This presentation is made by Andrei Kolesnikov. Presented during the Development Day conference 2019.

1. Putin’s Children: Who Will Rule
Russia After 2024?
New demands/challenges and the
response of Russian state
Andrei Kolesnikov | November, 2019

2. Social framework: old-new fears
• Fear of the world war - increase from 40% to
53% (from 2017 to 2019)
• Fear of the political regime's tightening - from
17 to 35%
• Fear of the mass repressions - from 21 to 39%
• Fear of the lawlessness - from 29 to 50%
• Fear of the criminal attacks - from 29 to 33%
• Respect for Stalin – 70% (March, 2019)

3. Economic framework: not only GDP
• 5th year of real incomes decrease (first half 2019 -
minors 1,3%; Q3 – 3% growth - inexplicable)
• A share of incomes from business-activity (2018) -
the lowest rate in the post-soviet period - 7,5%
• From property - 4,9% (lower than in 2013-2017)
• A share of social payments - the highest in the post-
soviet period - 19,4%

4. Political framework
• Safe transfer of power for political, administrative,
and business elites—not the modernization of the country—
is what concerns the Russian establishment the most in the
period between 2018 and 2024.
• Strong state involvement in economic, political, and
business processes is an important characteristic of the
system. The “civilian” and technocratic elites are tasked
with maintaining the sustainable state of the system, while
the security elites are to set its political and ideological
trajectory.
.

5. Political framework-2
• The state is the main actor and employer in
Russia. The state needs a new technocratic
elite, and its goal is to maintain efficiency of
the political system at an acceptable level. The
basic idea of the technocratic transition is to
change government personnel without
changing (improving) government institutions
and introducing political democracy.

6. 2018-2019: the fall, rebound, new plateau
Approval rating, Levada center
Do you approve the activities of V. Putin?
• 04.2018 – 82%
• 05.2018 – 79%
• 07.2018 – 67%
• 10-12.2018 – 66%
• 01-03.2019 – 64%
• 10.2019 – 70%

7. Voting
July 2019
as a percentage of all those surveyed
• Putin – 40%, Zhirinovsky – 3%, Grudinin -3%,
Zyuganov – 1%,
• Navalny – 1%.
as a percentage of those surveyed who were ready to
vote at the time of the survey:
• Putin – 54%, Zhirinovsky – 4%, Grudinin – 4,
Zyuganov – 1%, Navalny – 1%

8. IN YOUR OPINION, WHY DO MANY PEOPLE TRUST VLADIMIR
PUTIN?
People are
convinced that
Putin
successfully and
appropriately
deals with the
country’s
problems
People hope
that, in the
future, Putin will
be able to deal
with the country’s
problems
People don’t
know who else
they could rely
on
Difficult
to say
Jul. 19 27 24 43 7
Nov. 16 28 39 29 4

9. Who can propose a plan of changes
(Carnegie and Levada survey, 2019)

10. Does Russia need changes (Carnegie and Levada
survey, 2019)

11. Changes are possible in a case…

12. What is better: state interventionism or
laissez-faire approach?

13. State’s response to the challenges-1
• More socially biased agenda – pouring money
into the social sphere
• Mirroring the civil society, creating imitative
and controlled civil society institutions – this is
an answer to the grass-roots modernization
and reconsolidation of the real civil society on
the negative ground (primarily a resistance to
the urban reconstruction, landfill problems
etc.)

14. State’s response to the challenges-2.
Technocratic Transition: Basic Characteristics
• The new technocratic elites are not required to be
involved in making political decisions.
• These technocrats are accountable to the upper
political class only, and never to the public.
• Logic of technocratic transition: appointing new
technocrats at the mid-level of the government
pyramid will gradually impact the appointments at
the top.
• Absolute political loyalty is more important than
technocratic efficiency.

15. Digitization: Central Planning 2.0
• Digitization replaces substantive modernization and
becomes a top priority.
• Creating more automatic infrastructure is a
technocratic rather than substantive goal. A formal
bureaucratic approach to job performance goals
dominates (i.e., “how many kilometers of cable must
be completed”).
• The personalization of initiatives advanced by certain
government officials.

16. Digitization: Central Planning 2.0
• Today, the state is the main buyer of Russian IT
products. If the Digital Economy program is
implemented, IT presence in the competitive private
sector economy will decline.
• Digitization has a political aspect: the authorities are
prepared to use “digital dictatorship” for monitoring
and controlling the public.
• Nevertheless, digitization may help to reduce the
number of civil service bureaucrats, may solve the
problem of excessive control.

17. The Limitations of Technocratic Transition
• An average member of today’s elite is a “little Putin” of sorts.
His administrative decisions and political behavior are guided
by the question “What would Putin do in my place?”
• Both domestic and foreign business communities have no
serious reasons to believe that state elites harbor some
modernization aspirations.
• Russian politics, including the country’s economic policy, has
little room for the modernization coalition that Dmitry
Medvedev talked about during his presidency. Instead, the
counter-modernization “coalition” and support for the status
quo.

18. Response to the challenges-3: the shift away
from informational dictatorship to repressions

19. 2018-2024 and beyond: authoritarian modernization
vs “Francoization”. This dilemma is no longer relevant