Abstract
The elimination of the Communist Party at the beginning of the 1990s foreshadowed a new path to power in post-communist Russia.1 In the first years after the Soviet collapse, it appeared that patterns of political elite recruitment in Russia might parallel those found in many democratic countries, where parliament and private business serve as training grounds for those assuming leading executive posts. By the beginning of the Putin era, however, it was clear that careers in state administration — rather than elective politics or private industry — had become both the dominant path to political power and an important training ground for business elites.2 This is not, of course, just a Russian pattern. As Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman observed, ‘although most countries of the Third World today have organizations labeled “legislatures”, “parties”, and “bureaucracies”, in few of these systems is power actually divided between elected politicians and career administrators’.3
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Notes
On political recruitment in the Soviet era, see T.H. Rigby (1968), Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Grey Hodnett (1978), Leadership in the Soviet National Republics: A Quantitative Study of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press)
Bohdan Harasymiw (1984), Political Elite Recruitment in the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s)
T.H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw (eds) (1983), Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: Allen & Unwin).
Joel D. Aberbach, Robert D. Putnam, and Bert A. Rockman (1981), Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p.3. Unlike Russia, in several East European countries ‘the introduction of multi-party competition after the change of regime inevitably destroyed this cosy relationship between politicians and bureaucrats’.
Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling (2004), ‘Civil service reform in post-communist Europe: The bumpy road to depoliticisation’, West European Politics, XXVII, 1, 79.
On pantouflage in France, see Pierre Birnbaum (1982), The Heights of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Jeanne Siwek-Pouydesseau (1969), Le Personnel de Direction des Ministeres (Paris: Armand Colin)
Philippe Bezes (2001), ‘Defensive versus offensive approaches to administrative reform in France (1988–1997): The leadership dilemmas of French prime ministers’, Governance, XXIV, 1, 99–132
Luc Rouban, ‘The senior civil service in France’, in Edward C. Page and Vincent Wright (1999), Bureaucratic Elites in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Top Officials (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.66–87.
C Wright Mills (1956), The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press). The risks of a revolving door between the public and private sectors became apparent in the recent global financial crisis. According to two critics of pantouflage in the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): ‘[i]f you work for the enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it’. Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, ‘The end of the financial world as we know it’, New York Times, 3 January 2009.
Fred Riggs, ‘Bureaucrats and political development: A paradoxical view’, in Joseph LaPalombara (1963), Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p.130.
Peter Rutland, ‘Introduction: Business and the state in Russia’, in Peter Rutland (ed.) (2001), Business and the State in Contemporary Russia (Boulder: Westview), p.25.
S. Peregudov, N. Lapina, and I. Semenenko (1999), Gruppa interesov i rossiiskoe gosudarstvo (Moscow: Editorial URSS)
cited in Andrew Yorke (2003), ‘Business and politics in Krasnoyarsk Krai’, Europe-Asia Studies, LV, 2, 259.
Gerald Easter, ‘Building fiscal capacity’, in Timothy J. Colton and Stephen Holmes (2006), The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), p.40.
See also Stefan Hedlund (2005), Russian Path Dependence (London: Routledge).
Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White (2005), ‘The rise of the Russian business elite’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, XXXVIII, 3, 300.
On the perception of state-business relations among leaders of Russian firms, see Timothy Frye (2002), ‘Capture or exchange? Business lobbying in Russia’, Europe-Asia Studies, LIV, 7, 1017–36. Although it is true, as Frye argues, that the relationship between state officials and businessmen is closer to that of elite exchange than state capture, the term exchange suggests a rough parity of partners that is fading in the Putin era.
For a view that emphasizes the pre-eminence of state officials in this relationship, see Andrei Yakovlev (2006), ‘The evolution of business-state interaction in Russia: From state capture to business capture?’, Europe-Asia Studies, LVIII, 7, 1033–56.
Eugene Huskey, ‘The politics-administration nexus in postcommunist Russia’, in Don K. Rowney and Eugene Huskey (2009), Russian Bureaucracy and the State. Officialdom from Alexander III to Vladimir Putin (London: Palgrave Macmillan). In his annual address to parliament in 2008, President Medvedev himself recognized, at least implicitly, the dangers of rule by the apparatchiki when he noted that ‘our state apparatus is the largest employer, the most active publisher, the best producer, its own judge, its own party, and, in the end, its own public […sam sebe sud, sam sebe partii i sam sebe v konechnom schete narod]. Such a system is absolutely ineffective and creates only one thing — corruption. It produces legal nihilism in the publie… [and] it impedes the development of institutions of an innovative economy and democracy.’ http://kremlin.ru/appears/2008/ 11/05/1349_type63372type63374type63381type82634_208749.shtml.
See, for example, Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White (2006), ‘From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite’, Europe-Asia Studies, LVIII, 5, 711–33
David Lane and Cameron Ross (1999), The Transition from Communism to Capitalism: Ruling Elites from Gorbachev to Yeltsin (New York: St. Martin’s).
Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White (2003), ‘Putin’s militocracy’, Post-Soviet Affairs, XIX, 4, 289–306.
For a critique of the some of the methods and conclusions in Kryshtanovskaya and White’s work, see Bettina Renz (2006), ‘Putin’s militocracy? An alternative interpretation of Siloviki in contemporary Russian politics’, Europe-Asia Studies, LVIII, 6, 903–24
Sharon Werning Rivera and David Rivera (2006), ‘The Russian elite under Putin: Militocratic or bourgeois’, Post-Soviet Affairs, XXII, 2, 125–44.
T.H. Rigby (1999), ‘New top elites for old in Russian polities’, British Journal of Political Science, XXIX, 2, 337. By natural heirs Rigby meant those persons who could have been expected to have been promoted from below under the logic of the old regime.
For earlier assessments of the intersection between the state and business, see Kryshtanovskaya and White, ‘Rise of Russian business elite’, 293–307; Peter Rutland (2001), Business and the State in Contemporary Russia (Boulder: Westview); Gerald Easter, ‘Building fiscal capacity’
Juliet Johnson (2000), A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
On the abuse of office by Chubais and other ‘liberal reformers’, see Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski (2001), The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace).
An example of the latter may be found in Iulia Shevchenko (2004), The Central Government of Russia: From Gorbachev to Putin (Aldershot: Ashgate).
Kryshtanovskaya and White, ‘Rise of Russian business elite’, 306. On the expanding role of the state in personnel matters in the private sector, see Eugene Huskey (2004), ‘Nomenklatura lite? The cadres reserve in Russian public administration’, Problems of Post-Communism, LI, 2, 30–9.
Ivan Szelenyi and Szonja Szelenyi (1995), ‘Circulation or reproduction of elites during the postcommunist transformation of eastern Europe: Introduction’, Theory and Society, XXIV, 5, 631, 663.
On this latter issue, see Andreas Heinrich (2008), ‘Under the Kremlin’s thumb: Does increased state control in the Russian gas sector endanger European energy security?’, Europe-Asia Studies, LX, 9, 1539–55.
James E. Rauch and Peter B. Evans (2000), ‘Bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic performance in less developed countries’, Journal of Public Economics, LXXV, 1, 49–71. On the role of merit in the hiring and promotion of contemporary Russian officials, see Vladimir Magun, Vladimir Gimpelson, and Robert Brym, ‘Hiring and promoting young civil servants: Weberian ideals and Russian realities’, in Rowney and Huskey, Russian Bureaucracy and the State.
Michael Burton, Richard Gunther, John Higley, ‘Elites and democratic consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe: An Overview’, in John Higley and Richard Gunther (eds) (1992), Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.346–7.
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Huskey, E. (2010). Pantouflage à la russe: The Recruitment of Russian Political and Business Elites. In: Fortescue, S. (eds) Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230293144_8
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