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Managerial, Effective, and Deadly
It looks as if the structural reform of the government that president and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin put into effect several days before the elections was not just a preelection ploy. To all appearances, a real administrative revolution took place in the country. At the same time, the government’s effectiveness in its new form will show whether Russia needs a presidential regime with unlimited powers. However, having become a real rival for presidential power, the new government has signed its own death warrant.
People from the Government Reserves
After issuing a series of decrees on changes to the structure of the Russian government and the appointment of the heads of most subdivisions of the cabinet of ministers, the president explained to all concerned what he actually intended, sternly but obscurely commenting on Mikhail Kasyanov’s dismissal.
Considering the time, place, and circumstances of this message, it makes sense to figure out who it was aimed at and who wrote it. We will not question Vladimir Putin’s desire to make executive power in Russia more effective. Nevertheless, the fact that the government was reorganized a week before the presidential elections and the very strange circumstances of Mikhail Kasyanov’s dismissal suggest that what happened was less an action of the president than part of a presidential candidate’s election campaign. The campaign itself, whose results at the time this issue of Dengi appeared in print will be better known to readers than to the author, was unusual. For the first time in Russia’s history, the country’s population was not voting for the head of state, who will probably be Vladimir Putin by a wide margin, but for the people he believes will bring him absolute victory.
Mikhail Kasyanov’s dismissal was apparently a preelection move by the “force” element of the president’s circle. It was no accident that this was followed by the Ministry of Taxation’s claims against Sibneft and the charges laid by the Prosecutor General’s Office against Vladimir Malin, the head of the Russian Federal Property Fund (RFFI). According to preelection logic, this victory by the “forces” made it appear as though the greater part of Putin’s future victory in the elections had nothing to do with the actions of the old government, whose structure was formed in Yeltsin’s time. Thus, credit for the victory would go to the people who schemed against Mikhail Kasyanov.
The next preelection move, i.e., Mikhail Fradkov’s appointment as head of the cabinet, was made by the president himself, who ruled out an inevitable choice between the candidacies of Aleksei Kudrin and Sergei Ivanov in favor of a compromise candidate. Putin did not deny himself the right to contribute to his victory.
Then United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) took the initiative. Although immediately after his appointment the new acting prime minister said something about “two deputy prime ministers”, it became clear two days later that United Russia deputy and vice-speaker Aleksandr Zhukov would be the only deputy prime minister.
Obviously, it is still unclear to ordinary voters, most of whom are prepared to tick off the column “Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich” without any preelection games in the Kremlin, whether the Fradkov government will fulfill its duties any better than the previous one. None the less, all the preelection scheming, which had grown out of an expression of the popular will during the last three months of Putin’s presidency, produced a very curious result a week before the elections. Not, of course, the situation where 30 bureaucrats launch a radical restructuring of the government after March 14 in anticipation of personal favors; however, the result will probably be more important for the country than these favors or even Putin’s inevitable victory.
Paradoxically, by passing his first tem in office under the slogan of strengthening the power vertical, Vladimir Putin agreed to the format of reform proposed by the deputy head of his administration, Dmitry Kozak. Very similar plans suggested earlier by economist Evgeny Yasin, and even earlier by Igor Shuvalov, head of the government staff, failed, since the first, very obvious premise of reform is the need to reduce the ministries’ authoritative powers.
Sorting Out the Bureaucrats
There are 13 fewer ministries in the new government structure. Ministries that have been consigned to well-deserved oblivion include the Ministry of the Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting, and Mass Communications (Ministry of the Press), the Ministry of Industry, Science, and Technology, the Ministry of Railways, and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies, whose existence in recent years was justified only by the need of their heads to carry out administrative business. Most of the functions of the Ministry of Communications, for example, have become obsolete with the development of a nongovernmental telecommunications business and privatization in Russia. Therefore, the people in Leonid Reiman’s ministry admitted some time ago that they had no functions connected with the interests of the Ministry of Defense and the FSB or even with the interests of the minister, who did not get a place in the new government.
The structure of the new government can be briefly described as follows. All former ministerial structures have been divided into three groups. In the first group are federal ministries that have passed to the direct jurisdiction of the president as head of the executive branch of government: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry for Emergency Situations. Another nine federal ministries are under the prime minister’s jurisdiction: the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Health and Social Development, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Industry and Energy, and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. However, all their activities are the reserve of the federal ministries’ staff headed by Dmitry Kozak. The functions of Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Zhukov essentially amount to mediation between the government and the Duma; and those of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, to the representative capacities of the Queen of England and ideological control over the ministers’ decisions. That is, to relaying the ideas of Vladimir Putin and his administration to a narrow circle of ministers.
However, the ministries will be totally different from those under Mikhail Kasyanov. They will be responsible for issuing resolutions and orders on jurisdictional questions. However, they no longer have the right to make specific decisions, e.g., on issuing a license for a particular type of activity. In the new structure, a ministry makes the rules of the game without having the right to interfere in the observance of these rules.
Supervisory and control functions have passed from the ministries to federal services, e.g., the FSB, the Federal Press and Information Agency (the former Ministry of the Press), or the Federal Customs Service (FTS). All services are under the jurisdiction of the related ministry; for example, the FTS is under the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and the Federal Labor and Employment Service is under the Ministry of Health and Social Development (the former Ministry of Health). However, a service cannot combine supervisory and control functions and simultaneously further the interests of any state-owned enterprise; thus, direct management of state-owned enterprises, from hospitals to cartridge factories have passed to the next level, namely federal agencies. In the new government, agencies are essentially state property managers. They cannot make the rules of the game: the services regulate the activities of their “wards”, and the ministry regulates the order of their work.
Thus for almost the first time in Russia’s history, there is a declared separation of bureaucrats who determine the “interests of the state” from those who realize these interests. It is difficult to overestimate the originality of this innovation: it is comparable to implementing the concept of separation of government branches, the exact opposite of United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov’s concept of the unity of all government branches.
The Government as a Collective President
Undoubtedly, the present government structure will be involved in endless scandals right from the start. It is hard to imagine the activities of FSB director Nikolai Patrushev or former head of the Ministry of the Press, Mikhail Lesin, and their departments without the issue of executive orders and instructions, a right that is now in the hands of Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev and Minister of Culture and Information Aleksandr Sokolov. Wars of the heads of agencies and services with the ministries and with each other are a predictable reality.
However, there is another, more interesting aspect. Boris Yeltsin came to power with almost unlimited authority. He gradually began to share responsibilities with the government; and when he transferred power to Vladimir Putin in 2000, it was considerably reduced in comparison to 1992. By then, there seemed to be little need for a president as head of the executive branch given the presence of a competent prime minister. During his first term in office, Vladimir Putin took away the right to control the “force” ministries from the prime minister, and through this localization of functions strengthened the government, whose need for an effective manager as head of state was steadily decreasing.
The president approached his second term as de facto political leader and supreme commander-in-chief. Mikhail Kasyanov’s government became the only structure needed for government administration in a country where every political element not under government control was being cut down at terrifying speed.
If the cabinet of ministers is effective, the need for a president as head of the government machine will become a hot topic. Why indeed does Russia need a political leader if there is a parliament, albeit one led by United Russia? The government is also quite capable of managing the “forces”. Therefore, the present reforms are probably doomed. Either squabbles during the formation of the new government structure will be its epitaph or an effective government will become a collective rival to the head of state even before the 2008 elections. And everyone knows what happens to rivals of the president in Russia.
Dmitry Butrin
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 15, 2004
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Photo: Dmitry Azarov
