The original version of this paper was published in Diplomatie, August 10, 2024, and can be read here.

Vladimir Putin came to power in August 1999, when an ailing Boris Yeltsin, considerably weakened politically and facing a serious economic and financial crisis with disastrous social consequences for the country’s population, appointed him prime minister. This summer, he will celebrate his 25^th year at the head of the new Russian state. When this man, chosen because he was perceived as loyal and easy to manipulate, a civil servant relatively inexperienced in politics and completely unknown to the general public, was named as Yeltsin’s successor by the resigning president on the evening of New Year's Eve, December 31, there was nothing to suggest that Putin would enjoy a longevity in office that would make his predecessors’ terms pale into insignificance. He has long surpassed Boris Yeltsin (eight and a half years) and Mikhail Gorbachev (just under seven years), of course, and then Nikita Khrushchev (almost 10 years) and Leonid Brezhnev (18 years). Now, even the extraordinary longevity of the dictator Joseph Stalin seems within Putin's grasp. How has he been able to achieve this?

Much analysis of Putin's Russia has focused on the regime's most shocking acts of persecution. However, behind the scenes, more ordinary transformations in state formation take place, no less central to Putin's regime. While they may have gone unnoticed for a time, it is these long-term trends that need to be closely studied in order to grasp, beyond the staging of power to portray an omnipotent and omniscient Putin, the mechanisms and modalities that laid the foundation for the ruling elite's political domination of Russian society.

In his work on state formation, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) distinguished power, the ability to obtain obedience, from domination, legitimate power, i.e. power consented to by the dominated. In other words, Weber demonstrated that no power could be sustained over time without ensuring the conditions for its legitimization.² In this respect, Putin’s cadre policy (kadrovaya politika) strikes us as particularly significant for his ability to maintain power.

Inheritance of the Stalinist matrix of political domination

"Cadres decide everything" ("kadry reshayut vse"), Stalin said during a speech at the Kremlin Palace on May 4, 1935, to newly minted Red Army officers, expressing the critical importance he intended to give to the "human factor", "human capital" in the administration of the Soviet state. Indeed, this statement by the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) sums up the importance of cadre policy in the Soviet matrix of political domination inherited from Stalinism.

The Stalinist practice of power helped to anchor a mode of political domination by the Soviet party-state over society inherited from revolutionary practice and experience, itself guided by the Leninist conception of the party as the enlightened vanguard of the proletariat. Gradually, what had been theorized and justified as necessities driven by the revolutionary context and the creation of the new socialist state was institutionalized to form the backbone of the new political system. In this way, ideological and theoretical justifications were gradually found for the permanent coercion underpinning the Stalinist regime. The formation of a new state apparatus, marked by the party's mistrust and control of government at all levels, made the question of recruitment, management and training of cadres a fundamental issue in the construction of the socialist state.

After the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), which was victorious but nevertheless extremely costly in terms of men and materiel for the USSR, and the Great Purges of the late 1930s, the shortage of lower, middle and high-level cadres in the state and party administration prompted leaders to strengthen the institutional framework for training cadres. It was against this backdrop that, in 1946, the Academy of Social Sciences (Akademiya obshchestvennykh nauk pri TsK KPSS) was set up under the auspices of the CPSU Central Committee to host postgraduate students from various regional schools throughout the Soviet Union. The system was complemented in 1977 by the creation of the Academy of National Economy (Akademiya narodnogo khozyaystva) under the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. Its purpose was to train executives and managers of industrial enterprises, top economists and senior officials of sectoral ministries. In fact, Soviet leaders constantly deplored the lack of training in these areas. In fact, their poor knowledge of how the economy and society really functioned was part of a more general contradiction between the knowledge conveyed by the social sciences and the ideological straitjacket of Leninist Marxism, which very much limited the way in which problems affecting Soviet society were posed.³

Modernizing the state and steps to entrench the Putin regime

In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, many observers predicted that Putin would amend the constitution so he could stand for a third term. However, this was not to be. To respect the letter of the Constitution, Putin instead headed the United Russia party in the 2007 parliamentary election, which turned into a plebiscite on his leadership, and announced his preferred successor in the Kremlin: Dmitri Medvedev. For a time, Medvedev embodied the mirage of a liberalizing Russian political system.

In reality, Medvedev's main goal was to modernize the Russian economy, thereby generating wide public support for the ruling team and strengthening the regime. This modernization project was presented by Medvedev in autumn 2009 in a series of speeches to the nation and to parliament. For the government, the aim was to replace the existing economic model (a rent-based economy based on the export of raw materials), deemed obsolete and humiliating, with one based on technological innovation and intellectual potential.⁴ This was the backstory to the creation of what would be called the Presidential Academy, which in fact represented an attempt to recentralize and revitalize the institutional framework for executive training inherited from the USSR.

On September 20, 2010, Medvedev issued a presidential decree combining the Academy of National Economy and Academy of Public Administration to create the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).⁵ It also included 12 other entities corresponding to former regional higher party schools, which had been converted into regional public administration academies during the 1990s. The result was a gigantic institution providing training and continuing education to over 200,000 students (including those auditing courses)throughout Russia every year.

These impressive figures represent the 130,000 students enrolled in the various levels of initial training (baklavriat, magistratura and aspirantura) with the 80,000 or so taking continuing education courses and employed in the state or municipal civil service. Of these 200,000 students, only a quarter study in Moscow. The rest are trained across the network of 50 regional branches spanning Russia.

ENA on steroids

RANEPA is more than just a university in the traditional sense. It is also a top-level business school, with modern higher education disciplines such as human resources and management and MBA programs for future private-sector executives. It is also home to a network of academic research centers in the humanities, social sciences and politics, a business incubator, a school of administration for the regime's senior civil servants, and a think tank thatis particularly influential in Russian policymaking and agenda-setting.

Although its administrators like to compare it to the French École nationale d'administration (ENA),⁶ RANEPA is at the crossroads of such various fields as training, academic production of knowledge, expertise, and the analysis and implementation of public policy. It could be compared with ENA only if the latter were to add regional institutes of administration, universities, and business and management schools.

Since its creation in 2010, RANEPA has been very active international, establishing cooperation and exchange links with over 450 partner institutions worldwide. In France, for example, RANEPA has forged partnerships with ENA, Sciences Po, Institut d'études politiques in Bordeaux, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, as well as business schools. These partnerships are symbolic assets on the international market and contribute to the legitimacy of the young RANEPA.

The internationalization of RANEPA also extends to the cultural and scientific arena through the organization of congresses, symposia and conferences in Russia and around the world. Finally, it operates a network of bilateral partnership and cooperation centers. In this way, RANEPA is part of the Russian government’s strategy of influence, cultural diplomacy and "soft power.”

An extension of state power at the service of the regime

The particularity of RANEPA lies not only in its “polymorphism” and the diversity of its activities. Like all Russian higher education establishments, it reports to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, yet it is also directly "under the president.” RANEPA is used as an instrument to provide the Kremlin with the human resources needed to carry out its wishes in terms of state administration and society.

However, in Russia, due to the longevity of Putin, as well as the particular bureaucratic tradition, state service is seen as the same as serving the head of state and his team. RANEPA is thus an instrument for Putin to exercise power and political domination. This role was particularly striking in Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Less than a week after the incorporation of Crimea into Russia, Prime Minister Medvedev announced a mission to train new public servants so each Russian ministry and federal agency would have branches on Crimean territory with locals. In 2014, over 14,000 former Ukrainian civil servants were trained at RANEPA headquarters in Moscow and its regional branch in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia.⁷

RANEPA is therefore an extension of state power, of which it is a direct emanation. Its role is to transmit power from the small elite at the head of the regime to the second-tier elites, middle managers and ground-level bureaucrats throughout the country, who in turn are to create the conditions for that small elite’s political domination of Russian society.

School of power and the power of a school

RANEPA trains elites, on the one hand, and middle and lower-ranking managers, on the other hand, with these lines complementary. The aim is to meet a twofold imperative: to provide the country's economy and administration with qualified managers, and to identify, recruit and train cohorts of high-ranking executives to serve the state, in line with the government's vision.

When it opened its doors in 2010, RANEPA not only diversified and expanded its range of courses but also doubled its budget and lowered its fixed costs per student. This also corresponds to a political objective: to train cohorts of young executives and managers for the public and private sectors. The Institute of Management and Public Administration alone, for example, welcomes 5,000 students each year to its bakalavriat (bachelor's degree) and magistratura (master's degree) programs in public management.

The other part of RANEPA’s mission is continuing education for public servants. That is now compulsory: every three years, public servants are required to undergo professional skills enhancement training (povysheniye kvalifikatsii). These courses last 18, 36, 72 or 144 hours. As a result of this three-year obligation and growing demand from public administrations, continuing education for public servants has become a very important market for higher education establishments in Russia.

Any training institutions, including the private sector, are now allowed to bid for such contracts at tenders. However, in this particularly competitive market, RANEPA, together with its regional branches, is not exactly on an equal playing field. Firstly, it benefits from having an “exclusive domain.” Besides, programs within RANEPA's exclusive domain are financed directly by the federal budget, which makes them particularly attractive to public officials, since they are accessible free of charge. Secondly, because of its experience in the field of continuing education for public servants, RANEPA has know-how and bureaucratic skills that are invaluable, if not indispensable, when it comes to responding to public tenders in compliance with legal requirements and all the more or less formally stated expectations. As a result, since its creation in 2010, RANEPA has trained over 45% of the country's civil servants.

The creation of RANEPA was a powerful factor in homogenizing and standardizing training for public servants. This standardization was based on a specific body of knowledge inspired by the new public management approach: a specialization called state and municipal public management (gosudarstvennoye i munitsipal'noye upravleniye; GMU).

This new, hybrid discipline emerged in the 1990s from the fields of public law, economics and management, before spreading widely in the 2000s. Within RANEPA, it is representative of the managerial turn in executive education for both public administration and the economy. Indeed, GMU stems from the logic of crossover between the private and public sectors and from the vision of the state and its management that is embodied in new public management. GMU has been nourished largely by the import of new public management precepts, with Russian public administration trying to follow "best practices" and international standards from new public management. This is the ideological corpus that has informed the training of elites and top managers in the state apparatus and the economy.

Neo-nomenklatura? Cadre reserves to the rescue of the ruling elite

RANEPA also provides special training for members of the country's political, administrative and economic elite.

As a result, RANEPA has become a sought-after credential for all civil servants and, more broadly, all executives wishing to advance in their careers. Indeed, the Moscow RANEPA campus is more than just a training ground. By concentrating members of the highest and most prestigious bodies of federal and regional administrations, it represents a space where social capital can grow. In this sense, RANEPA is "a school of power", in line with Pierre Bourdieu's definition of ENA in France. What's more, in Russia, careers in the civil service are based largely on informal factors (relationships) and marks of allegiance and loyalty to power.

This dimension was reinforced by the creation of the executive reserve system. The principle is relatively simple: There are lists of names of executives eligible for a certain number of positions, not only in the public service, but also in state-owned enterprises and social organizations. In this sense, they are reminiscent of the Soviet nomenklatura. As with the nomenklatura, there are several levels of cadre reserves. The presidential executive reserve (officially called the High-Potential Management Personnel Reserve) is the most prestigious. It is under the president and comprises just over a hundred executives. The other cadre reserves comprise several thousand people.

This system responds to the ruling elite's need to build up support and trasmit its power throughout the country and across various levels of the political system, as well as the bureaucracy and the economy. For, beyond being a talent pool, this new cadre reserve is helping shape the contours of a Putinist state nobility, in the sense of an elite with economic, bureaucratic and even intellectual power, whose aim is to ensure its own reproduction and the legitimization of its domination.

From a Bourdieu perspective, this policy helps to homogenize the field of power and create an “esprit de corps” within the Russian elite, understood as a shared vision of the world, similar ways of thinking and acting, which forms the basis of a solidarity.⁸ RANEPA thus plays a “pacifying” role, ironing out potential conflicts within the ruling class by creating a common framework and training courses for these cohorts of executives.⁹ It also serves to ratify and consecrate, in a Bourdieu sense, the academic and administrative capital of the social elite. Ultimately, we are witnessing the institutionalization of an elite by state power.

In recent years, the promotion of new, relatively young executives with a technocratic profile has led to the prospect of a generational renewal of the federal and regional elite, particularly at the head of the regional governments, and seems to give a second wind to the political domination of the team in power. Often devoid of political capital before taking office, they are reputed to be loyal to those in power, to whom they owe their position. This political "parachuting" reinforces their image as technical managers who are not affiliated with local groups or clans. Finally, these new faces have in common the fact that, from the late 2000s and early 2010s onward, they were part of the most prestigious executive pools, completing their training at RANEPA. They embody state reform and economic modernization programs thanks to their technocratic profiles. More than just trophies on display, they represent a privileged new generation, rising to positions of power and loyalty to the regime and its leader.
RANEPA is thus an essential link in the chain that makes it possible for Russian society not only to exercise, but also to accept, the domination of power. In this sense, the institution should be seen as a privileged tool for the state's routinization of charisma (Veralltäglichung des Charismas) in the service of the ruling team,¹⁰ understood as a process at the end of which this domination becomes part of everyday social relations. Thus, understanding its role and mission helps us to better understand the longevity of Putin’sregime.