Medvedev calls for democracy po-russki

“Russian democracy will not merely copy foreign models. Civil society cannot be bought with foreign grants,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said in an article published today September 10 by Internet newssite Gazeta.ru, expressing a conservative evolutionary vision of democraticisation.

Crucially, however, Medvedev said that parties would play a central role in Russian democracy, competing for power at all levels, and even nominating candidates for the post of president.

“As in most democratic states, parliamentary parties will be leaders in the political struggle, regularly replacing each other in power. Parties and their coalitions will form federal and regional governments, not vice versa, and nominate candidacies for president, and regional and local government leaders,” Medvedev said, according to Interfax.

But this won’t happen overnight. Medvedev said genuine democracy has to develop through experience and practice, and cannot simply be imported. “Only our own experience of democratic development will give us the right to say that we are free, we are responsible, we are successful,” Medvedev wrote. “Political culture cannot be changed merely by imitating political events of progressive societies, (…) freedom cannot be copied from a book, even if it is a very good book. (…) But no one will live our life for us. No one will become free, successful, and responsible for us,” Medvedev said.

Medvedev argued in favour of gradualism rather than the attempts at radical democraticisation Russia saw in the 1990s.

“We have no right to put social stability at risk and threaten life even for the sake of the loftiest of the goals. (…) Reforms are intended for people, not people for reforms. (…) Change will come. Yes, it will be gradual and well thought out, and go step-by-step. But it will be steady and consistent,” Medvedev said, according to Interfax.

Medvedev significantly failed to mention the role of the mass media and freedom of the press in his article. Instead, he highlighted an effective judiciary as the missing link in Russia’s attempts at democraticisation to date.

“Democracy is in need of protection as much as the fundamental rights and liberties of our citizens are. First of all, protection from corruption, which breeds lawlessness, lack of freedom and injustice. We are just beginning to build such a protection mechanism. The judiciary must be its nucleus,” he wrote.

Although insisting Russia had to take its fate in its own hands, Medvedev also said Russia needed more international integration to be successful. “Our internal financial and technological capabilities are insufficient today to give a real boost to the quality of life. We need money and technologies from countries of Europe, America and Asia,” he wrote, according to Interfax.

Medvedev also highlighted the roots of the demographic crisis. “The population is shrinking with every passing year. Alcoholism, smoking, traffic accidents, poor access to many of the modern medical technologies and environmental problems cut the life span of many people. An increase in birthrate that has made itself felt, does not compensate for the number of deaths,” he said.

Medvedev has made a series of strong statements about the impact of alcoholism on Russia’s development, and spoken positively about Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated anti-alcohol campaign. However, specific measures have yet to be formulated.

Medvedev moves against state corporations

Graham Stack for Russia Profile (www.russiaprofile.org)

Medvedev Asks State Prosecutor General to Inquire into the Activity of Seven Major State Corporations

The much-anticipated shift toward more liberalism in Russia marked by Dmitry Medvedev’s election as president in March of 2008 but delayed by last year’s war with Georgia and this year’s economic crisis looks to be slowly getting started. Under the Kremlin’s patronage, an alliance appears to be forming against the state corporation juggernaut.

In December of 2007, a key Medvedev friend and confidante, university friend and law faculty colleague Anton Ivanov, now chairman of the Supreme Arbitrage Court and as such the chief of Russia’s system of commercial courts, said that “relations between state and business are like a seesaw – they tip to one side and then to another. There was a time when the state had lost influence over business to the extent that it practically handed out indulgences for the non-payment of taxes. Now we are in tougher times. Perhaps the seesaw has even tipped too far in the other direction, and it is time to re-determine the correct balance between business interests and state authority.”

Anton Ivanov plays a similar role for Dmitry Medvedev to the one that Sergei Ivanov played for former-President and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – a trusted friend and a top official. And whereas Sergei Ivanov counted as a key member of Putin’s hawkish network of former St. Petersburg KGB agents known as the “siloviki,” Anton Ivanov is a key figure in Medvedev’s liberal network of the St. Petersburg civil law scholars, nicknamed the “civiliki.”

However, the shift from statism back toward liberalism has been slow in coming. Cynics argue that Medvedev is merely a placeman until Putin resumes the presidency in 2012. Optimists say a planned policy shift has been derailed by the Georgian war in 2008 and the economic collapse in 2009.

Until now the cynics seemed to have the better arguments. However, in what is seen as Medvedev’s first real independent initiative, on August 10 he requested the State Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika to audit the activity of the seven state corporations set up in 2007 to manage various fields of the economy, from the defense sector production and export to the construction of facilities for the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics.

With their wide-ranging powers and little room for oversight and accountability, the state corporations seem to adhere to a state-dominated model of bureaucratic capitalism that could crowd out private enterprise and increase corruption. Moreover, over the previous eight years their anomalous legal form – neither truly state-owned nor private, neither truly non-commercial nor solely profit-oriented – has outright contradicted much of the progress in creating a unified legal space in Russia.

In speeches and interviews in the run-up to his election as president, Medvedev frequently repudiated “state capitalism,” calling it a dead end and declaring that he is on the side of private enterprise and innovation. His failure to back words with deeds until now only reinforced the impression that he was a puppet of his Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Collective discontent

Medvedev’s move comes just after a number of different bodies raised a chorus of criticism of state corporations in June and July. This points to a carefully orchestrated campaign to discredit state corporations and to the fact that the president has enough political backing across state bureaucracies to get his way.

The first blow was dealt by the “civilik” Anton Ivanov. In early June, in an interview to the Vedomosti business daily, Ivanov publicly reprimanded state corporations, calling for a moratorium on their creation and for the enforcement of “generally-binding norms for all legal entities.” “It is not for nothing that legal scholars criticize state corporations,” he said. “Because their assets are private, but you can’t call them private in essence. And if the decision was to be taken to liquidate a state corporation, who would get the stakes in the companies owned by them? We need to stop calling old structures by new names, when they in fact remain the same in essence.”

In June, the Presidential Council on Legal Codification went even further, calling for the elimination of state corporations as a legal form altogether, since they have no place in Russia’s civil code.

Then in July and August, the powerful Audit Chamber and the Anti-Monopoly Service joined in the chorus. Both are headed by former members of the liberal Yabloko party, Sergei Stepashin and Igor Artemev, respectively. Perhaps more importantly, they both have little jurisdiction over state corporations and would like to change this.

Thus, a report prepared by the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) and leaked to the Kommersant daily named state corporations as one of the main threats to competition in the Russian economy. Writing in Vedomosti about the correct way to go about modernizing the Russian economy, the Head of the Audit Chamber Sergei Stepashin argued that this had to be done by changing legal norms to support and reward innovations, not by Soviet-style “sectoral” corporations, which he said “had failed to justify themselves.”

Finally, Valentin Zavadnikov, the chairman of the Federation Council’s industry committee, put up bitter resistance to a draft bill setting up a state corporation to run Russia’s roads. Back in February of 2008, Zavadnikov authored a damning Federation Council report on state corporations, calling them “the perfect chance to transfer state property to the non-state sector with no financial benefit for the state and at the risk of uncontrolled use and alienation of assets.”

Civiliki vs. siloviki

The Kremlin’s move against state corporations has two targets: the “civiliki’s” concern about the disastrous implications for Russia’s developing civil code of the state corporation anomaly and the desire to eradicate it by converting state corporations into other legal forms provided for in the civil code – such as joint stock companies or government agencies.

Ironically, this might be the easier part. A number of state corporations themselves are headed by liberals who are likely to tow the Kremlin’s new line. Liberal Anatoly Chubais, the head of Rosnanotech, the state corporation for developing nanotechnologies, declared in August that changing the legal form would make no real difference in Rosnanotech’s activities. Sergei Kirienko, a former liberal party colleague of Chubais and now the head of atomic power state corporation Rosatom, is also unlikely to object to a change in form. Nor is Dmitry Kozak, the head of the Olimpstroi State Corporation for constructing the facilities for the Sochi 2014 Olympics and a liberal colleague of Medvedev’s at the St. Petersburg law faculty, likely to kick up a fuss. In fact, Vedomosti recently reported that Olimpstroi is likely to be transformed from a state corporation into a federal target program.

As a sign of the tide turning against state corporations, one planned state corporation to own and run Russia’s roads was scaled down to a state company in July, thanks to the efforts of the above-mentioned Valentin Zavadnikov in the Federation Council. Likewise, there apparently will be no state corporations in the space and rocket industry, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told journalists yesterday. Instead, the country will resort to forming vertically integrated public joint-stock companies.

And in August, Russia’s Finance Ministry abandoned the project of a state corporation for managing Russia’s financial assets. Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who in 2007 criticized state corporations for de facto privatizing state assets free of charge, said that the state corporation form “was no longer deemed suitable” and another legal form would be found instead to do the same job.

But the big stumbling block will be what to do with the mother of all state corporations – Russian Technologies (RT) – the very first state corporation established in December of 2007. RT was originally based on defense sector exporters and their suppliers, but rapidly snowballed to include companies ranging from metallurgy to carmakers. The corporation is headed by the influential friend of Putin’s Sergei Chemezov. He is the man who single-handedly tailored the state corporation legislation to suit his personal goals, and is not likely to surrender his huge privileges without a major struggle.

Suspicion of Russian Technologies’ activity runs even deeper than suspicion of the legal form of state corporations. Chemezov’s activity as head of RT seems not just to threaten the integrity of the civil code, but the overall primacy of private property in the Russian economy. In contrast to the other state corporations that operate in specific fields of activity, Russian Technologies has acted as a cross-sectoral “Ministry of Deprivatization,” acquiring privately-owned companies and often prompting accusations of behaving semi-legally as a “corporate raider.” RT’s latest major hostile acquisition was the fairly successful engine and turbine producer Saturn, which, as a private company owned by CEO Yuri Lastochkin, developed engines for the Superjet aircraft and a new generation of turbines for gas-fuelled power stations.

According to Kirill Rogov of the Institute of Economy in Transition, “Medvedev’s target is not only state corporations in general, but also one certain corporation in particular: Russian Technologies. Whereas for other state corporations the consequences will be limited to adjusting their status to conform with the Constitution and Russia’s laws, for Russian Technologies this is the beginning of the end of the project itself.”

Halting the Russian Technologies juggernaut would thus finally mark a modest beginning to the project announced by Anton Ivanov in December of 2007 of re-tipping the scales away from the state, and back toward private enterprise.

Legal eagles Obama and Medvedev swap notes

Graham Stack for Russia Profile (www.russiaprofile.org)

The Connection Between the Lawyer Presidents is More Curious than Medvedev Seems to Have Realized

When they first met, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev played up the common legal background he shares with U.S. President Barack Obama. And despite question marks over the veracity of Medvedev’s claim to have studied a “legal reference work” authored by Obama, the influence of the Russian president’s legal schooling is palpable, in his public statements, policies, and above all his appointments. But is his habit of hiring like-minded colleagues really a bid to consolidate the rule of law, or just good old-fashioned nepotism?

Relations between U.S. and Russian presidents are full of paradoxes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each new Russian president has been paired with a new U.S. president – Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, and now Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. The previous two presidential pairs featured an unlikely personal bond, which nevertheless failed to prevent tensions escalating between the countries.

Obama, after his first meetings with Medvedev, seemed to deliberately avoid any sentimentality, emphasizing that he wants a relationship based on shared national interests, not personalities. In fact, Medvedev’s response to Obama was more personal than vice versa, inspired by his and Obama’s common background as legal scholars.

Following the two presidents’ first meeting at the G20 summit in London in March, Medvedev commented that “we have read the same books.” Following a bilateral meeting at the G8 summit in L’Aquila on July 10, the footnote swapping seemed to have gone one step further: Medvedev said he had previously studied a “legal reference work” co-authored by Obama. “This is curious to say the least,” Medvedev remarked.

The issue is actually even more curious than Medvedev seems to have realized: Obama, as a legal scholar, published nothing, except one research note to the Harvard Law Review as a graduate. Medvedev’s own publication record is far more impressive than Obama’s – having co-authored a standard work on Russia’s civil code in the 1990s.

What publication was Medvedev referring to, then? It could be that he meant the Harvard Law Review. Obama famously edited the prestigious periodical between 1980 and 1990 as its first black editor. These were also the years when Medvedev was completing his doctorate in St. Petersburg.

However, according to a number of sources, it is extremely unlikely that the journal was available at St. Petersburg State University until the late 1990s. Also it is unclear why Harvard Law Review could have been interesting for a Russian legal scholar at that time.

More likely is that Medvedev confused Obama’s editorial position at Harvard Law Review with his later teaching post at University of Chicago. University of Chicago law school publishes the famous journal “Law and Economics.” “Law and Economics” is the flagship journal of the neo-institutional economic school that analyses an economy according to its legal institutional framework, and as such is a key journal in Medvedev’s field of commercial law. Obama’s faculty friend and now top economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, was lead editor of the journal in the 1990s.

Neo-institutional economics became mainstream in Russia in the second half of the 1990s, as it became clear that macroeconomic stabilization and privatization did not work if an economy lacked efficient laws and institutions. As a result, government economic reforms started to focus on the legal sphere. This shift was embodied by the appointment of legal scholar German Gref as a long-serving economy minister between 2000 and 2007. Gref studied and taught alongside Medvedev in the St. Petersburg law faculty in the early 1990s.

Medvedev must have studied this school of thought – and may (wrongly) think Obama edited its foremost journal when he taught at the University of Chicago. In fact Obama taught constitutional law, and was concerned with issues of race and citizens’ rights quite distant from Medvedev’s scholarly interests.

Civiliki: Network or norms?

Whatever the truth, Medvedev’s response to Obama demonstrates how strong his identity as a civil law scholar remains, despite years of working in the Kremlin and government. This is an identity he shares with other top officials and friends, nicknamed the civiliki, to distinguish them from Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB network of siloviki.

This identity was underscored last week by a visit to his alma mater, St. Petersburg University’s law faculty, posted on his video blog on the Kremlin website, where Medvedev reminisces about his years studying and teaching there. Ilya Nikiforov, an associate lecturer at the civil law department, pointed out that “Medvedev even contributed a chapter for a civil law textbook, co-authored by members of St. Petersburg Law School, after having become president last year.”

Medvedev’s background in law does not just serve him intellectually, but as a source of personnel appointments. Besides Gref, who now heads Russia’s largest bank, the state-owned Sberbank, the new Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov also studied and taught alongside Medvedev in Petersburg in the 1990s, where he lectured on Roman and civil law.

From among Medvedev’s undergraduate classmates (class of 87), Konstantin Chuichenko heads the Central Control Directorate in the presidential administration, Nikolai Vinnichenko is presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District, Artur Parfenchikov heads the State Bailiffs Service, Nikolai Gutsan is deputy prosecutor general, and Valeriya Adamova chairs the Moscow Arbitration Court. About a dozen other colleagues and classmates are scattered through the top echelons of the state as well as Gazprom.

Most civil among the civiliki, and the closest to Medvedev, is his longtime friend, former classmate, faculty colleague and textbook co-author, Anton Ivanov. Ivanov was catapulted to head Russia’s Supreme Arbitration Court, the country’s court of final instance in commercial disputes, also with prerogatives in norm setting, in 2005.

Like Medvedev, Ivanov has retained close ties to academia, as scientific director of the law faculty of Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics. According to deputy dean of the faculty, Natalia Rostovtseva, Ivanov’s position is not a formality. “He plays an active role in the life of the faculty,” said Rostovtseva. “He teaches the second year course on the civil code, and examines. Moreover, he insists that students get practical experience by attending sessions of the Supreme Arbitration Court and completing internships there.” Ivanov himself complains that he now only has time for three or four publications per year.

Ivanov is notable for having taken a principled position against siloviki policy in the state sector of the economy. In June he called for a moratorium on the creation of state corporations such as giant defense sector and engineering holding Russian Technologies, headed by leading silovik Sergei Chemezov, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin’s. Ivanov argued that Russia’s civil code does not envisage any such hybrid form of private and state property, and demanded “common norms for all legal entities.”

Likewise, Medvedev’s rhetoric against “legal nihilism” and his calls to strengthen the rule of law obviously draw on his roots in jurisprudence.

On the other hand, the civiliki network might turn into a “jobs for the boys” club, ensuring the loyalty to Medvedev of what are meant to be independent institutions. On July 7, for instance, a former St. Petersburg law faculty member, Sergei Mavrin, was proposed by Medvedev as deputy chairman of the constitutional court. Prior to this, new legal amendments empowered the president to propose candidates, whereas previously judges had voted on new members. Mavrin is now widely tipped to head the constitutional court when current head Valery Zorkin steps down in 2012.

So the crucial test for Medvedev’s presidency could be whether his declared interest in strengthening legal norms is actually implemented, or whether his academic background will simply serve him as a source of cadres, equivalent to Vladimir Putin’s siloviki network.

Similarly in U.S.-Russian relations, a reset will only work if Obama’s and Medvedev’s shared legal background helps them move ahead with strengthening the rule of law in the international sphere. If their legal interest is simply used as a basis to build a personal relationship, the history of the previous two presidential pairs, where personal friendship failed to prevent escalation of Russian-U.S. tension, may be doomed to repeat itself.

Tracing the rise of Medvedev’s network – Russia’s “civiliki”

Graham Stack for business new europe

Dmitry Medvedev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s endorsed successor, is likely to ask a slew of old university friends round to the Kremlin when he moves in later this year. Not to party, but to work. Much as Putin has relied on a string of friends from St Petersburg formerly with the KGB, the so-called siloviki, Medvedev has hauled up into high positions a network of friends and colleagues from the St Petersburg State University civil law department: the “civiliki,” as it were.

“Relations between state and business are like a seesaw – they tip to one side and then to another. There was a time when the state had lost influence over business to the extent that it practically handed out indulgences for non-payment of taxes. Now we are in tougher times. Perhaps the seesaw has even tipped too far in the other direction, and it is time to re-determine the correct balance between business interests and state authority.”

When the chairman of Russia’s Supreme Arbitration Court, 42-year old Anton Ivanov, interviewed by business daily Vedomosti on December 25, came out with the above statement, Russian political observers took notice: only two weeks before, Ivanov’s friend and colleague of 25 years standing, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, had been picked by Putin to succeed him as president. The presidential elections are due on March 2.

Medvedev and Ivanov studied together at what was then Leningrad University’s faculty of law from 1982-1987. Following graduation, both went on write PhDs and teach at the faculty in the civil law department. Their PhD supervisor was none other than law professor Anatoly Sobchak, leader of St Petersburg’s surging pro-democracy movement, elected mayor of Petersburg in 1990, and Putin’s boss until 1996.

Medvedev and Ivanov’s professional partnership extended to co-authoring, together with other faculty members, an acclaimed civil law textbook that’s still widely used in Russia, and also jointly founding a legal consultancy in St Petersburg in the early 1990s.

At every stage of Medvedev’s subsequent rise to the top since then, Ivanov has followed him at a short distance. And not only Ivanov. From Medvedev and Ivanov’s class of ‘87, a cluster of names such as Konstantin Chuichenko, Valeriya Adamova, Vladimir Allisov, Ilya Eliseev, Mikhail Krotov and Nikolai Vinnichenko have accompanied Medvedev and Ivanov’s dizzying rise.

Just as during Putin’s presidency saw the previously obscure siloviki members such as aide Igor Sechin and state arms trader Sergei Chemezov rise to become national figures, in the same way some of the above names are likely to figure large in the still-nascent art of “Medvedevology.”

First stop: Gazprom

Dmitry Medvedev was named head of the supervisory board of Gazprom in June 2000, immediately after Putin’s inauguration as president. The civiliki were quick to follow him to Gazprom.

In July 2004, Anton Ivanov was appointed first deputy head of Gazprom Media, Gazprom’s structure for managing its media assets which had been expropriated from exiled media oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.

A number of his former classmates had already been installed at Gazprom.

Konstantin Chuichenko, class of ‘87, had in March 2001 become head of Gazprom’s legal department, and in 2002, he became a member of the Gazprom management board and chairman of the supervisory board of Gazprom Media. As of 2004, Chuichenko has been a managing director of the controversial gas trader RosUkrEnergo, the murky intermediary for Russia’s sales to Ukraine of Turkmen gas that was at the centre of the “gas wars” scandal in 2006.

Valeriya Adamova, also class of ‘87, became vice-president of the legal department of the Gazprom chemicals affiliate Sibur in April 2003. Adamova played an active role in helping Gazprom to reclaim assets transferred to Sibur under the 1990’s management. Vladimir Alisov, again class of ‘87, was head of the legal department of Gazprom’s newly-created subsidiary, Gazpromregiongaz, which handles gas distribution in Russia.

One year after Ivanov’s move to Gazprom, Ilya Eliseev, Medvedev and Ivanov’s former classmate, faculty colleague and co-author, was appointed deputy chairman of the management board of Gazprombank, Russia’s third largest. Finally in April 2005, Mikhail Krotov, class of ‘85 this time, former faculty colleague and co-author, succeeded Ivanov as deputy general director of Gazprom Media. Putin had chosen Ivanov to chair the Supreme Arbitration Court, Russia’s highest commercial court.

Civiliki go to court

Ivanov became chairman of the Supreme Arbitration Court in 2005 despite his never having worked before as a judge. He was tasked with launching a systematic reform of the commercial court system – and quickly built up a public profile thanks to frequent media appearances.

Ivanov appointed as his deputy, Elena Valyavina, a university classmate and then faculty colleague, who in the 1990s worked under Ivanov in the St Petersburg city justice department. Adamova moved from her post at Sibur in 2005 to become deputy chairman of the very important Moscow Arbitration Court in 2005.

Nikolai Vinnichenko, class of ‘87, a friend of Medvedev and Ivanov, had risen through the state prosecutor’s office to become state prosecutor for Petersburg in 2003. In October 2004, he was appointed director of the Federal Service of Court Bailiffs.

Vinnichenko’s long-standing deputy in St Petersburg prosecutor’s department, Aleksandr Konovalov, a 1992 graduate of the St Petersburg law faculty, and then faculty colleague of Medvedev and Ivanov, moved to become chief state prosecutor for Bashkiria in 2005, and in the same year was promoted to the post of presidential representative for the Volga region.

Finally, in November 2005, Medvedev’s faculty colleague and co-author Mikhail Krotov moved from Gazprom Media to become the presidential representative to the Constitutional Court.

Civiliki at the Kremlin gates?

How quickly Medvedev will promote his own people to important posts will only become clear if he wins the presidential election and after he is inaugurated as president in May.

It’s also too early to say how the civiliki might impact on the country’s politics. But it would be wrong to expect fundamental democratic impulses from them. Not only are legal scholars inclined to favour technocratic solutions over the cut and thrust of democratic politics, but more importantly at Gazprom Media the civiliki were implicated in the effective de-privatisation of formerly independent TV station NTV, and it was after Anton Ivanov’s move to the Supreme Arbitration Court that the crippling tax claims against Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s now-bankrupt oil company Yukos were enforced.

For the civiliki to tilt the seesaw back towards society, they will first have to discard a lot of ballast.

All the Next President’s Men: Dmitry Medvedev’s Civiliki

Graham Stack for Russia Profile

Roll over siloviki, the civiliki are on their way.

Dmitry Medvedev, United Russia and Vladimir Putin’s presidential candidate, is not a member of the dreaded siloviki network. Instead, he is the leading member of the “civiliki,” a network of St. Petersburg civil law scholars whom he has pulled up into high positions in Gazprom and the Russian court system.

One of Sovietologists’ most treasured analytical tools was to spot networks between officials – usually regional networks – and trace their progress across the Soviet political firmament. In post-Soviet Russia, “networkism” is an equally fruitful political resource and analytical tool. London sociologist Alena Ledeneva has described contemporary Russia as a “network society:” Networkism, a more inclusive, sometimes more productive, form of nepotism, determines both individual opportunities and identities.

The classic example of networkism is, of course, the siloviki network attributed to Vladimir Putin, comprising former KGB operatives from St. Petersburg. Sociologist Olga Khryshtanovskaya has described prolifically how the siloviki have been taking over at the top, occupying post after post in the economy and government.

So there was considerable surprise last week when Putin threw his support behind First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev who does not belong to the siloviki. The West sighed with relief, or even disappointment, as Medvedev, whose small stature and large brown eyes give him more of a resemblance to a teddy bear than a Russian bear.

So if Medvedev is not a silovik, who is he? What network does he belong to?

Dmitry Medvedev is a textbook civilian, a civil law scholar who co-authored an award-winning textbook on the Russian civil code that was first published in 1991. His co-authors included Ilya Yeliseyev, Anton Ivanov and Mikhail Krotov, a few threads in the network that has risen in Moscow alongside Medvedev. The anointed successor, Yeliseyev, Ivanov and another friend, Vladimir Alisov, were classmates from 1982 to1987 at the Leningrad State University law department. They formed a band of four, according to fellow students and staff, spending both their study time and free time together. Medvedev, Ivanov and Yeliseyev then continued on to postgraduate study and eventually taught in the department. Krotov, who also lectured in the department, graduated two years earlier.

Another classmate from 1987 was Konstantin Chuichenko, but, instead of going into academia, he chose the more adventurous path of joining the KGB.

The Businessmen

Dmitry Medvedev was named head of the supervisory board of Gazprom in June 2000, immediately after Vladimir Putin’s inauguration as president.

Not surprisingly, considering the number of ex-KGB men moving into leadership roles, the first of Medvedev’s classmates to take a high position at Gazprom was Chuichenko. In March 2001, Chuichenko was appointed head of Gazprom’s legal department, and in April 2002, he became a member of the Gazprom management board. From January 2002 to June 2004, he was chairman of the supervisory board of Gazprom Media, the holding company created to handle assets expropriated from media oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.

In July 2004, Chuichenko became one of three managing directors of the controversial gas trader RosUkrEnergo, the intermediary for Russia’s sales of Turkmen gas to Ukraine and the center of the “gas wars” scandal in 2006. In March 2005, Chuichenko also was elected to the supervisory board of Sibneft, after Roman Abramovich bought it from Gazprom.

Other Medvedev classmates were quick to follow Chuichenko, taking up positions at Gazprom affiliates. In April 2003, Valeria Adamova, class of ‘87, was named vice-president of the legal department of Gazprom’s chemicals affiliate Sibur. Gazprom was busy reclaiming assets transferred to Sibur under the 1990s-era management, and Adamova played an active role in court cases.

In July 2004, Anton Ivanov, Medvedev’s co-author and close friend was appointed first deputy head of Gazprom Media, a member of the management board, and a member of the board of directors of television stations TNT and NTV.

In 2004, Alisov, the fourth in the group of Medvedev’s friends and classmates, became head of the legal department of Gazprom’s newly-created subsidiary, Gazpromregiongaz, which handles gas distribution in Russia.

In 2005, Yeliseyev was appointed deputy chairman of the management board of Gazprombank, Russia’s third largest bank.

Finally in April 2005, Krotov, an acclaimed legal scholar with a number of state awards for jurisprudential excellence, was appointed deputy general director of Gazprom Media, succeeding Ivanov, who had moved on to chair the Supreme Arbitration Court in January.

The civiliki go to court

At the time of his appointment to Russia’s highest commercial court and in light of his judicial experience, he was charged with launching a systematic reform of the commercial court system, and quickly developed a public profile in this capacity through frequent media appearances.

Ivanov appointed Yelena Valyavina, Leningrad law department class of ’88, as his deputy on the court. She had been his first deputy in the St. Petersburg city justice department in the 1990s. Valyavina, like Ivanov, had no experience in court work, and Dmitry Fursov, a Moscow Region court judge with far better qualifications, unsuccessfully protested her appointment in court.

Ivanov then started to bring the next generation of St. Petersburg legal scholars to work for him. Igor Drosdov, class of ‘99, moved from his job as assistant to Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref (who is also a graduate of the Leningrad law department) to head the administration of the Supreme Arbitration Court. Dmitry Pleschkov, another of Ivanov’s Ph.D. students, became head of the court registry.

Nikolai Vinichenko, class of ’87, had risen through the state prosecutor’s office to become state prosecutor for St. Petersburg in 2003. In October 2004, he was appointed director of the Federal Service of Court Bailiffs.

Finally, in November 2005, Krotov moved from Gazprom-Media to become the president’s representative to the Constitutional Court.

True to their roots

The civiliki are as proud of their faculty ties as the siloviki are of their ties to the “corporation.” Asked in 2006 how close he was to his “former colleague” Anton Ivanov, Mihail Krotov replied, “Why former? We both continue to teach. Anton Alexandrovich lectures and I still work with Ph.D. students and post-docs.”

After their move to Moscow, the St. Petersburg civiliki set up shop in the faculty of civil law at the esteemed Higher School of Economics. Ivanov is head of faculty; Drosdov is deputy head. Other faculty members include Yeliseyev, Krotov, and Pleschkov.

Medvedev, receiving an honorary degree from St. Petersburg State University in 2006, promised to return to give a lecture in the same year: “But not about the National Projects or strengthening the Russian state. I’ll lecture to you about Roman law, because Roman law is the foundation of everything else,” he said.

Friends in high places

The civiliki have a number of associate members who have made their way independently to top positions.

Alexander Konovalov, presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District, graduated from the law department of St. Petersburg State University in 1992 and went on to lecture in civil law alongside Ivanov, Krotov and Medvedev while working in the municipal state prosecutor’s department.

From 1997 to 1998, he served as a deputy to Nikolai Vinichenko as a district prosecutor in St. Petersburg, and between 2001 and 2005, he worked as deputy state prosecutor for St. Petersburg.

In 2005, he became the state prosecutor for Bashkortostan, where he investigated the Blagoveschensk police brutality scandal, and won some acclaim from human rights activists. He also investigated the privatization of the region’s oil companies by structures close to the political leadership. In November 2005, he replaced former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko as presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District.

Minister of Regional Development Dmitry Kozak was a classmate of Mikhail Krotov, graduating from the Leningrad law department in 1985. He worked in the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office and was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg between 1996 and 1999. He is considered a political heavyweight and reformer, someone whom Putin has used to handle emergency situations.

Lovers of law, distrustful of democracy

It is too early to say what impact Medvedev’s civiliki will have on Russian politics. It was only towards the end of Vladimir Putin’s first term that the influence of the siloviki became decisive in Kremlin policies, and it also took Medvedev time before he started to actively promote his own people to Moscow posts.

The first round of reshuffling following the presidential elections in March will show how intent Medvedev is on appointing his classmates to top government positions. The most likely for promotion to the government or Kremlin administration, is Anton Ivanov, who has achieved some public prominence, including TV appearances alongside Vladimir Putin.

It would be wrong to expect fundamental democratic impulses from the civiliki. Legal scholars are inevitably distrustful of the cut and thrust of democratic politics, as it threatens to impair the “perfection” of draft laws. Noticeably, none of the civiliki, for all their legal expertise, has chosen to engage in legislative politics on either the regional or national level.

Now, with Medvedev assured of complete control of the Duma after United Russia’s landslide victory, the civiliki will have carte blanche to draft legislation according to all the textbook procedures. But can scholarly erudition compensate for a complete absence of political competition in making good laws?