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The Three-Prime-Minister Government
// Mikhail Fradkov Gets a Cabinet
President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on the personnel of the new government. He expressly emphasized that the new compact cabinet was the “result of administrative reform.” However, if you look at the Fradkov government’s economic bloc in particular, you might conclude that in fact there are three prime ministers in this cabinet who have no relation to administrative reform.
The president had every reason to call the new White House structure the result of administrative reform. The point is not that there were 30 ministers in Kasyanov’s cabinet, while there are only 17 in Fradkov’s cabinet. It is no less important that the government was redrawn precisely along the lines of administrative reform: the number of ministers was reduced by dividing executive departments into law-instituting departments (with the power to prepare draft legislation and issue regulatory acts, i.e., ministries), agencies and services whose task is to implement the ministries’ decrees, and special supervisory bodies. The purpose of this division is not to reduce the administrative apparatus but to make the work of the ministries and departments more transparent and better controlled, meaning more effective, by barring the same department from both setting the rules of the game on the market and acting as its arbiter.
The role of the ministries and ministers is being greatly increased in full agreement with the concepts of administrative reform; even if they are not political figures in the full sense of the word, they are still being granted the right to make political decisions. German Gref was the biggest winner among the new cabinet ministers. Along with his previously huge ministry, he now has control over the Federal Customs Service (the former State Customs Committee), the Federal Property Management Agency (the former Ministry of State Property), and the Federal Tariff Service (the former Federal Energy Commission).
However, while administrative reform is the credo of the new government, the main loser in the government renewal process is its official White House architect, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Aleshin. It was not enough that no portfolio was found for him (he received an offer to head the united agencies of the military-industrial complex); at a certain point, the very principles of the reform that was carried out began to diverge from the ones worked out by Mr. Aleshin. For example, he proposed a move away from the sectoral principle, but this approach is retained in the new cabinet. This means that as an actual administrative reformer, Boris Aleshin did not suit the people who implemented cabinet reform.
There is nothing unusual about this. Kommersant wrote more than once that the administrative reform committee headed by Boris Aleshin was not engaged in administrative reform at all, to put it mildly. Its “mandate”, written by Mikhail Kasyanov, boiled down to looking over the functions once entrusted to one or another department with the aim of getting this department to agree to eliminate some of these “superfluous functions”. It was only after Mikhail Kasyanov was fired that Boris Aleshin began tackling actual administrative reform, summarizing his research in a letter to Vladimir Putin; but he was too late. The real reformer of the government was first deputy head of the presidential administration, Dmitry Kozak.
It was Mr. Kozak, delegated from the Kremlin to the White House to the very noteworthy post of head of the government staff with the rank of minister, who brought to mind the question once flung by chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, at Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: “How many prime ministers are there in your government?” At the time, Mr. Khasbulatov answered his own question by calling Anatoly Chubais an unofficial prime minister. One could ask Mikhail Fradkov exactly the same question. Dmitry Kozak may be called the second prime minister, the reason being that as head of Vladimir Putin’s campaign headquarters, he is among the officials most closely connected with the president, and as first deputy head of the presidential administration (since October 31, 2003), he was involved in so-called special projects, especially government reform. The logic of his new appointment is obvious: Dmitry Kozak was sent to put the finishing touches on his project, i.e., a new government. Mikhail Fradkov himself has to agree with Mr. Kozak’s appointment as second prime minister, since he consented to the Kremlin’s choice of his closest associate in the government rather than making his own choice. Dmitry Kozak will “prompt” Mikhail Fradkov with suggestions that the prime minister will hardly be able to refuse to implement.
There is also a third prime minister in the cabinet, i.e., Aleksandr Zhukov, the only deputy prime minister. Up to now, Russian prime ministers have refused to have just one deputy, because even according to formal logic, this person is immediately vested with almost the same powers as the prime minister. Aleksandr Zhukov has one more important advantage over both Mikhail Fradkov and all his subordinates: he is a member of the ruling party (for now, only in the Duma). So if Mr. Kozak is prime minister #2 by Kremlin order, Mr. Zhukov is prime minister #3 by party order. Significantly, the official prime minister’s position in the group of three prime ministers is probably the weakest one. Aleksandr Zhukov is the leader in macroeconomics, while Dmitry Kozak is the leader in reform, especially in administrative reform, which has not lost its urgency and includes continuation of the reform of executive bodies, as well as reform of the Central Bank and the presidential administration itself.
Nikolai Vardul
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 10, 2004
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Photo: Dmitry Azarov
