June 2015: Russian president Vladimir Putin shakes hands with his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov. Pavel Golovkin / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.True to the informal tradition that August brings surprises in Russia, on the 12th it was announced that Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, was leaving his position as head of the Presidential Administration (AP) and taking up the new and rather less pivotal job of presidential representative for transport and the environment. In his place, Putin elevated one of Ivanov’s deputies, the essentially-unknown 44-year old Anton Vaino. Whatever Vaino’s strengths, this points to the way Putin is hollowing out his inner elite, surrounding himself with fewer but also less substantial peers, who are unlikely to challenge his worldview and opinions.
Ivanov’s departure was both unexpected and significant. Although Ivanov has since claimed that in 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency, he asked only to hold this admittedly onerous job for four years, there had been no previous hint of such an understanding. A shrewd and polished operator, Ivanov seemed at once ambitious and indispensable (asked whom he trusted back in 1999, Putin’s immediate response: “Sergei Ivanov”). Furthermore, the AP has become the most important single institution in Putin’s regime. Prime minister Dmitri Medvedev and his ministers are there to execute policy; the AP is there to help (and sometimes lobby) Putin to make it.
Coming as it did after the rotation of several regional leaders, as well as a series of other promotions and dismissals, this has inevitably raised all kinds of excited speculation (the perils of cultural stereotype: what would be called a “reshuffle” in the west tends to become a “purge” in Russia) about the emergence of a neo-Stalinist form of autocracy or, at the other extreme, wild claims of splits in the leadership and a challenge to Putin.
