The war in Ukraine has put Russia’s domestic issues on the back burner, but that hasn’t stopped the curator of the Kremlin’s domestic policy bloc, First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko, from increasing his influence. At present, the most precious commodity for the Russian elite is personal access to President Vladimir Putin, and in that sense, Kiriyenko has become a fantastically wealthy man in recent months. Having expanded his remit far beyond his original domain of elections and the “in system” political parties, he now has many more opportunities for interaction with the president.
Kiriyenko, a seasoned technocrat who served as prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s, has always listened to Putin very carefully. Accordingly, following the president’s February state of the-nation address, he began actively working on one of the areas on which Putin had focused: higher education and the key role played by teachers.
Soon after the address, Kiriyenko met with teachers and explained to them that they were working on the “front line of the fight for the future.” Technically, education is not the domain of the deputy head of the presidential administration: there are specific ministers who are responsible for it, and the overall sector is overseen by presidential aide Andrei Fursenko.
That has not stopped Kiriyenko’s team from becoming very active in the field of education. The presidential administration is taking part in the development of a new “scientific communism”: a higher education course entitled “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.” In addition, an NGO created with Kiriyenko’s support (Russia—Country of Opportunities) has long been working at the meeting point of education and recruitment, organizing every imaginable kind of professional competition and courses for gaining additional qualifications.
Kiriyenko’s expansionist ambitions aren’t limited to education. He has also increased his influence at the gubernatorial level. The presidential administration’s political bloc had always participated in the selection of regional governors, and when gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012 it remained involved in the election campaigns of candidates put forward by the authorities. Still, that involvement was limited to oversight of the process: governors were first and foremost the creatures of influential federal groups or figures close to Putin. Now the candidates go through the initiation of the School of Governors training program: another Kiriyenko project.
One more area into which Kiriyenko is expanding is propaganda, where he has been helped by the dynamic development of the internet in Russia. The Kremlin’s political bloc was always responsible for oversight of the internet, but for a long time it lagged behind television and tabloid newspapers as a source of information for Russians. Now, however, the internet is arguably even more powerful than television in terms of its influence on society’s mood. Kiriyenko and his subordinates have therefore organically encroached upon the realm of another deputy head of the presidential administration: the curator of the Kremlin’s information bloc, Alexei Gromov.
Even culture has not escaped Kiriyenko’s attention. Last spring, the administration’s political bloc made a foray into the field of cultural propaganda with the organization of a series of concerts titled Za Rossiyu (For Russia) at a cost of 100 million rubles.
Kiriyenko’s expansion has always been quiet and methodical. A classic example was the smooth redistribution of mandates between the Directorate of Internal Policies (DIP) and the Directorate of State Council Affairs (DSC). Kiriyenko was unable to get his close associate Alexander Kharichev appointed as head of the DIP, a key subdepartment of the presidential administration: domestic policy was instead given to a man close to the security services, Andrei Yarin. In order to avoid a conflict with Yarin and his patrons in epaulets, Kiriyenko came up with a cunning plan. He engineered the appointment of Kharichev to the previously insignificant post of head of the DSC, after which the directorate gradually took on the functions of the DIP.
After all, logic dictates that since regional governors are members of the State Council, the appropriate directorate should curate their appointment. And if that’s the case, then it can oversee their election too (the election of regional and local deputies can be left in the hands of the DIP). And since the DSC is now running key governorship campaigns, it makes sense to put the oversight of federal elections in its hands as well—and so on. The result is that Kharichev’s directorate is now working on all of the campaigns and Kremlin ideology, while the DIP—previously one of the most powerful Kremlin directorates—has been reduced to dealing with minor local operational issues and interaction with the security services.
Kiriyenko is using the same approach to expand into areas that weren’t previously under his control by creating or taking control of NGOs that are not officially within his brief as head of the political bloc. In 2021, for example, Kiriyenko was appointed head of the supervisory board of Znanie (Knowledge). Having miraculously survived from the Soviet era, this education-focused NGO had been quietly dying a slow death, but following Kiriyenko’s arrival it began holding conferences with the participation of Elon Musk and other prominent speakers. By the fall of 2022, it was coordinating the development of a higher education course on “Russian ideology.”
Back in 2019, the Moscow mayor’s office set up an NGO named Dialog, which was supposed to establish a channel for feedback from Muscovites. In 2020, Alexei Goreslavsky, the former deputy director of the Kremlin’s Directorate for Social Projects (i.e., a former subordinate of Kiriyenko’s) was appointed its head. Dialog collected information on public mood across the whole of Russia. The organization began overseeing regional management centers (RMCs) that are supposed to collect critical feedback from members of the public on social issues and pass them on to the authorities. In practice, the RMCs became watchdogs policing the governors: they are locked into Kiriyenko’s political bloc and operate first and foremost in his interests. The Kremlin’s political bloc is methodically stripping regional heads of the limited independence they once had.
Kiriyenko isn’t just the curator of public policy in a narrow sense. He controls governors and interacts with cultural figures who are loyal to the authorities. He is becoming the teacher of teachers and taking decisions in the field of education.
The result is that the first deputy chief of staff is acquiring yet more grounds for meeting with Putin. Previously, he could organize Leaders of Russia competition events with the participation of the president, but now those meetings attended by Putin can also be with teachers, children, and many other groups of people.
Kiriyenko is doing everything he can to make himself an irreplaceable cog in the wheels of power. In many ways, he is making a success of it: the circle of individuals voluntarily or involuntarily loyal to him is continually growing. The bet that Kiriyenko has placed on expanding his remit through contractor organizations that he actively uses in his own interests is paying off.
