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.

Afghan heroin could kill US-Russian reset

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

In context of the “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations, the two countries’ cooperation over Afghanistan has been hailed as a model for working together in other areas, ranging from Europe to Iran and North Korea. But with the reset hardly underway, opinion differences are already emerging between Moscow and Washington over anti-narcotics policy in Afghanistan.

Russia’s security policy hawks tend to react negatively to the United States acting unilaterally, deploying interventionist military power and tweaking UN mandates to expand missions. But when in 2008 U.S. hardliners pushed for the American military and allies to widen the fight against the Afghan Taliban to include military engagement of the country’s billion-dollar narco-industry, including a shoot-to-kill policy against heroin producers and a blanket aerial crop-eradication campaign, Russia’s siloviki stood up and applauded.

U.S. hardliners regarded Afghanistan’s opium production as a crucial source of financing for the strengthening Taliban insurgency, and drew inspiration from the America’s experience of having fought and largely won a war with drug producers in Columbia. In 2007, the U.S. ambassador to Columbia William Wood, an ardent supporter of aerial crop eradication, was reassigned to Afghanistan to step up the war on drugs. “If there is no poppy, there is nothing to traffic,” Wood told reporters on arrival. In 2007, military operations supporting manual eradication got underway, and in January 2009, a leaked letter by NATO’s Supreme Commander General John Craddock to European counterparts declared an effective shoot-to-kill policy for the drug war, saying it was “no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective.”

Iraq, Iran and North Korea are all examples where Russia has vehemently opposed the use of American military force against weapons of mass destruction. But without any sense of irony, Viktor Ivanov, the head of Russia’s Federal Anti-Narcotics Service (FSKN) speaking in February called Afghanistan’s heroin “a weapon of mass destruction of a special kind,” and expressly demanded that the United States and its allies in Afghanistan engage and destroy it.

Ivanov’s reasoning is clear: Russia is the country worst affected by Afghanistan’s heroin exports. According to FSKN statistics, Russia has up to 2.5 million drug addicts, mostly in the critical reproductive age group of 18 to 39, with the number surging by 80,000 a year. Ninety percent of drug addicts in the country use Afghan heroin. These alarming figures do not take into account the enormous number of HIV infections transmitted via dirty needle sharing. “Today it is self-evident for everyone that the state should take decisive emergency measures to prevent an approaching national catastrophe,” Reuters reported Ivanov as saying in May, adding that “it is time the world community got serious about the Afghan drug problem.”

Although Ivanov has no official foreign policy remit, he is not simply a law-enforcement officer lobbying for a larger budget. A former KGB officer, he is a longstanding associate of the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and a key member of the influential “silovik” network of former KGB officers from St. Petersburg responsible for Russian security policy. He was a top Kremlin aide throughout Putin’s presidency before moving to the FSNK in 2008. And there is also a special personal background to Ivanov’s interest in Afghanistan: he served there with the Soviet forces in the 1980s during the Soviet Union’s disastrous occupation. His move to the FSNK duly shifted the organization’s attention from the domestic to the international dimension of Russia’s heroin problem.

It is testimony to Ivanov’s influence that the joint declaration given by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at June’s Moscow summit listed combating illegal drug trafficking alongside the fight against terrorism and armed extremism as shared goals in Afghanistan, with Obama acknowledging that “Russia has deep concerns about the [Afghan] drug trade and its infiltration into Russia.”

New man on the job

The Obama-Medvedev summit was the birth of the U.S.-Russian “reset,” and the new spirit of cooperation was marked by Russia’s agreement to allow the transit of U.S. weapon cargo to Afghanistan. But ironically, as part of Obama’s global adjustment of foreign policy, the U.S. policy in Afghanistan is also being reset – and the results are not looking like anything Russia would want them to be.

Obama’s shift away from George Bush’s hardline policies has seen both general Craddock and ambassador Wood lose their posts this year. Instead, a veteran Democrat diplomat Richard Holbrooke has taken over the U.S. policy in the area as the American special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke is a longstanding opponent of any form of crop eradication, whether on ground or by air, and indeed largely denies that Afghanistan’s opium trade is the main source of funding for the Taliban insurgency.

“If the drugs ended tomorrow, it would not have a major effect on the Taliban source of funding,” Holbrooke declared in June at a ceremony to mark General Stanley McChrystal’s assumption of command of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Holbrooke pointed out that the ground-based crop eradication program has been costly in terms of money and lives, and has failed to make any impact. These are points the Russians agree with – but instead of ending crop eradication, Ivanov is demanding a step-up to aerial eradication, and lamented general Craddock’s departure in an interview he gave to the Kommersant daily in June.

In response to Holbrooke, Ivanov claims it would be possible to end the Afghan opium production swiftly, and adduces two examples: firstly, he says, following the UN’s condemnation of Afghanistan’s heroin exports in 1999, in 2000 and 2001 the Taliban reduced the opium harvest practically to zero. Secondly, the U.S. crop eradication campaign in Columbia has been largely successful. According to Ivanov, 74 percent of the coca crop was destroyed in 2008, with no increase in armed resistance.

Ivanov says the UN should force the United States and its allies to take decisive action against opium production in Afghanistan, firstly by declaring Afghan’s narcotics trade an international threat, as it has done with terrorism and piracy. Following this, Russia should make the next annual renewal of the UN mandate for international troops in Afghanistan conditional on action against heroin production and trafficking. “The further presence of coalition forces in Afghanistan should be made conditional on an undertaking to destroy drug fields,” Ivanov told a conference in April. Russia’s UN Security Council veto means that theoretically, Russia has the leverage to do this.

Ivanov has gone as far as to propose tying U.S. transit of weaponry to Afghanistan via Russia to a more active pursuit of crop eradication on behalf of the Americans. “The granting of transport corridors to NATO forces in Afghanistan should be conditioned on a commitment to destroy sown areas, laboratories, stocks and other infrastructure of the Afghan drug business,” he told Russia’s Duma in late June.

With Russian demands for crop eradication becoming more strident while U.S. strategy moves decisively away from the approach, the signs do not bode well for U.S.-Russian cooperation in the one policy area where it has been strongest to date.

At the same time, however, U.S. strategy is shifting away from unconditional support for the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, an opponent of crop eradication who has been frequently accused of protecting major figures involved in opium and heroin production. Indeed, on August 28 reports appeared in the media that Holbrooke had had a major row with Karzai over allegations of ballot-stuffing in the August 20 presidential elections.

A more distanced approach toward the Karzai administration could make Holbrooke’s plan to go after the big fish of heroin production and trafficking, instead of the small fry opium farmers, seem more plausible to the Russians. This is something that Ivanov, who has called for a UN blacklist of Afghan drug barons to be compiled, could go along with. On the other hand, Russia’s drugs tsar is skeptical that the big fish can be found in Afghanistan. “All these people live a long way from Afghanistan, for instance in United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia,” he told Kommersant in June

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.

United Russia – a conservative party?

Graham Stack for Russia Profile
Putin’s party United Russia is increasingly referring to itself as a ‘ ‘conservative’ party. But is it anything like a conservative party in the Western sense?

One of the surprises following the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been the reaction of Putin’s party United Russia. While the laments and praise of liberal figures, and the silence of the Communists were predictable, the leadership of United Russia was unexpectedly vocal in claiming Solzhenitsyn as one of its own – as a conservative.

Andrei Isaev, head of the Duma committee on labour and social policy, and leader of United Russia’s Centre for social-conservative policy, called Solzhenitsyn August 14th ‘the founder of conservative ideology in Russia,’ according to polit.ru

And with Solzhenitsyn’s death closely followed by the 100th day of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, United Russia figures were quick to claim the new president as one of their own as well – as a conservative. Isaev claimed that Medvedev was no liberal but “just as much a conservative as Putin.”

There are even rumours afoot that United Russia is about to adopt ‘conservatism’ as the sole definition of its ideology at its party conference in November.

‘Conservatism’ would then replace the current master concept of ’sovereign democracy’, dubbed by critics ’sovereign disregard for democracy’. Medvedev himself has publicly criticized the ’sovereign democracy’ concept, and Putin, now United Russia’s honory chairman, himself has repeatedly savaged for its lack of any clear ideology.

Political conservatism in Russia is paradoxical – the very word had to be imported from English, and is unfortunately consonant with the Russian for condom. Russia’s conservatives in the literal sense would seem to be the Communists and nationalist parties, harking back to Soviet and imperial greatness – and propogating the very opposite of Western conservative values.

So is United Russia really going conservative, or is the label just a Potemkin village?

“There isn’t, in my view, a Russian equivalent to the conservatism of European Christian Democrats or of either the free-market trend or the one-nation trend in British conservatism,” says Phillip Hanson, emeritus professor at Britain’s foreign policy institute Chatham House. “Russian conservatism as the Russian political mainstream is dogmatically nationalist and its connections with business are close and corrupt, but Russian political conservatism is not business-friendly in the sense of either dancing to the tune of big business, or seeking to promote a good business environment for all comers.”

However, politics professor Nikolai Petro of Rhode Island University, disagrees:

“I believe that United Russia is what political scientists like to call a “catch all party;” i.e., one that defines itself not in partisan terms, but as THE party of law, order, and prosperity, an agenda that transcends political divisions. They model themselves on the French Gaullists, whose purpose is to preserve a politically viable elite in power, not to promote any particular ideology. (…) Also, as the country as a whole is becoming more aware of its pre-Soviet historical identity, it is becoming more comfortable with an identity that is truly “conservative,” in the traditional sense. Such an identity was severely repressed in Soviet times, and is just now beginning to become politically significant, with the political rise of young people”

Private property and political rights are key to conservatism

Conservative parties the world over indulge in nationalist rhetoric, especially when it comes to foreign interference in domestic affairs, and also talk tough about law and order. The key to conservatism, however, is that all the “strong state” talk stops as soon it comes to private property and political rights. Because basically, conservatism is all about political rights protecting private property from state intervention.

This is the million dollar question about Russian conservatism.

“Russian society views conservatism as the idea of strong state protection. Conservatism has stronger traditions in Russian politics than socialism. At the same time, elements of the socialist past are regarded as part of the idea of conservatism as well,” says Alexander Rahr of Germany’s foreign policy think tank German Society for Foreign Policy.

So in Russian conservatism with a small c, the protection of private property plays a small role – because historically private property has played a small role in Russia.

Now, however, with 80% of Russians homeowners, after the privatization of the 1990s, conservatism theoretically has a natural constituency – a vast one at that.

However, United Russia are clearly reluctant to harp on about private property. The reason is that the population de facto owned their apartments in late Soviet times, although they could not buy and sell them. “Private property”, on the other hand, is still widely associated with the injustice of the 1990s’ privatizations that saw a class of ‘oligarchs’ emerge. And, although Vladimir Putin’s election in 2000 arguably saved the 1990s privatization from reversal, the Putin administration resorted on occasion to anti-oligarch rhetoric, and in the notorious Yukos case, to very real deeds.

So the jury is out on whether Russia’s self-named conservatives really understand that the key to conservatism is the self-restricting state.

Critics point to media control, violence in Chechnya, nationalization of key companies and appointment of regional governors as indicating otherwise.

Putin supporters, on the other hand, argue that it was Putin who saved privatization from reversal, unified the legal space, introduced private ownership of land, brought in jury trials, slashed the draft, retained the death penalty moratorium and, finally, stepped down after two terms.

With this ambivalence at the heart of Russia conservatism, it is telling that the homage paid to Solzhenitsyn was also ambivalent.

For all that Solzhenitsyn loathed communism, Isaev finds in him support for a gradual move from communism instead of the ‘ultraliberal course’ embarked on in the 1990s by Boris Yeltsin, i.e. as a critique of privatization.

“I remember that Solzhenitsyn’s article ‘How to rebuild Russia’ of 1990 seemed to many in the country to be too moderate, conservative and even out of touch,” says Isaev. “But now, with hindsight, if we had listened to him then, we would have been able to avoid many disasters.”

Russian’s wannabe conservatives might better heed Solzhenitsyn’s more recent words – in his last interview – on the importance to conservatism of property rights and entrepreneurship.

“Although many fortunes were amassed in Yeltsin’s times by ransacking, the only reasonable way to correct the situation is not to go after big businesses but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and corruption,” Solzhenitsyn told Germany’s Der Spiegel in 2007.

Conservatives prefer evolution to revolution – and Russia’s conservatives, like Russia itself, are themselves still only evolving.

Putin’s Finest Hour a Distant Memory as Hopes for Democracy are Dimmed in St. Petersburg

Graham Stack for Russia Profile

For someone who loves to display a good memory for facts and figures, Russian President Vladimir Putin suffers from severe amnesia regarding one decisive episode in the history of his country: the putsch attempt of 1991. The residents of St. Petersburg who took part in resisting the putsch remember those days more accurately than Putin.

Putin himself now jogs their memory for all the wrong reasons. For the first time since the Soviet era, there is an almost complete lack of political alternatives to the current administration, and the government does all it can to maintain the status quo by controlling TV and “managing” democracy. Putin’s cricket score popularity ratings and the economy’s snowballing growth also help.

Every revolution has its Thermidor

Alexander Rahr mentions in his Putin biography “The German in the Kremlin” that, on the first day of the putsch, the mayor of St. Petersburg and Putin’s boss Anatoly Sobchak was at Boris Yeltsin’s dacha in Moscow. The KGB had orders to arrest Sobchak immediately upon his return at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, but “To their great surprise, when they arrived, they found the plane guarded by armed police units. Putin had returned from vacation and learning of Sobchak’s pending arrest, decided to defend him by all means possible, thus openly turning against his former employers.” According to Rahr, Putin arrived at the airport in person, put Sobchak in his car and drove him at breakneck speed into town, where crucial talks were held with the head of the city’s KGB and military. The negotiations resulted in the law-enforcement agencies agreeing not to intervene.

Alexander Sungurov, human rights activist and senior lecturer at the St. Petersburg branch of the Higher School of Economics, was a democratic deputy in the Leningrad Soviet at that time.

“Perhaps the most important thing in St. Petersburg,” he remembered, “was the stance of the head of police, who refused to follow orders from Moscow to disperse demonstrators. In addition, Petersburg was the only city where even the Communist Party showed some opposition to the putsch, demanding that Gorbachev be released and shown on TV so that people could see he was alive.”

Sungurov continued to work as a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly throughout the 1990s. “I remember Putin well, of course. He was a perfectly normal aide to Sobchak. He was someone we often spoke with. He’s basically a conformist, loyal to the team of which he is a member. When he was on Sobchak’s team, he was loyal to Sobchak.”

At present, Sungurov is a member of the Presidential Committee on Human Rights under the chairmanship of Ella Panfilova. “You have to understand that every revolution is followed by a downturn, every revolution has its Thermidor. That’s just a law of physics. The question is just how far it goes. The only real alternative to Putin was General Alexander Lebed, and if he had become president, things would have been a whole lot worse. So Putin taking charge of the country in the authoritarian phase following the revolution is far from the worst thing that could have happened.”

Sungurov is upbeat about the newly-elected president Dmitry Medvedev. “The main thing is to learn from mistakes and to get ready for the next democratic wave, which I believe will be coming very quickly. For the first time in a century, at least since Vladimir Lenin, the new president will be someone whose parents have a higher humanitarian education. Medvedev doesn’t belong to the KGB Corporation.”

“If Putin had stayed president it would have been like in Central Asian republics,” he added. “But he had the courage to say enough’s enough. The fact that he hasn’t completely gone, but is staying as prime minister, is also understandable. Putin himself said that he is staying ‘because I know what my friends the siloviki are planning for the country if I leave completely.’ Putin can control the siloviki and Medvedev can’t.”

“The real revolution in Russia took place when independent deputies were elected in 1990,” Sungurov concluded. “What happened during the putsch in 1991 was the equivalent of the colored revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We’ve been through all that already. We’re waiting for the next stage now.”

What I fought for I still have

Lev Apostolov, 34, now a logistics manager in the book trade, was a student in 1991 and one of the youngest to join the official defense of the Leningrad government during the Putsch.

“I went straight to Nevsky Prospekt and joined in a demonstration against the Putsch. The next day I went back and joined the official defenders of city hall. It seems funny now, but it wasn’t funny then. There were six of us in the brigade – my school friend Jan, another student, a butcher, a burglar (by his own admission). There were groups of martial arts enthusiasts and a lot of Afghan veterans.”

“We were assigned to patrol the Bolshaya Morskaya Street and to build a barricade right beside a cinema called Barrikada. So we piled up trash cans,” said Apostolov. “We were given arm bands and told not to jump on tanks if they appeared. That whole night was very tense, full of rumors. In the morning came the announcement that the putsch had failed, and they played Bob Marley on the speakers. I remember that the democrats in city hall behaved with great dignity and calm. Sobchak gave a splendid speech – fascism will not pass things of that sort.”

“Yeltsin was a hero at that time. Without any publicity at all, the democrats could gather thousands and thousands of people. Now look at the Dissenters’ March. They advertise on the radio, on Ekho Moskvy. And still no one goes. Everyone was politicized back then. Perestroika was a great time. Of course, there were huge hopes, many of which were never fulfilled, but I don’t regret anything. What I was defending then was my right to travel, to hear the music I want to, to read the books and watch the films I want to. And these rights I still have.”

With regard to the status quo, Apostolov said, “The biggest problem with Putin is that, if they are tightening the screws now, when there’s no reason to, what on earth are they going to do when the price of oil falls, when the problems start? I can’t understand why they want to turn people into idiots with this farce of an election. I took my bulletin with me from the voting booth.”

Fed up with being afraid

The day after Dmitry Medvedev took 70 percent of the vote despite his candidacy having been announced just two months previously, around 1000 members of St. Petersburg’s liberal opposition forces gathered to hold a Dissenters’ March, showing that not everyone had forgotten what democracy is about. March 3 is also the anniversary date of the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in 1917. But among those marching, memories of 1991 were more important than those of 1917.

Anatoly Sergeev, 62, who calls himself a “simple worker,” reminisced about how different it was all back then. “I went to St. Isaak’s Square and joined a brigade of official defenders. We had no weapons. We built barricades. In contrast to today, there were no police trying to stop us. At night we then sat on the rooftops by the square drinking tea. There was fear in the air. But in the end nothing happened.”

“It was a great mistake to let the Soviet Union collapse,” Sergeev argued. “They should have kept the Union – there was a majority in favor of it at the referendum. No one had permission to break up the USSR. The individual republics creating their own central banks out of the Soviet state bank drove the last nail into the coffin. I still like Gorbachev, but he should have been tougher. Sobchak was a thief; the only good thing he did was to rename Leningrad Petersburg. And he acted bravely during the Putsch.”

Turning to contemporary politics, Anatoly pulls no punches. “Putin’s just a puppet, other people are pulling the strings. He has done a lot, but not for me. How can you live on a pension? I have a bad heart and need medicine. I had to pay for my daughter to study somehow. And prices keep rising.”

Despite straitened circumstances, Anatoly is proud of having resisted the putsch. “I don’t regret taking part at all. I didn’t even think twice back then. It’s simply that at some stage you get fed up with being afraid. Why don’t they give us proper elections today? I would have voted for Ivanov, the defense minister, if he had stood. He’s a strong figure. Why did they not let him stand? Why did it have to be Medvedev?”

A child of the revolution

Lena, 46, a school librarian and another participant in the March 3 Dissenters’ March in St. Petersburg, said that she had supported the resistance to the putsch with all her heart. The only reason she did not join herself was having her first child.

“Of course, it was all terribly frightening, the putsch I mean,” Lena remembered. “But I saw the people who were involved before and after. Their faces were alive, that’s all I can say. Their eyes were bright. Look around you now at the faces here. People are awake. Look at the faces of the police. Completely dead.”

“That’s why I came here,” she said. “Of course I know it’s no use, that no one will pay attention. But I come here to feel myself a person, to feel myself honest. These elections were not honest.”

Asked if her daughter knows about the Putsch, Lena answered: “Of course, she’s aware of it all. Much more than the other kids her age are. She’s not here today, but I know she’s on our side. Her time will come.”

Petersburgers underwhelmed by “Kinder Surprise” Medvedev

Graham Stack for business new europe

As universally expected, Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, strongly backed by incumbent President Vladimir Putin and enjoying a lion’s share of media coverage, won 70.2% of the vote in the presidential election with almost 100% counted. Distant second came Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov with 17.77%, followed by nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky with 9.37% and rank outsider liberal Andrei Bogdanov with just 1.2%.

Both Putin and Medvedev hail from St Petersburg, and the city shows the extent to which Putin has reshaped the Russian political landscape. Once a strong hold of Russian liberalism, with liberal parties like SPS and Yabloko taking 30-40% of the vote in the 1990s, now the pro-Putin United Russia party enjoys a majority in the city’s parliament, and liberals lead a marginal existence.

At the same time, St Petersburg has shaped the new Russian political landscape: Not only Putin and Medvedev, but the majority of Putin’s Kremlin team worked in the city’s administration in the 1990s.

Like Putin, 42-year-old Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s new president, is a son of Russia’s cultural capital. He was born, grew up, studied and worked in the city until the Anatoly Sobchak administration in which Putin was vice mayor lost the municipal elections in 1996. Medvedev’s wife is also from the city.

However, this does not guarantee him the affection of his fellow Petersburgers, although his backing from Vladimir Putin guaranteed him their vote. Many on the historical streets of the city centre on election day March 2 were skeptical about Medvedev’s leadership qualities and mocked his lack of charisma. In voting for Medvedev, they did not vote for the person, but for stability, and for Putin.

“Yes, we voted for Medvedev, but we don’t like him” said Olga, 35, an architect, and her friend Masha, 27, agreed. “We’ve never seen much of him, and he doesn’t come across positively on TV. He’s wooden. I voted for stability, and because there’s no alternative to Medvedev.” Both also agreed: “We liked Putin much better, but the law rules out more than two terms.”

When asked if they considered Russia a democracy, they both laughed. “Perhaps in a relative sense,” said Olga. “We’ve a long way to go before we’re a democracy,” said Masha. But both are proud that the third Russian president is a Petersburger.

“I will vote for Medvedev because of Putin” said Leonara Kononova, 71, “but he hasn’t really done anything or said anything independently.”

Lena, 25, who works in radiophysics, said she had not decided who to vote for. For Lena as well, Medvedev suffers by comparison with Putin, “I don’t like the way he speaks – he can’t construct proper sentences. It’s always pleasant to listen to Putin speaking. He answers quickly and in clear sentences.” Lena’s biggest concern is the state of science in the country. “So many friends leave the country after studying to do their PhDs abroad. They get offered good grants and jobs.”

Almost all those voting for Medvedev would have preferred to see Putin stay – although, as most added, he is not exactly going either, since he is set to become prime minister. “Putin should have stayed,” said 24-year-old Svetlana, selling souvenirs at a stand. “We’ve got used to him.”

“No I don’t like Medvedev particularly, but Putin is staying anyway as prime minister, so it’s OK,” said 22-year-old Dima. “The main thing is for the authorities to observe people’s rights,” said his girlfriend Sascha.

“We’d have liked Putin to stay” said Marat and Kamilla, 22 and 21. Marat, a manager, added that, “the most important thing is that there is no default again.”

Some who support Putin voted or were considering voting against Medvedev. Tatiana, 55, a nurse by profession, said that she had voted for Zyuganov. “Medvedev is too young. What’s he ever done? He is like a Kinder Surprise.” But her sister Elena, a librarian, said she voted for Medvedev because of Putin.

Another pair of sisters, teachers Alexandra and Nastya in their mid-20s, said they approved of Putin, “who’s going to stay anyway,” but they had voted for Bogdanov, the long-haired outsider pro-EU candidate. “He’s an alternative kind of guy. They were showing Medvedev on TV all the time, it was unbearable,” said Nastya.

Ironically, however, most analysts agree that the Bogdanov candidacy was initiated by the Kremlin to increase the number of candidates. Alexandra and Nasty hoped for an end to bureaucratic arbitrariness in Russia.

Even a member of Edinaya Rossiya, 35-year–old neurologist Mikhail, had little positive to say about Medvedev’s personality. He said he thought it was good to separate politics from personality, and said he was simply voting for his party’s candidate. The greatest current danger he sees is for Russia to get “dizzy with success” and overplay its hand on the international stage.

Irina 62, was one of the few with something positive to say about Medvedev: “He is young and clever, and the partnership with Putin will be strong.”

Arkady, 32, a rock musician, was positive about Medvedev because of his taste in music – Medvedev is a Deep Purple fan. As to Russia’s international status, Arkady believed that “countries will start respecting us when we learn to respect each other.”

“Russia’s biggest problem is high prices for oil,” he said ironically, and no, he does not consider Russia a democracy.

The protest vote

Vyacheslav, a 70-year-old post office worker whose vote went to the Communist Party’s Zyuganov, is one of the few to offer sharp criticism of Putin. He was outraged by Putin’s recent statement that, “whether you like it or not, we need to raise the salaries of civil servants many times over.”

“He won’t raise pensions, but he brazenly declares he’s going to raise his own salary a number of times over, whether we like it or not!” Vyacheslav said that Russia is “at the most to be only 50% democratic.”

Alla, 55 years old, voted for Zyuganov because of his policy of nationalization of natural resources, a point mentioned by other communist voters.

Alexei, 18, said he intended to vote for anyone except Medvedev and the United Russia party, and had voted for nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the Duma elections in December. He pointed to inflation and pensions as the main problems in Russia, and also a lack of national pride.

The most damning criticism came from those who refused to vote, because they held the vote to be pre-decided. “It’s all a farce, it’s all arranged,” said 40-year-old engineer Yevgeny, who nevertheless speaks positively about Putin as honest and hardworking. “The country will only change when the relationship between people changes, when people start to think of others instead of just themselves,” he philosophised.

Sveta, 27, a doctor, and Seryozha, 45, a technician, were also not intending to vote, because they hold it all for a charade. They even denied that Putin and Medvedev had anything to do with St Petersburg. “They’ve been in Moscow for so long,” Seryozha said. “Moscow has swallowed them up like a swamp.”

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?