Who has led Russia? Russian regional political elites, 1954 – 2006

Abstract

Quantitative measures are used to compare the age, tenure, gender and change of political elites in 18 Russian regions from 1954 to 2006. The study finds more similarities than differences between regional elites from the Soviet era and from the post-Soviet Russian era. The Russian regional political elite since 1992 is actually older than the Soviet elite and resembles it quite closely in terms of years in office and turnover, comparing both the total time spans of the elites of each era and at 10-year intervals from 1956 through to 2006. Even in relation to differences by region and gender since 1992, there has been a re-emergence of a regional political establishment in a similar pattern to that of the Soviet era.

Notes

¹There are actually 49 non-autonomous regions, but the figure of 38% (18 of 47) excludes the two additional and exceptional federal cities of Moscow and Leningrad – St Petersburg. The 18 do not represent a true sample of all 47 non-autonomous regions, but they have been the focus of my cumulative research on regional elites over the past four decades since I began it from the limited number of regional newspapers and other sources accessible at the Lenin Library in Moscow in 1970 (Moses 1974, 1985, 1992).

² East View Information Services Online Databases, available at: http://online.eastview.com.

³‘Labyrint’, Panorama, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed August – December 2006.

⁴A partial exception is Perm', where a Komi-Permyak autonomous district (okrug) was formed as a separate 89th federation subject between 1992 and 2004, before it was reincorporated into Perm' in 2005 as the Perm' territory (krai).

⁵‘Pervye litsa gorodskoi administratsii—v proshlom i nastoyashchem’, Vechernii Novosibirsk, 14 August 2000, available at: http://www.vn.ru, accessed August 2000.

⁶‘Ofitsial'nyi sait-internet munitsipaliteta g. Tomska: glavy goroda’, available at: http://www.1.adm.tomsk.ru/pages/city_gl, accessed October 2006; and ‘Administratsiya goroda Permi—Gradonachaliniki’, available at: http://www.gorodperm.ru, accessed October 2006.

⁷‘Kratkie biografii rukovoditelei organov bezopasnosti Yarovslavkoi oblasti’, available at: http://www.adm.yar.ru/fsb/his2.html, accessed November 2006.

⁸Aleksandr P. Filatov, first secretary of Novosibirsk (1978 – 1988), ‘Ofitsial'nyi sait merii Novosibirsk’, available at: http://www.novo-sibirsk.ru/, accessed October 2006; Vasilii I. Chernyi, first secretary of Tambov (1966 – 1978), ‘Ofitsial'nyi sait Administratsii goroda Tambova’, available at: http://www.cityadm.tambov/ru/, accessed October 2006; Ivan Ye. Klimenko, first secretary of Smolensk (1969 – 1987), ‘Smolenskaya oblast’. Personalii entsiklopediya', available at: http://adm.smolensk.ru/history/encyclop/index.html, accessed October 2006; Aleksei F. Ponomarev, first secretary of Belgorod (1983 – 1991), ‘Budet ustanovlen stend ‘Pochetnye grazhdane obasti’’, 16 July 2001, available at: http://www.regions.ru, accessed July 2001; Aleksandr F. Gudkov, first secretary of Kursk (1970 – 1988), ‘Imena. Zemlyaki pomnyat’, Kurskaya pravda, 17 April 2007, East View Information Services Online Databases, available at: http://online.eastview.com, accessed May 2007.

⁹‘Ya vsegda byl odnolyubom … 10 marta otmetil 70-letie Georgyi Aleshin’ and ‘Aleksandr Filatov; tovarishch sekretar’, Vechernii Novosibirsk, 13 October 2001 and 26 June 2003, available at: http://www.vn.ru, accessed October 2001 and 28 June 2003; ‘Ye. K. Ligachëv: ‘Pravyashchaya vlast’ uzhe sdelala svoe chernoye delo’', Tomskaya pravda, 11, 79, 1 June 2002.

¹⁰‘Kemerovo_ofitsial'nyi sait Administratsiya goroda’, available at: http://www.kemerovo.ru/index.php?page=1, accessed September 2006.

¹¹ Bryanskii rabochii, 13 December 1989, p. 1; McFaul & Petrov (1998, Kniga 1, p. 459); Izvestiya, 11 November 1998, p. 6; ‘Russian Regional Report’, 18 February 1999, available at: http://www.iews.org, accessed February 1999; ‘Russian Federation Report’, 10 March 1999, available at: http://www.rferl.org, accessed March 1999; Bryanskoe vremya, 11 April 2001; ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006.

¹²Matsuzato and Shatilova (1997b, p. 263), and ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006.

¹³Matsuzato and Shatilova (1997c, p. 207); Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 3, 1989; and ‘Oftitsial'nyi sait administratsii Yaroslavskoi oblast: organy vlasti’, available at: http://www.adm.yar.ru, accessed October 2006.

¹⁴Biographies of Sergei N. Yastrebov, Aleksandr A. Ipatov, Valerii V. Valichko, and Vladimir D. Yeregin, available at: http://www.city.yar.ru/home/government/city_administration.html, accessed October 2006.

¹⁵Delegates to 26th (1981) and 27th (1986) CPSU Party Congresses, 19th CPSU Party Conference (1988); deputies in Russian Supreme Soviet (1990 – 93); candidates to State Duma, 12 December 1993; ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006.

¹⁶ Pravda, 2 October 1989; McFaul & Petrov (1998, Kniga 2, p. 754); ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006.

¹⁷ Komsomol'skaya pravda, 27 April 1974; ‘Administratsiya Oblasti-Orel’, Panorama 1995, available at: http://www.panorama.ru, accessed January 1996, and ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006; and Prostory Rossii, 24 January 2007, available at: http://www.prgazeta.ru/, accessed January 2007.

¹⁸‘Administratsiya Orlovskoi oblasti—gubernator’, available at: http://www.adm.orel.ru/gubern/, accessed October 2006.

¹⁹Implicit recognition of the unique status of these three regions during the Soviet era was reflected in their having an office of first secretary, elected at least as a candidate member of their obkom bureaux. On the Rybinsk political ‘clan’ see Matsuzato and Shatilova (1997c, p. 202). Tax revenue from Northern Steel in Cherepovets constituted 76% of the regional government budget from local enterprises in 2001 (Nezavisimaya gazeta-regiony, 19 June 2001); and Alexei Mordashov, the owner of Northern Steel in the Russian era, has transformed it into a major multinational corporation with worldwide assets. Komi-Permyak was an ethnic district (okrug) in Perm' during the Soviet era, a separate autonomous ethnic district of Russia in 1992 – 2004, and was reincorporated into the newly renamed Perm' territory (krai) as an ethnic district in 2005.

²⁰However, Pogrebshchikov resigned as mayor in September 1993 after only one and a half years in public office to head the Rostov branch of the Yegor Gaidar Association of Private and Privatised Enterprises, and by 2004 he headed production of the successful Rostov clothing manufacturing firm ‘Gloria Jeans’. See Marlet Kryukov, ‘The Mayor Came, The Mayor Went …’, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS-USR-93-12, 29 September 1993, pp. 82 – 84; and ‘Labyrint’, Panorama 2006, available at: http://www.labyrinth.ru, accessed September 2006.

²¹Yurii P. Trutnev was mayor of Perm' (1996 – 2000) and governor (2000 – 2004). Anatolii A. Temkin, deputy mayor (1997 – 2000, property management), first deputy governor (2000 – 2004, property management); Viktor V. Shein, deputy mayor (1996 – 2000, chief-of-staff, legal department, civil service), deputy governor (2000 – 2003, chief-of-staff, legal department, civil service); Tat'yana I. Margolina, deputy mayor (1999 – 2000, education, science and social policy), deputy governor (2000 – 2004, education, science and social policy); Nikolai A. Yashin, deputy mayor (1997 – 2000, health care, civil society and local self-management), deputy governor (2000 – 2003, health care-public organisations and mass media).

²²Biographies available at: http://www.bryanskobl.ru/∼pab/vedomstva/index.html, accessed February 2007.

²³L. J. Cook & C. Nechemias, ‘Women in the Russian Duma, 1993 – 2004’, unpublished article.

²⁴An exception to this argument could be made for Izotova, who in October 2006 was promoted to deputy head of the Northwest Federal District of Russia overseeing Vologda among other regions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel C. Moses

I am indebted to two anonymous referees of this journal for their insightful comments, to Eugene Huskey (Stetson University) for the conception of this article, and to my former teacher John Armstrong (University of Wisconsin – Madison) for the inspiration of this research over the past four decades.