Climbing to the Top: New Elites in Moscow From Russia’s Regions

Russia’s war against Ukraine has not led to a change in the Russian model of relations between the centre and the regions. However, it has presented the country’s leadership with new challenges, which have required new people who are both loyal and professional. For the first time in post-Soviet history, such personnel have come from Russia’s regions. In 2024, a group of regional governors were appointed federal ministers. Since then, they have been building their own patronage networks between the federal and the regional level.

This new generation of the Russian political elite, known as the Young Wolves, can act more flexibly and creatively than President Vladimir Putin’s Old Guard. They are capitalising on an opening created by the war and may challenge the Old Guard, but they will remain a conservative force that seeks to preserve an authoritarian, personalist regime.

The opportunity of war

Experts often describe Russia’s political elites as a monolithic organism cemented around Putin. Analysts also point to the advanced age of these elites: according to journalist Andrey Pertsev, ‘the Russian regime increasingly resembles the gerontocracy that ran the late Soviet Union, with elderly officials replacing other elderly officials, and some starting to die on the job’.

These characteristics lead to a perception of the elites as immovable and inflexible – a group of people who may well want to think creatively and take energetic action but whose age no longer allows them to do so. And indeed, perhaps Russia would have become a new gerontocracy and Putin’s Old Guard would have died out – if Putin had not launched a war against Ukraine in early 2022.

With the war continuing for more than three years, the Russian leadership has faced the enormous challenge of integrating it into all dimensions of Russia’s political, economic, and social life. To deal with this challenge, Moscow needed new people. Thus, the war has opened a window of opportunity for new elites. What is unique is that these elites came to Moscow from Russia’s regions as a group. This is the first time this has happened in the country’s post-Soviet history.

Who are Russia’s Young Wolves?

Russia’s 2024 presidential election and the subsequent formation of a new government created a chance for major personnel changes. The regime’s new strategy involved calling up the most promising regional governors to federal positions in Moscow.

There were five such governors, four of whom were appointed federal ministers. Mikhail Degtyarev, the governor of Khabarovsk, was named minister of sport. Anton Alikhanov from Kaliningrad was appointed minister of industry and trade. Roman Starovoyt of Kursk was made minister of transport. Sergei Tsivilev, who headed the Kemerovo region, was selected as minister of energy. The most remarkable rise was that of Aleksey Dyumin, the governor of the Tula region, who was appointed Putin’s aide and secretary of the State Council. One of his key responsibilities was to assist the federal government and the state corporation Rostec in maintaining an uninterrupted supply of weapons to Russian troops in Ukraine.

At the same time, patronage networks, which largely determine the distribution of power in Russia, have also been restructured. Whereas regional governors used to be subordinate to Moscow-based politicians, now former governors, having risen to federal positions, maintain close ties with their successors in the regions. In this way, a new network was formed that unites Dyumin in Moscow, his successor in Tula, and his protégé in the Samara region. Similarly, a group led by Dyumin and the director of the National Guard, Viktor Zolotov, has also expanded its influence.

Generally speaking, the Young Wolves consist of men aged 40–50. In terms of their backgrounds, they are mainly former or current governors of regions in European Russia that are either economically powerful, such as Tula, Samara, and Moscow, or geopolitically important, like Kaliningrad. Significantly, all of them are or were the governors of regions with Russian ethnic majorities. These people have no Soviet-era management experience: their careers have developed under Putin’s rule, and they have collected a lot of experience of crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic and the war against Ukraine.

New trends in federal-regional power dynamics

Russia’s model of centre-region relations has remained largely unchanged during the war. Regional governors continue to maintain the authoritarian status quo. However, the war has triggered new processes and opened novel opportunities for regional governors to rise to positions in federal executive bodies. Putin has had to navigate between the need to bring new people to power and the risk associated with achieving complete control over this group. He appears to have considered this risk to be minimal and has relied on the absolute loyalty of people from the regions.

These new regional figures are not yet part of Putin’s inner circle – with the possible exception of Dyumin – but they are striving to become so. Their goal is to maximise their career opportunities at a time of war. If they can coordinate both horizontally with others who have risen to prominence during the war and vertically with their successors as governors, they will be capable of challenging not only Putin’s Old Guard but also the president himself.

However, it is important to remember that under no circumstances will this group support reforms. This is not a reformist but a conservative force, which advocates the redistribution of political power in its favour while maintaining the authoritarian status quo. This new generation of politicians has the potential to reinvigorate the Putin system after Putin is gone.

Irina Busygina is a political scientist and a researcher at ZOiS. She is also a research scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC.