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Are Siloviki Still Undemocratic? Elite Support for Political Pluralism during Putin’s Third Presidential Term
Abstract
Will Vladimir Putin’s penchant for staffing the state with siloviki undermine the prospects for democratization after he leaves office? The answer to this question hinges on whether Russian military and security officers currently possess a less liberal worldview than do civilian elites, yet little to no research has examined this question in close to a decade. In an effort to fill this gap in existing knowledge, this article investigates the orientations of influential Russians toward several core components of liberal democracy on the basis of a survey conducted in 2016. We find that attitudinal differences between siloviki and civilians persist into this decade. As was the case in both the 1990s and 2000s, elites with professional backgrounds in the force structures were less supportive of political pluralism and individual rights than were those with purely civilian resumés. In addition, active-duty officers were even less liberal than either their retired former colleagues or lifelong civilians. Finally, unlike the situation that apparently prevailed at the very end of Putin’s second presidential term, conventional military officers now espouse nearly identical levels of support for political pluralism as do officers entrusted with internal security.
... As a frame of reference, we also estimated the proportion of the elites with siloviki backgrounds in our elite samples . In our estimation strategy we followed the approach proposed by Rivera and Rivera (2019), who classify Putin-regime elites into three categories -active-duty officers, silovikcivilians, and non-siloviki. We used the same approach to classify our elite members into these three categories. ...
Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approximately 60% of contemporary elites. Most have ties in the middle and lower, rather than the top, ranks of the nomenklatura. In addition, the share of those with nomenklatura backgrounds in Putin-era elites is significantly higher than the share of siloviki. These results reflect a noticeable continuity between the Soviet-era and Putin-regime elites 30 years after the transition. This often-ignored characteristic helps understand the absence of an elite split and a high degree of elite compliance with re-autocratization in Putin’s Russia.
... In our estimation strategy we followed the approach proposed by Rivera and Rivera, who classify the Putin regime's elites into three categories -active-duty officers, silovik-civilians, and non-siloviki. We used the same approach to classify our elite members into these three categories (Rivera & Rivera, 2019). 8 8 Rivera and Rivera (2019) identify two main subtypes of siloviki: ...
... The reliance by Russia's federal center on the regional security services to keep regions under control and the political opposition in check also seems to have a clearly negative effect on economic dynamism, as many of the strategies employed by the security services -such as limiting collective action, controlling the formation of networks, imposing controls on scientific exchange or keeping the economic activities of opposition-affiliated entrepreneurs under tight control -are economically counterproductive (Galeotti 2016;Soldatov and Rochlitz 2018;Libman 2019;Petrov and Rochlitz 2019;Rivera and Rivera 2019). In addition, the fact that the regional security services are also being used to check upon the regional governors -inter alia with respect to the use of political machines -has led to many conflicts in the regions, with often negative economic repercussions (Aisin and Yakovlev 2019). ...
Scholars of contentious politics understand the critical role of opposition protests and the elite in influencing regime outcomes. What is less understood, however, is how opposition protest can impact the “hearts and minds” of elites in authoritarian settings. Using the timing of the Survey of Russian Elites and a 2016 protest in Moscow to commemorate the death of a Russian opposition figure, we show that elites initially responded with sympathy to the peaceful and well-attended protest, but those feelings faded in the weeks following the event. We attribute the ephemeral nature of the protest’s impact to a successful strategy by the Kremlin to acknowledge the event and then promptly ignore it in the following weeks. We posit this allowed the event to leave the consciousness of most elites and their feelings returned to pre-protest levels. Our findings suggest that certain opposition protests can garner sympathy among the elite in authoritarian settings, but also highlight the passive tools of authoritarian regimes in minimizing the impact of protest movements. Opposition movements, thus, not only have to cue sympathetic feelings among the elite, but also have to sustain that persuasion in subsequent news cycles.
Why did Russia's relations with the West shift from cooperation a few decades ago to a new era of confrontation today? Some explanations focus narrowly on changes in the balance of power in the international system, or trace historic parallels and cultural continuities in Russian international behavior. For a complete understanding of Russian foreign policy today, individuals, ideas, and institutions—President Vladimir Putin, Putinism, and autocracy—must be added to the analysis. An examination of three cases of recent Russian intervention (in Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2015, and the United States in 2016) illuminates the causal influence of these domestic determinants in the making of Russian foreign policy.
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