to the presidential administration with him in 2012. In a number of articles around the time he obtained an economics degree and one book published in 2012, he lays out a theory of the entire universe, and discusses potential ways of controlling it, including an enigmatic device called the ‘nooscope’.
One of the central questions of Mr Putin’s reshuffle is what this means for his own inner circle and its informal influence on the government. In the course of Mr Putin’s three presidential terms and one term as prime minister, a relatively small group of men mostly his age — fellow former KGB officers, friends from his youth and former colleagues from his time in St Petersburg’s municipal administration — has enjoyed an outsized influence.
“People who participate in certain decisions often don’t hold any formal posts at all,” Mr Minchenko told Meduza, the Latvia-based Russian online newspaper, in December. “Rotenberg is more influential than most ministers,” he said, referring to Arkady Rotenberg, Mr Putin’s judo sparring partner who has built a growing construction and transport business empire since 2000.
Other heavyweight members of Mr Putin’s inner circle include Igor Sechin, the powerful chief executive of state oil firm Rosneft, Sergei Chemezov, head of state defence conglomerate Rostec, and Yuri Kovalchuk, a billionaire who holds Russian banking and media assets.
“There is immense tension now because everyone who is influential today is keen to secure influence in this new apparatus he is building,” says one person whose family has ties to Mr Putin. “If we are talking about the new regional governors, most have little or no political weight of their own. If we get a well-functioning bureaucracy that is supposed to just implement orders efficiently, you want to be among those who have a say in what the orders are.”
The powerful men around Mr Putin are therefore scrambling to place their protégés among the new generation of bureaucrats. “When the reshuffle started in 2015, we saw mostly Chemezov creations,” says Mr Minchenko. “More recently, Kovalchuk has been activated, and last year [defence minister Sergei] Shoigu and Sechin joined the game.”
According to the political consultant, it was Mr Sechin who lobbied for the appointment of Gleb Nikitin, the 40-year-old new governor of Nizhny Novgorod, in September. Mr Nikitin was thrown into the limelight when Mr Putin announced his presidential candidacy in December during a visit to an automobile plant in the industrial region by the Volga river.
Two people familiar with Mr Chemezov said he had pushed Mr Alikhanov as a candidate for the post in Kaliningrad — a strategic territory bordering Poland and the Baltic. The young governor has several links to senior officials — his father was friends with Mikhail Babich, Mr Putin’s envoy in one of the country’s six federal districts who has served as a KGB officer, chief executive of weapons manufacturer Antey and prime minister of Chechnya. Mr Alikhanov senior is also believed to be acquainted with Igor Shuvalov, the deputy prime minister.
The promotions of Moscow-backed outsiders to the regions are causing a lot of controversy. Mr Alikhanov has already clashed with local elites. Business leaders criticise the way he has set up a special economic zone in the enclave. Activists are unhappy about a state media campaign vilifying those in the territory who stress the cultural legacy of its former German residents.
Mr Alikhanov has little patience for these disputes. Asked about the territory’s special identity, he snaps that it “does not have and cannot have any identity other than the general Russian one”. In general, he believes that disagreements with local elites should not be the subject of public debate. “We will solve these problems behind closed doors and that’s how it should be.”
The former bodyguard
Alexei Dyumin, 45
Governor of Tula
Of all the skills required of Russia’s regional governors, knowing how to fight off a bear is unlikely to feature in a job interview. But Alexei Dyumin marked himself out as a dependable aide to Mr Putin when he was his personal bodyguard, boasting of an evening when he drove away the grizzly night-time visitor as the head of state slept.
As governor of Tula, an agricultural region south of Moscow, the 45-year-old has emerged as a political player, in the tradition of former security officials holding prominent roles in Mr Putin’s Russia. Born into a military family, Mr Dyumin is a careerist who rose through the security apparatus. Appointed deputy chief of the military intelligence agency in 2014, he has denied press reports that he ran the operation that year to evacuate Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych to Russia as protests raged. Promoted to lieutenant-general and made deputy defence minister in 2015, Mr Dyumin’s appointment a year later to the governorship surprised many, but left him unfazed, describing it as just another order from his “commander-in-chief.”
Alexander Kozlov, governor of the far-eastern Amur province, is not quite so earnest. Sitting beneath a big mural of Wonder Woman in a café in Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border, the 37-year-old gets out his iPhone and shows photos of a recent ski race and a video of African students plunging into frozen lakes as part of a Russian orthodox festival. Two young video producers are recording the interview for his Gubernator Live YouTube channel, where videos show him taking a trip to Moscow or playing ice-hockey — one of Mr Putin’s favourite hobbies.
A Moscow-schooled lawyer who worked as an executive at a small coal producer, Mr Kozlov entered local politics in 2011 before rapidly rising to the top of the regional executive.
His province, once a backwater, has gained importance due to a $55bn gas pipeline being built across its territory to China, and Moscow’s geopolitical goal to develop ties with Beijing as relations with the west sour. And Mr Putin’s name is never far from the conversation.
“The president has named the Amur region as a territory that receives more investment . . . And of course we consider this assessment very important,” he says, speaking in a quiet, measured voice with long pauses strikingly similar to Mr Putin’s delivery. “He has declared that this century is the one where we develop the Far East region.”
Andrei Nikitin, 38, governor of Novgorod since February last year, faces a task at least as difficult: to restore his thinly populated, relatively poor region to the prominence it once enjoyed. But the Swedish-trained economist who headed the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, a policy think-tank, until last year is full of confidence. The governor is approaching his job with a mindset that looks more McKinsey than KGB.
A fast talker, Mr Nikitin says he draws on his experience at the agency in “analysing and scaling up best practices from various regions” to bring Novgorod quickly up to speed. “I tell my guys, go to Tula [province], look why they have fewer civil servants there than we have, although the region is larger,” he says. “They went, looked, and we cut 30 per cent of civil servants last year. It turned out they were not needed.”
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