Long Soviet shadows: the nomenklatura ties of Putin elites

ABSTRACT

Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approximately 60% of contemporary elites. Most have ties in the middle and lower, rather than the top, ranks of the nomenklatura. In addition, the share of those with nomenklatura backgrounds in Putin-era elites is significantly higher than the share of siloviki. These results reflect a noticeable continuity between the Soviet-era and Putin-regime elites 30 years after the transition. This often-ignored characteristic helps understand the absence of an elite split and a high degree of elite compliance with re-autocratization in Putin’s Russia.

KEYWORDS:

• Nomenklatura
• Soviet legacy
• siloviki
• Putin-regime elites
• transition

Acknowledgments

This article has strongly benefited from comments by Sharon Rivera, Vladimir Gel’man, Michael McFaul, Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan, and David Hoffman. We are deeply thankful for all these comments. Any remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Kremlin also often manipulates public opinion to revive Soviet nostalgia and associated themes (Hansen 2016; Snegovaya 2018).

2. The influence of the siloviki group of ex-KGB officers (Korzhakov and Barsukov) and Afghanistan campaign military officers (Rutskoy, Grachev, Lebed, Gromov, etc.) during Yeltsin’s presidency might also be important in this regard.

3. In 1994, the first head of post-Soviet Belarus, career scientist of the Russian Academy of Sciences Stanislav Shushkevich, was defeated by anti-elite populist Alexander Lukashenka, who had held a lower-level nomenklatura position as a director of a Soviet-era state farm in the Soviet nomenklatura system, but lacked long-range career prospects. However, it was Lukashenka who subsequently restored and reinforced many of the Soviet practices.

4. This finding echoes Kryshtanovskaya’s (2005, 73) study, in which she shows that the proportion of the Soviet nomenklatura in the regional elites remained very high between 1989 and 2002.

5. Particular attention has been devoted to their business career tracks and/or oligarchic origins (see, e.g. Åslund 2019; Hoffman 2011; Ledeneva 2012; Rutland 2003) as well as their technocratic backgrounds (see, e.g. Huskey 2010; Solovey 2019).

6. Experts who take part in the survey are prominent Russian political scientists, political strategists, media experts, and representatives of political parties. On a monthly basis, they are asked the following question: “How would you rate the influence of the following Russian politicians in the administration of the President of the Russian Federation, the government of the Russian Federation, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on a scale from 1 to 10?” Subsequently, the arithmetic mean is taken of the values of the expert assessments. In the annual resulting table, the arithmetic mean over the entire year 2019 is estimated (average final score). Each expert has an opportunity to recommend additional individuals (no more than five) to be included in the questionnaire. If at least two experts name an individual not represented in the questionnaire, his/her name is included in the next month’s study (Orlov 2020).

7. In greater detail, Rivera’s and Rivera’s (2019) categories consist of: (a) active-duty officers, whose only experience has been in the conventional military, or who have served in other force structures (either exclusively or in combination with service in the conventional military); (b) siloviki-civilians, those possessing at least three years of prior service as an officer in the conventional military alone; and (c) civilians with a comparable career history as an officer in a domestic security service (either exclusively or in combination with service in the conventional military).

8. This is partly a consequence of a significant representation of siloviki in our samples, whose personal information is often classified. Even the simplest biographical analysis is complicated in today’s Russia, where people in high state public posts, whether intentionally or out of habit, hide information about their families from the public.