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Moscow News
www.mnweekly.ru
February 19, 2009
Medvedev reshuffle a wake-up call to governors
By Anna Arutunyan

President Dmitry Medvedev has ousted four regional governors in one day in what some political analysts said was a move to kill two birds with one stone: ensuring political stability in potentially troublesome regions as the crisis takes its toll on jobs, and showing the public that he can act decisively.

Medvedev accepted on Monday the resignations of Mikhail Kuznetsov of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia, Yegor Stroyev of the Orlov region in central Russia,Vladimir Kulakov of the central Russian Voro­nezh region, and Valery Potapenko of the Nenets Autonomous District in northern Russia.

Kulakov and Potapenko were both former FSB officials.

Stroyev, 71, had occupied his post since 1993, and was due to step down in March. He was replaced by Alexander Kozlov, deputy minister of agriculture. Medvedev nominated Andrei Turchak, a Federation Council senator, to replace Kuznetsov, while longtime Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and Igor Fyodorov will replace Kulakov and Potapenko, respectively.

Officially, the resignations were qualified as measures to counteract inefficiency.

"We should review the quality of state management both at the federal and provincial level," RIA Novosti quoted Vladislav Surkov, first deputy chief of the presidential staff, as saying. "The president on the whole trusts his governors."

The Monday strike was not Med­vedev's first reshuffle since becoming president in May. In October, he replaced Ingushetia President Murat Zyazikov after oppositional unrest reached a crescendo in the restive North Caucasus republic.

In a move that raised even more eyebrows, Medvedev appointed liberal opposition leader Nikita Belykh to head the Kirov region in December. But the massive scale of this week's reshuffle - four governors handed in their resignation in a single day - generated speculation about what exactly Medvedev was punishing the regional heads for, and what he was trying to achieve with the new appointments.

The first culprit appeared to be joblessness. In a televised interview on Sunday, Medvedev cited the 44 billion rubles that had been set aside to fight joblessness in the regions and complained that a number of them - including the Far East Primorsky region, the Ryazan region, and Sverdlov region - were not acting fast enough.

But the gubernatorial reshuffle the following day did not involve any of those places. And joblessness did not appear to be the chief problem either. According to business daily Vedomosti, the Pskov region's unemployment rate for December was just 2.3 per cent - well below the national average of 7.7 per cent.

Asked what the regions had in common, Sergei Markov, a political adviser to the government and a United Russia State Duma deputy, said, "They all have enormous differences," adding that he did not believe that joblessness was a determining factor in the resignations. "This was a clearly administrative decision," he said.

A presidential decree signed by Vladimir Putin in summer 2007 established 82 criteria for evaluating the efficiency of governors, and Markov suggested that they were being judged according to those criteria.

But other experts said Medvedev's reshuffle was a typical preemptive strike to maintain the political status quo.

"There are similarities between the Nenets and Pskov regions," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, "but this similarity is in the governors, not the regions themselves. Kuznetsov fought with the local political-economic elite and created a headache for Kremlin functionaries. Potapenko hogged the economic blanket. He didn't share with the federal centre."

Pribylovsky dismissed the idea that the official criteria played any role in the decisions. "There are essentially two criteria: the person has to be your own guy, and he has to share."

While Pribylovsky said the crisis did not play a pivotal role in the reshuffle, another expert said it was certainly a factor in the background.

"This is an attempt to draw attention to the fact that the president has undertaken a rotation of the governor corps," says Rostislav Turovsky, a political expert and associate professor of the public policy department at the Higher School of Economics.

"He is sending a signal to the public, which will be pleased that the president is striking down unpopular governors, and to other governors, who should be more active in fighting the crisis."

According to Turovsky, fighting the crisis is not so much an economic issue - which the governors really have little control over - but a political one.

"They will not be able to deal with the effects of the crisis if they have little control over the regional elections and don't have enough support from the United Russia party in each region. This was a problem in all the regions except Orlov."

There, the ageing Stroyev, Turovsky said, had a good grasp of the "administrative resources" in the past years, but his grip was waning.

Pribylovsky and Turovsky agreed that a governor's ability to make sure residents weren't protesting in the street was one of the chief criteria in deciding how effective he would be in dealing with the crisis.

"If your streets are filled with people, like under Kulakov, then expect that you will eventually be dismissed," said Pribylovsky, who saw Putin's signature in the dismissals of unpopular figures after the actual dissent had quietened down.

The reshuffle prompted speculation of further dismissals or even a possible purge. When Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov lashed out at the government's efforts to fight the crisis in an interview with daily Kommersant, some media saw a pre-emptive move in his comments, signalling the possibility that he was next in line for a dismissal.

Pribylovsky, however, did not take such speculations seriously. "As far as I remember, they've been burying Luzhkov since 1994," he said.

More indicative of Medvedev's emerging personnel policy was a list of 100 luminaries and professional managers tapped to form a "reserve cadre," published Tuesday on the Kremlin website. The list echoed the president's earlier calls to make government cadre policy more transparent. Senator Andrei Torchak, nominated for governor of the Pskov region, was one of the people in the list.

"The people in this list do not differ too much from those currently in power," said Pribylovsky. "Most, except for the journalists and media figures, have one thing in common: they have other sources of income besides their official salaries."