Russia’s Wartime Élite
This lab is a collaborative project of Ideas for Russia and CEDAR (Center for Data and Research on Russia)
Mentor
Dr. Fabian Burkhardt is a postdoctoral research associate in the Political Science Research Group at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany. Since 2023, he has been working with CEDAR on the research design of the project «Russia’s wartime elite» and on the collection of data since 2024. He is also a non-resident associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). He serves as the co-editor of the Russian Analytical Digest and Russland-Analysen. Burkhardt’s academic work is in comparative authoritarianism. He focuses on executives, elites, constitutions, and digital politics in authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space, in particular in Russia and Belarus. More information can be found on his institutional web profile at https://leibniz-ios.de/en/people/details/fabian-burkhardt.
Project description
The main goal of this project is to contribute to our understanding of elite dynamics in Russia in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The basic assumption of the project is that elite-level developments are crucial for understanding regime stability in Russia and policy change with regard to the war against Ukraine. The academic literature on war termination suggests that coalition change in the aggressor state is an essential precondition for war termination. More than two years into the war, there is still very little systematic research on Russia’s wartime elite.
Taking a “positional approach” to elite analysis, this project aims to partially fill this gap by studying the deputy heads of Russia’s federal executive bodies (ministries, services, and agencies). While these deputy heads do not belong to the top tier of the Russian elite, this class of officials is crucial to day-to-day wartime governance and offers unique insights into possible factionalism and latent discontent (siloviki and technocrats, doves and hawks, mobilized loyalists and silent discontents). And unlike the smaller and more secretive cohort of top elite actors, there are sufficient observable dynamics and variations in appointment and dismissal patterns among deputy heads to allow for systematic and replicable analyses of Russia’s wartime elite.
Methodologically, the project aims to avoid the shortcomings of elite analysis based on anecdotal evidence, insider accounts, and telegram gossip. The main objective is to assess elite factionalism, particularly within the presidential and government-controlled executive, existing checks and balances, and conflict and cooperation within the executive.
The data set of deputy heads is coded to track elite repression, elite defection, the effect of personal sanctions by the US, UK, and EU on career paths, subsequent appointments after dismissal from the position of deputy head, generational change, and elite renewal in the executive, the degree of involvement in war activities, and war rhetoric.
The period of analysis is one presidential term from May 2018 to May 2024, which allows for a comparison of wartime elite dynamics with a “normal” and pre-pandemic period (“before-after analysis” with the start of the full-scale invasion as a critical juncture).
The main data outputs of the project are a data set on deputy heads of Russia’s federal executive, data on personal sanctions, meetings and travels of Vladimir Putin and Prime Ministers Dmitrii Medvedev and Mikhail Mishustin, and a text corpus of media mentions of deputy heads. The main deliverables of the project are an analytical report written by the mentor, and the data sets, which are made publicly available in a reputable open access data repository after the publication of the report. Data collection, analysis, and visualization are conducted in cooperation with the Cedar.