Russia’s civil service: professional or patrimonial? Executive-level officials in five federal ministries

ABSTRACT

The issue of poor performance of the Russian federal bureaucracy is addressed by linking performance to type of official, through analysis of biographical data on deputy ministers and division (departament) heads in five federal ministries since 2012, supplemented by internet searches on behavior, particularly of a corrupt nature. Education, previous career experience, and recruitment, including its timing relative to superiors and subordinates, are analyzed, in order to determine whether officials behave primarily as members of patrimonial teams, as members of problem-solving organizations, as self-serving individuals, as the instruments of capture by commercial organizations, or as servants of bureaucratic agency interests. The data do not strongly support any one conclusion, but problem-solving officials have the strongest presence.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• civil service
• bureaucracy
• patrimonialism
• new public management

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. A Chinese study by Huang (2002) claims the opposite, that the “single-function” nature of the work of central officials as opposed to the “multi-functionality” of regional officials means that the performance of the former is more easily measured and that they therefore are likely to have longer tenure and be less factionalized. However, performance is measured at the ministry level, and he does not apply any actual performance indicators in his analysis.

2. The increasing use of key performance indicators (KPIs) for officials suggests that attempts are made within the bureaucracies to measure performance, but we do not have – and are extremely unlikely to gain – access to the results (Galimova 2018).

3. The New Public Management movement was a reaction, initially in the West, to the perceived shortcomings of rational-legal bureaucracies. While NPM has been followed by a plethora of later public administration approaches – some stepping back in a neo-Weberian direction, others taking NPM even further (Peters 2018, chapters 3 and 10) – the general NPM orientation is still strong, including in Russian approaches to public administration (Gaman-Galuvtina 2009, 40–42; Huskey 2009a, 219).

4. I thank Peter Rutland for a personal communication in which he expressed his skepticism regarding the in-house career paths of senior officials, something which encouraged me to look into the matter more closely.

5. MED: 82 of 103; MID: 33 of 64; MNR: 20 of 26; MinEnergo: 19 of 21; MDFE: 9 of 18.

6. The data set does not include officials working in the so-called supervisory (nadzornye) agencies. Agencies such as Rosnedr or Rosprirodnadzor, in this case subordinate to MNR, have major regulatory functions and potential rent-seeking opportunities. A casual survey of their staff presents a similar picture to that found in the divisions of MNR’s central apparatus.

7. Ministers are appointed by the president and therefore not considered to be civil servants. Assistant/advisor (pomoshchnik/sovetnik) to the minister is also in the highest category. Officials in our sample are sometimes initially brought into the ministry as assistants for a brief period. The classification of official positions within federal ministries can be found in O gosudarstvennoi grazhdanskoi sluzhbe (2004, para.9) and Reestr (2005, part 5).

8. Allison’s phrase “where you stand depends on where you sit” makes the same point (quoted in Huskey 2009b, 256).

9. For commentary on the reserve system, see Huskey (2009b, 261–262).

10. The data are available in tabular form as Table A1 in the online appendix.

11. Unfortunately we do not have a biography for Barmichev, so do not know what his qualifications were.

12. In a 2019 survey of young people interested in obtaining a civil service job, 59% agreed that one cannot get such a job without connections (Smertina 2019).

13. Dedyushko did not last long, resigning in September 2019. Her replacement has no obvious links to Kozlov.

14. Oreshkin was replaced as minister in January 2020, after the writing of this article was completed. New turnover of deputy ministers is already evident.

15. In another account of the rigging of electricity markets, this time by a group run by a previous MinEnergo deputy minister, Mikhail Kurbatov, Kravchenko – before he had moved to MinEnergo himself – had opposed the scheme (Severtsev 2013).

16. Another source accuses Gryaznov, as head of the Division, of nothing more than incompetence (Blagina 2014).

17. Nazarov and Chisnikov are clearly linked through working together in Rostov-na-Donu before coming to the Ministry of Regional Development and then MED. No biographical links with Molodtsov are evident.

18. See the suggestion (Liik 2019) that recruitment into the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at mid-career level is “practically impossible.”