The Temporary Return of Putin Co.

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Snapshot

The Hinge that Holds Russia Together

Vladislav Inozemtsev

The Russian state is devoid of institutions that can exist outside of the personalized power structure that Vladimir Putin has built inside the Kremlin. And that is a foremost reason he's returning to the presidency.

Snapshot

Putin's Return and Washington's Reset With Russia

Andrew Kuchins

With Vladimir Putin now set to retake the Russian presidency, many are arguing that Washington's reset with Moscow is in jeopardy. Not so, as a rising China, cheap oil, and a need for international partners will force the Kremlin to play nice with the Obama administration.

The ruling tandem of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev was a clever trick that allowed Putin to keep his hold on Russian political life without violating the Russian constitution, which forbids serving more than two consecutive presidential terms. At the same time, it made it possible for Medvedev to lure the West and Russian liberals with hopes for reform.

But the ruling security-services clan, which has usurped power in Russia over the last decade, no longer needs the tandem. Tough times are ahead. The global economic crisis has not spared Russia, public confidence in the authorities is declining, corruption is eating its way through the entire state machine, and social discontent is on the rise.

The ruling group -- which includes Putin's former KGB associates, colleagues from his days working for former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, friends from the dacha cooperative Ozero ("Lake" in Russian) near St. Petersburg, and partners in various business projects from the early 1990s -- need a forceful and experienced leader.

At the moment, Putin is the most effective leader in the group of security officers turned bureaucrats and personifies its power. But self-preservation could force the elite to choose a new figure for this role. If there is one thing that the current regime has learned, it is how to change masks and mutate when necessary.

Above all, Putin's return to the Kremlin demonstrates the undisguised desire of members of the ruling clique to run the country for life, gradually transferring control of assets and power to their children and relatives. (In just one example of how this process operates, Sergei Ivanov, Jr., the son of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, was appointed head of the board of one of the country's most powerful banks, Rosselchoz, which is chaired by Dmitry Patrushev, the son of Nikolai Patrushev, the chief of the Russian Security Council.) What is emerging in Russia today is a unique kind of neo-monarchy of Janissaries eager to find a way to perpetuate their power and their families' positions.

The Putin corporation has created a hybrid of the Soviet and czarist power bases, revolving around a trinity of personalized power, total control over assets, and neo-imperialist aspirations, to preserve a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet era. Putin and his cronies, however, have added one additional element that is all their own. Representatives of the security agencies rule the country -- an unprecedented state of affairs in Russia, where they had always been under control of civilian authorities. Today, Russia's government is in the hands not only of the Soviet Union's most secretive agency, the KGB, known for its repressive methods and suspicious mindset, but of people from its middle and provincial levels, known for being particularly archaic and primitive in their outlook. They rose to the top by chance, simply because they were friends or acquaintances of Putin, himself a mediocre KGB officer picked by Boris Yeltsin as a successor because his grey personality seemed to Yeltsin the very embodiment of loyalty. Once chosen, Putin used the same criterion in promoting his favorites to the upper echelons of the Russian bureaucracy.