Since President Putin promoted Sergey Ivanov to the same senior government rank as Dmitry Medvedev in February 2007, a consensus has formed that Ivanov will be the next president. This consensus may yet be proved wrong. But Ivanov’s chances of coming to supreme power in Russia are clearly serious enough to justify a close study of the man.
Ivanov is a purer product even than Putin of the KGB foreign intelligence school. The national strategy as now formulated in the policies of the mature Putin administration would be the agenda of an Ivanov presidency. Any hidden 'KGB' agenda would be superfluous. The stated project to win for Russia a prime place in the sun in the globalising world already matches the instincts and ideals of officials of Ivanov’s generation and background. Our trusted source portrays Ivanov as a lone wolf. As president, Ivanov would set about implementing the present policy agenda with steady, even radical, rigour.
Six months ago, we published an analysis of Dmitry Medvedev as the then leading contender for the succession to President Putin (click here to read). At that point, Putin promoted Sergey Ivanov, the other front runner for the presidency in 2008, to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister (equal to Medvedev). Ivanov has since overtaken Medvedev in opinion polls of voter intentions in a hypothetical presidential election in which Putin was not a candidate.
Putin and Ivanov
If similarity of personal history were the main criterion, Ivanov would already be assured the succession to the Russian presidency. Like Vladimir Putin, he was born in 1953 in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), educated at Leningrad State University, and then recruited into the KGB. Both men were promoted to the KGB’s prestigious First Chief Directorate, dealing with foreign intelligence after serving for a spell in domestically-oriented directorates. It was in that first period that their professional paths first crossed. In 1976-77, they were both posted in the same department of the KGB’s regional Leningrad directorate.
The major divergence in their career paths came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that turning point, Ivanov did not follow Putin in leaving the KGB but instead stayed put in what was now renamed as the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). His career in foreign intelligence had been more successful than Putin’s. Ivanov started with a front-line Cold War posting to London in 1982 which ended a year later in one of the periodic expulsions of 'diplomats' (though Ivanov has publicly denied that he was expelled). Further postings followed in Helsinki and Nairobi. The contrast with Putin’s sole foreign posting in a Soviet satellite state (East Germany) could hardly be more marked.
No less striking is the reversal of the two men’s fortunes in the following decade. By 1998, when Putin began his meteoric rise – starting as head of the FSB (the successor to the domestic part of the KGB) – Ivanov was a mere deputy department head in the SVR. But that ceased to matter after Ivanov was pulled up to high office in Putin’s wake.
In an interview in early 2000, Putin was asked whom he trusted. Putin replied with a rather short list of names, and Ivanov was number one on that list. Putin spoke of him as someone he felt particularly able to rely on. By that stage, Ivanov had already succeeded Putin as Security Council secretary (rough equivalent of the National Security Adviser in the US) – which had been Putin’s last job before being launched into the premiership and presidency.
Since then, Putin has clearly had no change of heart. He promoted Ivanov to Defence Minister in April 2001, then (in 2005) to Deputy Prime Minister and now First Deputy Prime Minister, reckoned by both elite and wider public opinion as the obvious successor to the presidency itself. For a more detailed chronology of Ivanov’s career, click here.
Ivanov’s track record in the Putin administration
Ivanov has spent the greater part of the Putin presidency as Russia’s first civilian Defence Minister. In this post, he struggled – like his military predecessors – to reform the inefficient, impoverished and corruption-infested military machine inherited from the Soviet era. He was dogged by bad publicity over conscript desertion, deaths and injuries due to hazing, and casualties due to accidents caused by negligence.
At the same time, Ivanov had the major advantage over his predecessors of a rapidly expanding defence budget – which increased in nominal terms during the course of his tenure by 230 per cent to Rb822 billion. This spending surge was due not only to buoyant tax proceeds on the back of high oil prices but also to Ivanov’s close working relationship with Putin and their shared concern to revive the army. (It is worth mentioning in passing, however, that overall public expenditure in the same period grew 30 per cent faster than defence, reflecting Putin’s overarching priority of reducing poverty through hikes in general public sector pay and pensions.)
Apart from increased spending, Ivanov’s time at the defence ministry was marked by a determined focus on a few well-defined priorities. One conspicuous line was his introduction of a hard-nosed but sophisticated note of realism into international security relations. His successive interventions at the annual Munich security conference in hindsight culminated naturally at this year’s conference in the definitive statement by Putin himself of Russia’s sense of its national interest independent of the US and EU.
Another central policy of the Ivanov years at the Defence Ministry was the gradual shift from a conscript to a professional army. But here, Ivanov always stressed realism over populism, saying that the goal of a fully professional army was unattainable, given the numbers (not less than one million, in his view) needed to defend Russia’s huge territory.
Viewed from the perspective of Ivanov’s present government role and possible future presidency, the most significant policy from his time as Defence Minister is the re-equipment of the army. His procurement programmes brought the first big domestic orders for the rump of the Soviet military industrial complex, which had been subsisting since the Soviet collapse on exports, mainly to China and India. Soviet-era resource (mis)allocation left a good part of the Russian economy’s technological and innovation potential in defence-related production. Ivanov’s involvement with this sector through the Defence Ministry has led to his present wider responsibilities for industry and the real sector as a whole.
His responsibilities in this area were first formalised specifically as regards the defence industries in November 2005 when he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, while continuing his tenure of the Defence portfolio. This was the point at which Dmitry Medvedev was promoted to the more senior position of First Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the ‘National Projects’. Putin waited until February 2007 to equalise the rank of these two leading candidates for the succession, giving Ivanov overall responsibility for all industry outside the natural resource sectors, as well as transport, infrastructure, technology and innovation.
The presidential campaign
Ivanov’s new portfolio reflects what Putin has defined as the core diversification strategy – that is, reducing the economy’s dependence on natural resource extraction and increasing the range and scale of higher value-added production. As such, this portfolio has given Ivanov a platform for his undeclared presidential campaign which has proved just as advantageous as running the priority ‘national projects’ in various social policy areas has been for Dmitry Medvedev.
Ivanov has made campaigning use of his policy brief to travel ceaselessly around the country visiting factories. No sooner had he been given equal status with Medvedev than an elite consensus formed that Ivanov, with his greater experience and more naturally presidential bearing, would be Putin’s choice of successor. That consensus has been reflected in Ivanov receiving twice as much television airtime as Medvedev, with camera crews always in attendance on Ivanov’s regional travels.
These ‘tyre-kicking’ expeditions have also been important for Ivanov in building relations with regional elites. The governors, in particular, wield a considerable and sometime decisive influence on voting intentions. Since his February 2007 promotion, Ivanov has spoken at every meeting of the State Council presidium which brings together important governors from around the country.
Russian Axis, a London-based think tank
Part of the explanation for the different career choices of Sergey Ivanov and Vladimir Putin after the end of the Soviet Union – Ivanov to stay in foreign intelligence, Putin to move on to new opportunities in post-Soviet public service – may lie in their education. In contrast to Putin’s more versatile legal qualifications, Ivanov’s specialised linguistic training – mainly in English – set him on a narrower career path as a diplomat.
Wherever lies the balance between background, temperament and chance opportunity in accounting for this one major career divergence between the two men, the result was that by the time Ivanov first came to public attention as a senior official, he seemed backward compared to Putin himself and other leading figures in the new administration. By that stage, Putin had been exposed to a wide range of public policy issues both in a leading regional government and in the Kremlin staff. In those same years, Ivanov had been supervising the compilation of foreign intelligence assessments.
Holding a succession of senior posts in the Putin administration has enabled Ivanov to close that gap. Put another way, in the last eight years he has been along the equivalent development path which Putin benefited from in the 1990s.
This development can be traced in Ivanov’s public comments and speeches. From the outset of the Putin presidency, there was never any doubt that Ivanov was a key figure in the administration simply as a result of being such a close and trusted associate of the president. At the same time, Ivanov appeared relatively marginal to the main policy thrust of the first Putin term, which consisted in implementing the structural reform agenda developed by 1990s reformers and for which, in contrast to the preceding years under the ailing Boris Yeltsin, the necessary political capital now existed. In this early period, Ivanov’s function was confined to security and military issues. His periodic pronouncements on wider issues tended to be retrograde.
For example, he spoke of the desirability of controlling the degree and amount of violence and sex on television, which he said was eroding public morality. He expressed his personal sympathy for Colonel Yury Budanov, convicted of murdering a Chechen girl, as a “victim of circumstances and inadequate legislation”. His reaction to a mass desertion by conscript victims of hazing in 2003 was to round on the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, a domestic NGO whose campaigns against such abuses were made possible, said Ivanov, by financing from dubious sources and amounted to an incitement to desert.
The contrast between such statements and the public persona of Ivanov in 2007 is striking. These days, his speeches articulate the central policies of the late-stage Putin administration, without the slightest nuance at odds with the mainstream and politically respectable agenda of modernisation as framed and promoted by Putin himself.
The main exhibit here must be Ivanov’s keynote speech at the St Petersburg International Economic forum on 9 June. Here, before an audience of domestic and CIS elites, together with very senior representatives of international companies, Ivanov rehearsed the government’s policy programme and goals. Besides standard elements like macroeconomic stability, improved public administration (such as through deregulation), the promotion of small business and the planned new freedom of information act, he stressed some serious reform challenges: overcoming the monopolisation of product markets and low productivity due to rigidities in the labour market and education system. In an earlier speech – the first after his February 2007 promotion – Ivanov went out of his way to affirm one of the most radical and difficult reforms launched during the second Putin term: the staged liberalisation of domestic electricity and gas prices until 2011.
Ivanov’s progress has been more than a unilateral change on his part, but rather a genuine convergence. For Putin himself has moved from simply implementing the reform agenda he inherited to expressing in policy the underlying instincts and ideals to be expected of people with his and Ivanov’s background.
A fundamental instinct, or concern, is what Putin and Ivanov often describe as the defence of sovereignty – by which is meant preserving and enhancing Russia’s ability to act as an independent centre of power in the world as opposed to becoming a junior partner or client state of the US and/or EU. This basic tenet occasionally surfaces with a tinge of paranoia, as in the fixation with foreign-funded NGOs. It is also reflected in more serious policies, such as state control of strategic natural resources.
This orientation has been extended in the past year or so into a general industrial policy which gives the state a central role, not just as a catalyst but also a direct owner, in the creation of an internationally competitive industrial base. Here lies the focal point of the convergence between Ivanov and Putin – in the practical as well as ideological sense, since Ivanov has been put in charge of realising this strategy of diversification from natural resources towards higher value–added and knowledge-intensive production. Ivanov’s role is not confined to policy supervision, but includes active participation as in his chairmanship of the United Aircraft Building Corporation (one of the new industrial holdings consolidated under state control) and of the government’s new nanotechnology council.
The underlying concept here does not depart from the positions which Putin has always stated. The national goal is to reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse and restore the country’s position in the world no longer by confrontation and arms races, but rather by achieving strong economic growth (“doubling GDP in a decade”). Following the first term stress on structural and institutional reforms necessary to create the conditions for growth (such as a workable tax system, and basic legislation governing factor markets), the second Putin term has seen two policy departures.
The first of these developments, launched in 2005, was the ‘national projects’, supervised by Dmitry Medvedev. The new industrial policy entrusted to Ivanov, as described, is the second such initiative. Ivanov’s assignment may be reckoned the senior, or core, national project. For whereas the ‘Medvedev projects’ are to do with ensuring adequate quality – and now, with the addition of demography, also quantity – of human resources, the ‘Ivanov project’ defines the economic framework in which those resources will be put to work. Here is the most ambitious vision of ‘sovereignty’ in which Russia becomes a true force in the globalised economy rather than a mere passive beneficiary of the increased demand for hydrocarbons and metals created by globalisation.
In this light, the ever-strengthening expectation that Ivanov will prove to be Putin’s successor is based not only on relatively trivial perceptions about his more ‘presidential’ bearing compared to Medvedev (and others), but also on the underlying logic of Russia’s national strategy as it has evolved in the Putin years.
The most revealing comment which Ivanov has made about himself in public may be quoted in full:
I am not able to tell you everything that gets taught in intelligence officers’ training establishments, but I was definitely taught not to stand out from the crowd…and I now consider a lack of distinguishing characteristics to be a sign of [my] professionalism. I have never liked cliques, and have no desire to shine in front of cameras or frequent high society.
So here we have a lone wolf formed in the KGB’s mature Cold War school. Other widely remarked skills stemming from Ivanov’s combination of natural abilities and KGB training are a strong aural memory and an ability to reproduce his interlocutor’s tone of voice. Equally typical is his proclaimed asceticism.
For any senior official, let alone a would-be president, an important practical corollary of this make-up – patriotic and ascetic with a strong sense of duty – is personal integrity. None of the muck-raking websites and rumour machines have yet managed to produce any evidence of corruptibility. Perhaps the only shadow worth noting was cast in 2005 when charges were quietly dropped against the elder of his two sons who had been involved in a traffic accident in which an elderly woman pedestrian died. It is significant here that Ivanov’s main political opponents – the faction grouped around presidential aide Igor Sechin – used their media outlets to play up this story for a while.
Two contrasting features stand out in Ivanov’s relations with his colleagues and subordinates. Both clearly stem from his character and professional training as an intelligence officer.
On the one hand, for an official of his seniority, Ivanov has a notably sparse circle of close associates, and nothing resembling a network of trusted colleagues accumulated in the course of his career and now strategically posted in the bureaucracy and business as a governing team-in-waiting. Only three individuals may be clearly identified as part of a true inner circle: Andrey Chobotov, his closest aide; Vladimir Chernov; and Nikolay Pankov (for more details on each of these figures, click here). In this respect at least, Ivanov is well behind his much younger rival for the presidential succession, Dmitry Medvedev (click here to compare with Medvedev’s network).
A fresh demonstration of how far Ivanov is from being a networker, let alone a clannish bureaucratic operator, is the ease with which many senior members of his team at the defence ministry have been eased out since his departure by his successor as defence minister, Anatoly Serdyukov – associated with the Sechin faction in the Kremlin. The dismissals, accompanied by the announcement of probes into misuse of ministry funds, have included Aleksey Moskovsky, who ran Ivanov’s weapons procurement programme, and Anatoly Mazurkevich, a protégé of Andrey Chobotov (Ivanov’s closest aide).
While Ivanov’s inability to preserve his defence ministry team illustrates the relative weakness of this former intelligence officer as a bureaucratic empire-builder, the fact of that team’s formation and steady functioning points to the contrasting strong side of Ivanov's people management. This is his tactical ability to forge positive and productive working relationships with the colleagues whom he finds to hand. A good, and highly topical, example is his cordial and relaxed relationship with…Dmitry Medvedev.
This has reinforced expectations that Medvedev may serve as prime minister under Ivanov as president. In general, the more liberal-minded officials in the Kremlin are clearly ready to rally to Ivanov as the next president despite his KGB background and precisely because he holds himself aloof from the Sechin faction and other bureaucratic-business clans.
Ever since Putin came to power, a tiresome commonplace has been use of the “former KGB agent” label as a catch-all key to understanding and predicting his actions. As with all obfuscating half-truths, however, there is here an obvious underlying factual reality. And if anything, there is a better case for taking that reality of a career in foreign intelligence as a starting point for understanding Ivanov than as the key to Putin. For Ivanov’s formal education and then professional training and experience before coming to high office were more concentrated in that foreign intelligence world than was the case with Putin.
This raises the question of whether Ivanov’s progression to the heart of respectable mainstream policy-making is not some kind of front – as if the elite and wider voting public (and for that matter, the international audience) were just another potential agent targeted for recruitment in a charm offensive. In this logic, once the operation was accomplished, Ivanov would revert to type in some sense, showing his true KGB colours.
The flaw in this “true colours” theory is the lack of any logical basis, let alone practical evidence, to support some hidden or distinct KGB agenda in the new senior bureaucratic elite which has taken shape under Putin. The project for the new Russia’s national revival and development as it has evolved in the Putin years has now been thoroughly assimilated – and with unsurprising ease, since the “Putin project” naturally enough matches the instincts of what turned out to be the last cohort of elite Soviet officials who began their careers in the KGB and other prestigious agencies.
This generation turned its back on the Soviet system not, of course, for the same reasons as the system was feared and hated in the West, but rather on the patriotic grounds that the system had reduced the country to humiliating collapse. The present agenda is accordingly one of national revival, regaining influence and prestige in the world – but now as part of the world rather than in a self-imposed ghetto doomed to backwardness, and using the modern and civilised instruments of law and the market in a development process under Russia’s own national control. In particular, this national agenda is increasingly shedding residual nostalgia for the old empire. Ivanov himself is an outspoken exemplar of this tendency – often speaking scathingly of “parasitic neighbours” (meaning other former Soviet republics) as being welcome to do as they please but which should not expect special favours, let alone subsidies, from Russia.
If, on inspection, there turns out to be nothing very paradoxical in post-Soviet modernisation being undertaken by a group of former KGB officers, this does not of course mean that they are some kind of “born-again” generation. Rather, they are reapplying lessons inculcated in them as young men in today’s utterly transformed circumstances.
Obvious as it is, the contrast between people of Ivanov’s late-Soviet generation and the perestroika generation of Dmitry Medvedev (not to mention the now rapidly rising group of completely post-Soviet professionals) should be kept in view. So for example, Ivanov celebrates dominant state ownership of natural resource assets as intrinsically correct, whereas Medvedev presents this as a necessary but temporary stage in Russia’s development path. Ivanov’s approach to international tensions would be more likely to bear that Soviet zero-sum trademark (with the occasional flash of paranoia) than the more youthful and relaxed Medvedev, whose instincts are to find solutions where there is something for everyone.
Yet other aspects of Ivanov’s background and make-up could lead, in practice, to more rigorous and even radical policy implementation than may be expected from a less experienced and less independent figure like Medvedev. As presented by our trusted source, Ivanov reflects his intelligence officer’s training in the way that he appears to be a lone operator – able to work effectively with people around him, but not beholden to clans.
Medvedev, by contrast, has an important power base in Gazprom. So his more liberal instincts on the benefits of private ownership retreat before the tactical imperative of supporting Gazprom’s agenda – from extending the monopoly into thermal electricity generation to preserving a much lighter tax burden than the oil sector on the grounds of the heavy burden of (in reality, untransparent and inefficient) capex.
Ivanov presents the policy platform of the mature Putin administration in much more uncompromising terms. As he presents things, the new state-controlled holding companies are designed to help realise international comparative advantage, but he warns that this means neither state protectionism subsidising weak industries, nor cosy monopolisation of domestic markets including “by the natural monopolies in the infrastructure and energy sectors which are to be restructured”. In short, Ivanov comes across as being earnest about the stated policy agenda.
Our trusted source highlights the manoeuvres of the Kremlin faction associated with Igor Sechin to stop Ivanov from becoming president. This faction sees a third Putin term as the only sure way to protect its interests (and in the face of Putin’s determination to stand down, has resorted to promoting complete ciphers such as the present Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov as succession candidates). It follows that this ‘third-term party’ will concentrate its fire on whichever serious succession candidate happens to be the front-runner – as Ivanov has become since February 2007. But the Sechin group’s marked hostility to Ivanov also stems from a perception of his independence and rigour being a threat. This perception – rational in its own terms – also nicely captures the potential of an Ivanov presidency to reduce Russian country risk.
Download PDF
