Adnkronos (Adnkronos) –
Vladimir Putin turns 74. The season of muscular celebrations is long gone, along with Sergei Shoigu (67, in Siberia, on the Yenisey River), the 63-year-old together in Sochi for an ice hockey match, former champions on the field. The Russian president stands alone, in photos, commanding an increasingly fractious country and power structure, despite the unity proclaimed even in the name of the "presidential" party and reiterated in the President's request to Russians, so that his elite will understand.
Faced with no longer unlimited resources being sucked up by the war in Ukraine, and a succession that no one speaks about openly but is very much on everyone's minds in the nomenklatura, or rather, in the nobility, considering the 'young princes' projected into positions of power after the 2024 presidential elections, each faction is trying to occupy portions of territory from the others, a case in point being the recent arrest for large-scale drug dealing of political scientist Alexander Kynev (a siloviki over 70, against the political machine coordinated by the Kremlin's deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiryenko, 64).
The young princes (Boris Kovalchuk, 48, president of the Court of Auditors; his peer Dmitry Patrushev, deputy prime minister with responsibility for agriculture; Putin's cousin Anna Tsivileva, 54, deputy defense minister with responsibility for veterans and wife of the energy minister, among them all) have consolidated positions of power without experience or preparation alongside their fathers who have not yet left the scene (with the exception of former defense minister Shoigu, 71, in the comfortable retirement home of the group of permanent members of the Security Council, alongside former prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev, 61, who was also briefly and distantly mentioned as a possible successor to Putin).
Despite his age and the ailments he reportedly carries on his shoulders, Putin has been present on the public stage like never before, ahead of last month's legislative elections. His well-oiled campaign received a jolt from the unexpected summer surge in interest in the previously insignificant Yabloko party.
The President repeated the call for unity until the day before the polls opened.
With Putin's departure, when it happens, the senior elite who have accompanied him since the Leningrad/St. Petersburg days should also leave, if only for age reasons—the siloviki of the lakeside dacha complex on weekends, along with their families, from whom the leading figures in economics and politics during the Putin years branched out and from whom they drew support, or, conversely, had to contend. The gerontocrats (Security Council Secretary Alexander Bortnikov, 74; SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin, 71; Investigative Committee Director Alexander Bastrykin, 72; National Guard Commander Viktor Zolotov, 72; and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gersasimov, 70) have failed to groom their successors, just as Putin has failed to choose his own.
Political scientist Julian Waller of the Center for Naval Analyses and George Washington University, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs—one of the most interesting analyses of possible future scenarios for Russia—recalled what happened after Stalin's death, but denounced the generational shift that seems to have sidelined those in their 50s and 60s in favor of the next generation as a risk to an orderly transition after Putin's departure. A challenge to stability could come from them.
"There are important echoes" of what happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death (at 74, ed.) "in what unfolds before us," Waller emphasizes in the Council on Foreign Relations magazine. "As happened during the political transition after Joseph Stalin's death, the decisions and agreements of a small group of prominent figures will determine who takes power." Unlike then, those who will be part of this 'selective group' will be much older and less energetic, leaving open, along with a frustrated generation of excluded people and the unpreparedness of young upstarts, the possibility of a disorderly transition. "It's a recipe for potential chaos that can lead to missteps during the dance, which must be precise, of coordinating a transition."
In any case, rather than seeking the identity of the stone guest, it is perhaps now useful to try to identify those within the leadership group who might be eligible to join the select group, which is only accessible to those with institutional authority and a significant personal network. The pool of names to draw from includes the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament, the Prime Minister, the Director of the FSB, the Kremlin Chief of Staff, the Secretary of the National Security Council, the Defense Minister, and the Secretary of State. For years, 53-year-old Aleksei Dyumin has been rumored as a possible successor. But the game is on. And so is the fight.
international/foreign
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