Who's In Charge In The Kremlin ?

There are plenty of troubling signs that Putin's inevitable loss of influence over the course of events in Russian politics is already well underway. Divisions within Russia's party of power are deepening. The rivalries those divisions have created now threaten the country's political development, investment climate, and economic growth, and the Russian president seems unable to do much about it. Putin is still in the driver's seat. But, to paraphrase former presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin, he may already have discovered that the steering wheel is no longer connected to the engine. Putin's loss of control arouses real anxiety in those looking for clear policy direction in Russia, because there has been an enormous consolidation of power in the Kremlin since the 1998 financial crisis, in which chaos in the Russian government led to a default on international debt. The more powerful the vehicle, the more dangerous it is that no one person seems able to steer it. As elbows begin to fly heading toward Russia's 2008 presidential election, battle lines have been drawn inside the Kremlin and within Putin's United Russia Party. An increasingly acrimonious fight between the so-called technocrats and the siloviki (former and active officers of the military and security agencies) is spilling into the street and blocking both needed reforms and a sense of strategic direction. At the moment, the Kremlin's insiders have limited their initiatives to a kind of "anti-policy"—the scuttling (or gutting) of any initiative that might limit state control of Russia's politics and its resources. Government priorities now shift fluidly within the Kremlin, even as Russia's problems begin to mount. The battle between the Kremlin's technocrats and siloviki is most publicly visible in the jockeying for position between Russia's energy "state champions," Gazprom and Rosneft. Technocrats, like Dmitri Medvedev and Alexei Miller, control Gazprom. Former security officers, like Igor Sechin and Sergei Bogdanchikov, are in charge at Rosneft. The siloviki won a recent battle by blocking a merger of the two companies. But the technocrats overcame siloviki obstructionist tactics to swallow up another oil firm, Sibneft. The ongoing rivalry adds to an uncertain investment climate and undermines the government's ability to clarify rules of the road for would-be foreign investors and to coordinate efforts to increase efficiency in the energy sector. In fact, a worrying pattern has emerged: Putin issues statements intended to clarify official policy, and rival Kremlin factions quickly take actions that undermine his credibility. http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj06-1/bremmer.html

Note: http://www.worldpolicy....