Kamil Galeev Profile picture
May 28 26 tweets 10 min read
Why Russia is more fragile than you think

Russia presents a paradox. It looks robust. Still, it tends to collapse from time to time to everyone's surprise. Why? Russia tends to avoid small manageable risks thus accumulating unmanageable ones. Some of them are purely biological🧵 Image
What has always puzzled me about the Russian studies is this weird obsession with the "high culture" and the "people in power". Kremlenologists, Sovietologists & their modern followers tend to focus on everything high status. In other words they focus on the oldies Image
Everything high status is dead. By the time people climb up the hierarchy they're usually old. Yeah they hold power or symbolic capital and gonna hold it for awhile. But soon they're gonna die. Everything they loved, believed in, stood for will die with them and nobody will care Image
I don't claim that studying the high culture or the people in Kremlin is useless. I just argue that its importance is exaggerated. All you can learn from it is the *present state of affairs*. But it gonna change and it will be changing one funerals at a time. Much like science Image
Imagine you are a Kremlenologist. You studied the upper nomenklatura for all of your life. Indeed those guys occupied all the positions of power and wouldn't allow anyone else up. Of course you should study those living gods and base your prognoses on your Very Important Findings Image
A narrow clique can take power and not allow anyone up. But they're still mortal. If your rulers are all from the same generation, it means they'll be dying nearly simultaneously. In 1982-1985 three Soviet leaders died one by one. Because they belonged to the same generation Image
Rulers die, people laugh. Funerals of the Party bosses were called "races on the gun carriages". It looked like a contest who of them will pass away sooner. Soviet people found it absolutely hilarious. The frequency of those funerals harmed the prestige of Soviet power immensely Image
The speed of socio-economic-political changes in the USSRussia after 1985 may look shocking. It looks less shocking though, if we consider that it was largely the generational change. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were both born in 1931. 20 years younger than all their predecessors Image
If a clique belonging to the same generation occupies positions of power and doesn't allow anyone up, it makes system way more fragile in the long run. You can't prevent changes. You can only delay them for as long as you live. But once you die, there will be an avalanche Image
You can either rotate the ruling elite gradually retiring the oldies and promoting youngsters. Or you can keep the same oldies as long as you can. In the second case your system seems more stable but in fact becomes more fragile. Instead of many small crises you'll get a huge one Image
Putin sticks to the second strategy. Consider the civil service:

2013 - compulsory retirement age for top civil servants increased from 60 to 70

2022 - Putin introduced a bill to abolish the compulsory retirement age for top civil servants. Now they can serve indefinitely Image
Now consider the army:

2014 - compulsory retirement age for upper generals & admirals increased by 5 years, to 65 y

2021 - retirement age for upper generals & admirals increased to 70. It also stopped being compulsory. After they turn 70 Putin still can renew their contracts Image
We see the same gerontocratic pattern with various Siloviki agencies. Just a couple of examples:

2019 - Putin increases upper age limit for police generals from 60 to 65

2021 - Putin increases upper age limit for prison system generals from 60 to 65 Image
This example shows how Putin thinks:

2019 - Putin lifted the compulsory retirement age for rectors of two most important universities: Moscow and St Petersburg. Now he can renew their contracts indefinitely

2020 - Putin increased the retirement age for other rectors to 70 Image
We can see how Putin thinks. Rectors of unimportant universities might have some compulsory retirement age. But rectors of two most prestigious ones should remain in power as long as they breathe. The more important a position is, the more should avoid the cadre changes Image
That is a very important factor. Russia is not only gerontocratic, it's also unevenly gerontocratic. Putin is reluctant to make cadre changes on truly important positions of power, such as the Security Council or Presidential Administration. So they're more gerontocratic Image
And yet, Putin is much more willing to make cadre changes on less important positions, especially in the province. This makes the gubernatorial corpse the youngest strata of the ruling elite with the average age of only 51. That created a huge asymmetry in Russian elite Image
Courtiers vs barons dichotomy shapes the elite dynamics in pretty much every gigantic organisation, including the Russian Federation. If the regime is strong, courtiers have the upper hand. If it's weak, it will be the other way around as it was in the 1990s Image
Under the centralised regime of Putin, the courtier position are way more lucrative and important. Putin cares about who is a courtier much more than he cares about who is a baron. So he doesn't rotate them too much. He doesn't care so much about the barons and rotates them Image
Putin's cadre policy creates an age asymmetry among the courtiers and the barons. He doesn't rotate people on the important courtier positions, so they're occupied by the frailing gerontocracy. He rotates people on unimportant baronial positions. So they're much younger Image
Putin's reluctance to let the oldies go makes Russia a country with a very old leadership in a stark contrast to much younger leaders of Ukraine. In a sense, current Z-war is not only an ethnic, cultural or political but also a generational conflict Image
The same however can be said about the Russian internal elite dynamics. They're characterised by the generational difference between the barons and the courtiers. Right now this asymmetry doesn't have too important consequences as the barons can't renegotiate the power balance Image
The gerontocratic character of the Russian courtiers makes them way weaker in the long run. Modern medicine can delay a next round of races on the gun carriages but not for long. That will create a window of opportunities for a major renegotiation of the power balance. End of🧵 Image
Further reading:

You can see a very nice article of the age dynamics within the Russian elite here by Istories. It has a lot of data and infographics, but unfortunately they didn't translate it to English. If you want, you can use a Google Translate

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More from @kamilkazani

4h
Regarding the video with a castration of a Ukrainian POW, comments from the Russian ДШРГ Русич may give some context to the story:

"I have seen up to ten such clips. They're usually published 1-2 years after the events though to make perpetrators more difficult to identify" ImageImage
Русич (Rusich) is a Russian Neonazi group fighting in Ukraine. They're reportedly closely associated with the Wagner mercenary company Image
A Rusich fighter who told he had seen "up to ten such clips" is Evgeny Rasskazov (Topaz). Here you see his post commemorating Hitler's birthday:

"Today is birthday of out comrade who became example for many of us... his Word and Deed inspires us to beat the Ukro-Bolshevik scum" Image
Read 14 tweets
Jul 27
Die Fürstenstadt

There was a Soviet joke:

- What is long, green and smells with sausage?
- Moscow-Tver train

Why? Well, under the USSR provincials had to go shopping to Moscow. Their shops had no food, often very literally. Today we'll learn an expression "supply category"🧵
Under the centrally planned economy it was the state which supplied food to the localities. It would assign each city one of four "supply categories" determining how much food there will be on shelves. Moscow was supplied far better than anyone while cities like Tver - horribly
Provincial Soviet cities of the lower supply categories might have no food on the shelves at all. Sometimes very literally. Sometimes they would have only the scraps from the table of the higher status city: like some algae, or the disgusting paste "Ocean"
Read 26 tweets
Jul 25
I find this line of argumentation illustrative of the general state of Russian discourse, whether "patriotic" or "liberal". Everything Turkic occupies the same place in the Russian debates as everything Irish in the Imperial British. The Inner Other and the source of all the evil
Reading the Russian-Ukrainian debates with both sides accusing each other of racial impurity and having too many Steppe admixtures or influences, I noticed that their argumentation is mirroring each other. See this Russian nationalist material for example sputnikipogrom.com/history/15934/…
This mutuality and almost exact symmetry of Russian-Ukrainian accusations reminds me of a brilliant thread on the British rule over the Ionian Isles. Bach then the discourse was similar. Brits and Greeks were constantly accusing each other of Irishness
Read 14 tweets
Jul 24
Russian bureaucracy is *massive*. It's also diverse. Judging from my observations, it's less integrated than let's say the apparatus of the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Different agencies have different cultures and operate by different rules. Avoid sweeping generalisations (not🧵)
I see a very common attitude among the Russian pro-war community. It can be summarised this way:

"We expected dumb and incompetent bureaucrats to destroy our economy. But our glorious army would prevail against all odds. It turned out we were wrong. It's the other way around"
Now much of the Z-community argues that they greatly overestimated the Russian army (and the military apparatus). It's very, very much worse than anyone thought before. But they underestimated the economic bureaucracy. Which is very much better than they could have thought
Read 22 tweets
Jul 23
No. Describing Russian regime as "kleptocracy" is misrepresentation. It's not technically false, just absurdly reductionist. Let's be honest, if Putinism was *entirely* about stealing it would not be able to wage wars or produce armaments. And it produces hella lots of them
Keep in mind that public rhetorics work according to the rhetorical logic. Public position doesn't have to be factually accurate, it has to be rhetorically advantageous for it to work. They talk about "corruption" so much because it's rhetorically advantageous. That's it
When you don't have a positive agenda/vision of future or it's too hideous, you talk about "corruption". Examples - Lukashenko or Yeltsin. "Anti-corruption fight" is an ideal topic for a power hungry politician. Because talking about corruption = avoiding the actual conversation
Read 19 tweets
Jul 23
Kremlin may not have a grey cardinal. But it has a bald engineer. The Kinder Egg is a major architect of Putinism. In 1998 he made Putin the FSB Chief. In 2000s he dismantled the regional autonomy imposing the centralised rule. Now he manages Putin's domestic policy and Ukraine🧵
Sergey Kirienko was born as Sergey Israitel in a mixed Russian-Jewish family. After the divorce his mother changed his surname from father's "Israitel" to her own "Kirienko". That could be a pragmatic decision. A boy with a Slavic name would have better career chances in the USSR
In childhood Kirienko lived with his mom in subtropical Sochi. Here he started the bureaucrat career as a Komsomol manager (комсорг) of his high school class. NB: the role of Komsomol in Soviet to post-Soviet transition is underrated. Komsomol management were its main benefactors
Read 35 tweets

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