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🧵
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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🧵
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
Here you can find a much shorter summary of the Istories article by Meduza. It's okayish and gives a general idea of what the article is about though it's obviously less informative
Here you can find a list of many Putin's gerontocratic reforms such as increasing or lifting the compulsory retirement age limits for the upper officials across all branches of power mbk-news.appspot.com/suzhet/idem-na…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Wagner march was incredible, unprecedented to the extent most foreigners simply do not understand. Like, yes, Russia had its military coups in the 18th c. But those were the palace coups, all done by the Guards. Purely praetorian business with zero participation of the army.
Yes, there was a Kornilov affair in 1917, but that happened after the coup in capital. In March they overthrew the Tsar, then there was infighting in the capital, including a Bolshevik revolt in July, and only in September part of the army marches to St Petersburg.
Half a year after the coup. Not the same thing
I think the last time anything like that happened was in 1698, when the Musketeers marched on Moscow from the Western border. And then, next time, only in 2023.
(Army leaves the border/battlefield and marches on the capital without a previous praetorian coup in the capital)
As a person from a post-Soviet country, I could not but find the institutions of People’s Republic of China oddly familiar. For every major institution of the Communist Russia, I could find a direct equivalent in Communist China.
With one major exception:
China had no KGB
For a post-Soviet person, that was a shocking realisation. For us, a gigantic, centralised, all-permeating and all powerful state security system appears to be almost a natural phenomenon. The earth. The sky. Force of gravity. KGB
All basic properties of reality we live in
It was hard to come up with any explanation for why the PRC that evolved in a close cooperation with the USSR, that used to be its client state, that emulated its major institutions, failed to copy this seemingly prerequisite (?) institution of state power
Soviet output of armaments was absolutely gargantuan, massive, unbeatable. “Extraordinary by any standard” , it was impossible for any other country to compete with.
From 1975 to 1988, the Soviets produced four times as many ICBMs and SLBMs, twice as many nuclear submarines, five times as many bombers, six times as many SAMs, three times as many tanks and six times as many artillery pieces as the United States.
Impossible to compete with.
Which raises a question:
How could the USSR produce so much?
It is not only that the USSR invested every dime into the military production. It is also that the Soviet industry was designed for the very large volumes of output, and worked the best under these very large volumes
We are releasing our investigation on Roscosmos, covering a nearly exhaustive sample of Russian ICBM producing plants. We have investigated both primary ICBM/SLBM producers in Russia, a major producer of launchers, manufacturers of parts and components.
Each material includes an eclectic collection of sources, ranging from the TV propaganda to public tenders, and from the HR listings to academic dissertations. Combined altogether, they provide a holistic picture of Russian ICBM production base that no single type of source can.
Overall, you can expect tech moguls to have much, much higher level of reasoning abilities compared to the political/administrative class. But this comes at a cost. Their capacities for understanding the Other (masses count as the “Other”) are much poorer.
E.g. Putin is much, much less of an outlier in terms of intelligence compared to Thiel. He is much more average. At the same time, I am positively convinced that Putin understands the masses and works with masses much better.
One problem with that is that too much of the supply chain for drone production is located in China. The thing with drones is that they grew out of toys industry. Cheap plastic & electronic crap that all of a sudden got military significance
That is also the major problem I have with "China supports Russia" argument. China could wreck Ukraine easily, simply obstructing & delaying the drone/drone components shipments. That would be an instant military collapse for Ukraine.
Both Russian and Ukrainian drone industries are totally dependent upon the continuous shipments from China. To a very significant degree, their "production" is assembly from the Chinese components which are non alternative and cannot be substituted with anything else (as cheap).