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April 18, 2025 11:14-12:54 - CSPAN

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Scholars Discuss Russian Society

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nicole kobie

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unidentified		And at another level, answering the question thoughtfully requires much more time than we have.
		So I'll just say these things.
		The most sobering hour and a half that I've spent in the last six months was visiting the World War II Museum in Tokyo that presents a rather different perspective on the events that preceded December 7th, 1941, than the one that I learned in my U.S. high school history course.
		And so I think we need to be very much aware of the possible consequences of economic aggressiveness on our part, even economic aggressiveness that is reasonably well justified.
		We need to be prepared to think consequentially about that vis-à-vis China.
		Second thing I would say is we'll lead this year to take you live to a discussion on Russian society and its governance, hosted by the George Washington University.
		You're watching live coverage here on C-SPAN.
		Contemporary stage of Russian autocratization on this level, and we have a great panel of experts who would address different sides of development of the Russian state and how we can study it using methods available to us now.
		So first of all, we have Ekaterina Shulman with us from Freya University of Berlin and Carnegie Russia Center.
		We have Artur Barana from Northwestern University, David Zakoni, George Washington University, and Delanora Minaeva, European University Institute.
		So we will have 15 minutes for presentations for each presentation.
		And yeah, we'll be strict on time.
		So I'll notify you ahead when we're running out of time.
		And then we'll have a Q ⁇ A.
		So, Ekaterina, welcome you.
		Thank you, dear colleagues.
		Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
		And the topic that I'm going to present resonates with a lot of what has been said during the previous panel.
		We all in our different field of fields of Russian studies are dealing with an environment that is getting exceedingly closed.
		The information that was previously available becomes either unavailable or unreliable.
		So we are dealing with an object of our study that actively resists being studied, tells all sorts of lies about itself, and falsifies information or makes it unavailable.
		How do we proceed with our work in these circumstances?
		To outline the general environment we are in, I will say that since the start of the war, or as we should be saying, of the full-scale invasion, about 44 Russian ministries and services have closed the previously available data that they were publishing.
		Of these 44, 35 were statistical data, and the rest was the information about these ministries and governmental bodies themselves.
		That is, for example, the list of personnel or their structure.
		So By 2025, about 28% of the federal budget is now the so-called closed articles, which means that they are not discussed during plenary sessions.
		The materials are not published.
		They are subject to discussion in a closed commission that is mainly composed of state Duma deputies with security service backgrounds.
		About 500 data sets, governmental data sets, have been taken off the internet.
		It is interesting what ministries have been first in this competition of secrecy.
		So, about 70% of these disappearing data sets belong to the following four ministries.
		The Ministry of Healthcare, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Road Agency, and the Ministry of Energy.
		Why is that?
		For example, very early in the war, statistics that show electricity consumption have been taken down.
		Why?
		Because consumption of electricity and the dynamics of it gives you a fairly accurate idea of industrial production in the country.
		So, if you have, for example, militarization of industry or moving the economy on military rails, then your electricity consumption should go up.
		In 2024, the data on production of fuel and gasoline has also become unavailable to the public.
		The Ministry of Internal Affairs has stopped publishing regular and detailed reports on the country's criminal activity.
		Now, we just have generalized reports and more often than not, telegram posts from the ministry's press secretary saying that the ministry is severely understaffed but is doing a great job in fighting crime.
		So, in this situation, when we have less and less data, whatever data is even available is questionable.
		For example, there's a very lively discussion in the demographic community on the question how many people live in Russia.
		And that does not include the problem of the questionable territories, the imaginary subjects of the Russian Federation.
		We are talking of the so-called canonic Russian territory.
		Why the discussion?
		Because the previous general census of 2021 is generally supposed to have been a flop.
		It was conducted while there were still COVID restrictions.
		It was done on a hybrid method, partly online and partly by traditional door-to-door survey.
		People were not opening the doors, and the online part, the Rostat evidently invented itself.
		This is not just the estimation of the experts, but we can judge from signs like deputy head of Rostad, who was responsible for the census, lost his job a little bit after the census was over.
		So, now the majority of experts, when they want to, for example, have a reliable demographic pyramid drafted, they use 2010 census results with adjustments.
		So, this is just to show the situation we are in.
		In this situation, in this position, and I would say this balanced amount of stress has been placed on conducting internal sources, on generally having sources inside the country.
		Because in addition to this Usual authoritarian closure of information and distortion of information.
		We have the situation where a lot of experts have been forced to leave the country.
		Let's not point fingers, but I've heard of such cases.
		They can no longer visit the country, and their colleagues in Russia are no longer at liberty to communicate with them.
		There is a whole separate discussion about the validity of psychological surveys in a non-free environment.
		I will not even be touching on that because that's a Pandora box all of its own.
		But the whole question: how can you know something about the country that you can't even go to?
		And hence, the idea that those few people that are still in the country, still working and still willing to communicate, have some sort of treasured knowledge that we should listen to, I think, is very much distorting the expertise field.
		The thing is, the tendencies that I have outlined that I have outlined apply equally to us, the exiled or the foreign specialists studying Russia from outside of Russia, and to those of our colleagues who work in the country.
		If the ministry stops publishing its data, I can't get at it, they can't get at it either, but I can at least talk about it.
		I can complain, that's a relief, and I can also have the advantage of educated discussion with my peers about what to do about it.
	And in a moment, I'm going to propose a few things that we can do about it.
	But people in the country can't do even that.
	So, what may possibly be the solution or one of the numerous solutions to this situation?
	The situation I think is not quite new.
	The Soviet Union was also a closed country.
	Experts in the West studied open sources such as were available to them, including, for example, regional publications or ministerial newspapers that from time to time publish something that could shed a light on the state of affairs in the country.
	But today, we are dealing with both an insufficiency and the overflow of information because we are not dealing with the Soviet Union but with a new informative autocracy that produces a lot of information and a lot of data about itself.
	So, we should doubly careful not to swallow this propaganda, not to take it for granted.
	So, in this, again, very sad position, we can rely on the specific feature of the Russian authoritarian regime, which is, again, shares most of its qualities with other autocracies around the world, but it has a few specifics.
	It is a highly bureaucratized system.
	It is a system that runs on bureaucracy to manage it.
	Bureaucracy is both numerous, more or less qualified, and like any bureaucracy out there, it runs on paper.
	It produces paper, it consumes paper, it leaves a lot of paper trail.
	We see that it tries to hide some of this paper trail.
	But this specific feature means, for example, that this bureaucracy that wants to regulate everything that happens in the country does this, because we belong to a continental legal system rather than the Anglo-Saxon one, does this by constantly changing federal legislation.
	So, the state Duma, which is not quite, I'm sad to have to say it, but not quite a real parliament, is still a very actively turning legislative machine.
	If the state wants to do something, it needs first to make a certain amendment in a federal legislation.
	So, by watching these changes, you can actually see the intention of the state rather than by listening to whatever state speakers say about those intentions.
	All the official rhetoric is also a useful source of information.
	I'm watching that too, but now we are going to move to the legislative.
	So, how big a rules on this game?
	So, the state Duma Electronic Database is still an open source of information.
	It contains all the bills since 1995.
	The first convocation is not yet fully digitalized, but all the rest are.
	It also has transcripts of plenary meetings, it has tables of amendments.
	It used to have statistics and some analytical material, but that was year in and year out more and more taken out of public reach.
	This is an interesting process in itself because the raw data is out there.
	So, there is an extremely user-un-friendly site.
	Still, it's my favorite site on all internet.
	But if you know how to navigate it, you can get quite a lot out of it.
	Although, again, all the analytical materials, all the aggregated statistics that used to be available is no longer available.
	And this didn't start with the war, but earlier.
	So, I think it was an intentional policy.
	Still, let's take an example.
	In September 2022, the so-called partial mobilization was proclaimed.
	It lasted actually less than a month, about four weeks.
	It seemed to have taken much, much longer.
	And it was, as I will try to explain a bit later, it was a great shock to the system.
	It put the system under enormous pressure.
	That's why I think it was wrapped up so quickly.
	And this is why, after this mobilization was over, the state machines started actively inventing alternative mechanisms of replenishing their livestock without again resorting to the experience of mass mobilization, which proved to be so traumatizing both for society, it was perceived negatively, it is still perceived uniformly negatively.
	A colleague, a sociologist, said that this is one of the very few red lines that Russian society managed to draw for its authorities.
	There is more toleration, according to the polls, for the use of nuclear weapons than for the next mobilization.
	It doesn't say, well, it doesn't say much good of the moral state of our society, but that is what it is.
	So, we see how this activity, this legislative activity, using the word mobilization, either in the title of the bill or in its text, has increased.
	And speaking about titles, I'm indebted to this data and to this pre-CFS to a very, very minor invention done by some friendly volunteers who created a platform that uses the data of SOSADE that you can't access without a VPN.
	And besides, I don't need the whole of it, but it sources the information that I need from the SOSADE and analyzes it.
	So it kind of does the work that used to be done by the State Duma itself, but that is no longer available to the public.
	And why this title versus text is important.
	The Russian state has a passion for secrecy that is omnipresent.
	So the most harmful legislative initiatives are usually entitled on introducing an amendment into certain acts of the Russian Federation.
	That's it.
	So from the name, you can understand pretty much nothing.
	From the Puysnitilians I Piska, which is again those who know, they know, which is a text that the initiators write explaining why they initiate a certain bill, you also can't understand that much.
	Because it's basically a kind of advertising bill, a kind of advertising page that says that the law will benefit everybody, will not entail spending on federal budget, etc.
	So you need to analyze the text.
	Bills dealing with mobilizational activities and general mobilization legislation had much less time to pass, took much less time to pass through the Duma than the average bill.
	Although the State Duma has been famous for its, well, the swiftness and effectiveness of its legislative work, still mobilization bills go through the process even faster.
	And that shows what kind of how prioritized they are by the legislative machine.
	This is average time to first reading.
	You see, after the bill is introduced, they can linger in the state for years.
	There are many such cases.
	So to be moved almost immediately from introduction to the first reading is a sign of prioritized legislation.
	So this is the cloud of words showing what were the most popular titles of legislation introduced into the Duma since 2022.
	And we see here military service, general service, mobilization, and of course these important words, administrativne revolutionia, administrative misdemeanours.
	And here we have one more point that can help us assess how the system itself assesses its position.
	A short time after the active phase of mobilization was over, and mobilization per se is not over till there's a potential degree to that effect, and that has not been published.
	But a little time after the active phase was closed, the state Duma adopted an amendment into the Code of Administrative Offenses, specifically targeting officials and legal bodies for non-compliance with mobilization activities.
	Which means, in retrospect, that during this exit phase, there was, if not active sabotage, but at least non-participation, widespread enough to necessitate the introduction of a new crime, well, a new effect into the Code of Administrator.
	Among these numerous activities, among these numerous activities connected with changing mobilization laws, we have seen exactly the introduction of alternative instruments, like payments for those who sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense, benefits and social preferences for themselves and their families.
	The infamous amendment to the Russian criminal legislation, which allows a suspect person by signing a contract to not just avoid criminal responsibility, but to actually stop the investigation of them.
	This is, I think, one of the most horrible legal acts introduced in the history of law, but that is neither here nor there.
	To return to our initial point, from all this, I would say, cloud of evidence, we can deduce, and here platforms and artificial intelligence can help us, because in my experience, when you ask them for conclusions, they only tell you what you already know.
	But based on this, we could surmise that another mobilization on the 2022 model, if not impossible, is highly unlikely.
	I, as an expert with something of a public position, was relying on this in my comments for numerous media requests like, we have a leak, a source told us, I've seen a paper somebody brought from the general staff office, mobilization will be tomorrow or next week or on the 1st of May.
	And what we could say in our modest capacity is that, again, while not impossible, while not absolutely excluded, judging by the way the system behaves, not the way it speaks, not what it wants us to assume, but the way it behaves in these legislative steps that it's taking.
	And of course, in a system so highly bureaucratized and tightly controlled as Russia, these laws are the rules written by bureaucracy for bureaucracy.
	So these are messages for the system itself rather than for the society.
	For the society, yes, because the people will also be subject to these changes in criminal legislation or tax legislation.
	But first and foremost, this is a message, a signal to the system, to the widespread bureaucracy.
	So based on all this, I was saying that the repetition of the experience of September 2022 is not likely.
	At the same time, we see that the necessity of replenishing the ranks is as high as ever.
	So we can conclude from this that the system is afraid of certain things, doesn't want to run the risk of disbalancing itself, but wants to continue the war and wants to invent ways and creative mechanisms to do this without incurring the self-perceived risks for its own stability.
	And this is What we can learn from analyzing open sources, which I hope every expert out there is more willing to do than relying on whatever somebody told.
	I'm very much, let me conclude with this.
	I'm very much against the mystification of Russian studies, of painting the country as this great black box which is unfathomable, mysterious, and can't be studied by rational means.
	It can't.
	It is tricky, to put it mildly, but it can be done.
	And still, we have a lot of information out there that can lend itself to analysis if we know where to find it and how to analyze it.
	Thank you so much.
	OK, Artur, see you next.
	Thanks.
	I'm Lucky.
	I'm presenting right after Yukati Na Shulman.
	She has greatly introduced us to the topic of state Duma, and I definitely share the optimism of how we can use the available data to make meaningful conclusions.
	And I'll demonstrate that today.
	So here in my work, I propose to focus on how we can get the sense of how the regime transforms itself through day-to-day state Duma operation, Russian parliament.
	Before we get into that, I need to lay out a couple of foundational assumptions.
	So, first of all, we know that elites talk a lot, right?
	They talk about different things.
	And as researchers, we're interested in extracting the essence from that.
	For example, Batura Havlov and Tolstrop code, like I said, give us a snapshot.
	Then, we know that even in the Russian authoritarian parliament, we have conflicts emerging, right?
	So, elites are trying to compete with each other, different leaders groups promote their interests through the Russian parliament.
	And lastly, and even more importantly, I guess, Russian state Duma is a classic example of an authoritarian parliament.
	What that means is that it functions to manage the intra-elite conflict, it provides monitoring to elites and coordination.
	Okay, let us think about our intuition here.
	So, when we think about regime transformations, we are thinking of something that you can see on the slide right now, right?
	So, Russia is gradually declining on all democracy scores, right?
	Let's zoom in into that process.
	So, let's start from the beginning, from the first part, from the first couple of years of Putin's rule.
	When we think about that period, we think it's okay, it's weak democracy or like competing authoritarian states, but not a dictatorship, right?
	And here I'm demonstrating you a quote of a member of a parliament from that period, right?
	They're claiming there, okay, so United Russia, the ruling party, the Putin's party, is suppressing political opponents using illegal means, right?
	So, we see a lot of pro-democratic competition going on there.
	That's the intuition.
	Now, let's zoom in into the last years of Putin.
	Okay, last maybe is not the right word here.
	The recent years of Putin, right?
	Okay, let's zoom into that.
	When we think about the dictatorship, so we see that another deputy here, he is referring to President as like, wow, okay, I was looking forward to see what Putin says.
	He's manifesting loyalty.
	Yes, I so agree with my dear Mr. President, and I repeat his narratives here.
	And let's try to leverage that intuition we have about how the state Duma operates here.
	The thing I argue here is that when promoting their interest, deputies leverage different tools.
	They can refer to different sources of power.
	Will it be an institution?
	As you could have seen, that was a democracy when they were calling United Russia, they were blaming United Russia.
	Or they can refer to Putin.
	A classic example of that would be, okay, so as Mr. President said, and then you start imagining what he would said and then start to promote your own interest.
	Very typical tool that deputies use in State Duma.
	And as a researcher, we can use that choice to understand how they prioritize things.
	And, okay, so this is a pretty much simple framework I have in my mind when thinking about how they make their choices over who to refer to.
	If it's an autocrat, right, this is a really low cost in short term, right?
	I can promote my interest easily, almost in a moment, right?
	Putin wants that, we need to do this.
	But in long term, the costs are pretty high, right?
	You are basically giving up your political power.
	You are empowering a single person.
	And the opposite is true for institutions.
	When we are thinking about institutions, they introduce complexity, right?
	We need to go through procedures.
	As my electorate thinks, we need to do this and that.
	So first of all, you need to win the election, right, to say that.
	But in long term, the costs are really low just because you are feeling safe.
	And I propose here to track that choice.
	I think about that as a scale.
	Sometimes deputies can think about that as sort of, okay, sometimes I use reference to institutions, sometimes I use reference to autocrats, and something eventually plays off.
	And when thinking about institutions, usually we assume something that is opposite to an autocrat in authority.
	An institution in this case is, of course, democracy.
	Democratic procedures, right?
	And when we think about the autocrat, we're thinking about the loyalty manifestation to that autocrat.
	So to study this sort of dynamics, I rely on keyword-assisted topic modeling.
	It sounds super fancy, though it's a relatively simple thing.
	We are trying to discern topics that the deputies are discussing, and topic is basically a collection of words that are likely to appear together.
	And then we calculate a theta, which is basically a proportion of this given topic in a deputy speech.
	A couple of worrying things about the model specification.
	So the data I rely on are coming from the State Duma.
	Thank you to Yutinus Schumann for promoting the data sources.
	Yes, that comes from the same website.
	Are you a fan of Souza Dev?
	Pretty much, yes.
	I mean, yes, that's my career here so far.
	So I scraped the data from there from 2024.
	This is a plenary session, the transcript of the State Duma.
	And then I aggregate that to the level of party month.
	So that's my sort of analysis here.
	I specify that I want the algorithm to calculate 80 topics and two of them are defined.
	And those are democratic procedures and loyalty manifestation.
	I supplement the keywords that I want to track.
	And the topic basically is generated based on words appearing close to the keywords.
	And on the slide you can see some examples like what I think about democratic procedures or the loyalty manifestation.
	Okay, so what can we see here?
	And I think a lot of interesting things can be deduced from that single graph.
	First of all, we see that throughout the progression of Russian autocratization, we see the loyalty manifestation as gaining It's proportion with the length of the duration of Putin.
	And the opposite is true for democratic procedures, right?
	They're paying less attention to that.
	And this is pretty much an intuitive result, right?
	And that's why I think it's fascinating.
	We're finally quantifying some stuff.
	But on top of everything, if we think about how different party dynamics affect that, right?
	If we disaggregate that measure by party, we see that opposition and by opposition, I mean, this is the wrong word to use for opposition.
	Not united for sure.
	Not united Russia is relying more on democratic procedures than the United Russia.
	But United Russia is manifesting way more loyalty than the opposition.
	Super intuitive.
	And I love that science.
	Okay.
	Maybe slightly more interesting topic right now.
	What does it tell us about the regime dynamics here?
	Well, pretty much a lot.
	I'm comparing the measurements I was able to extract from those topics to the polyarchy score from TVDEM.
	And you can see that there is a huge degree of association.
	Basically, they're not identical, but they're really, really close.
	What does it mean for us?
	So, first of all, we see that democratic procedures and manifestation of loyalty to the president helps us to understand what's going on with the regime evolution there.
	But on top of everything, this approach allows us to use the same methods, but for other units.
	For example, if we're interested in regional politics, how different regions in Russia, how their parliaments are reacting to new governors, for example.
	Or we can be way more detailed on how we study things.
	For example, we can easily aggregate the measure to a level of month, two months, half a year, or something.
	And then, lastly, I didn't have a chance to talk about that yet, but I would be glad to pick that on QA.
	Another interesting measure I was able to discern is the degree of conflict into the parliament.
	The declining degree of conflict pretty much correlates with autocratization.
	So, this is a big signal.
	We want some degree of conflict in the parliament for a sustained democracy.
	And there are a couple of sort of future directions.
	We, as decision makers, as researchers, we want to know what determines those kinds of choices.
	And I started discussing a bit how party affiliation affects that.
	We see different dynamics there.
	But there are way more factors we can discuss.
	And maybe lastly, and maybe even more relatively important to the audience here, is that how the regime affects different shocks, cease functions, or mobilization, as Yikiti and Mihala mentioned here.
	We want to know how it is connected with authoritarian stability.
	But that's for the future.
	Thank you so much. Thank you.
	And David.
	Thank you so much, Ivan and Marlin, for putting on this program today.
	It's a delight to be here, and I'm thrilled to talk to you about some brand new work, a chapter from a new book manuscript, which I will use to motivate this talk.
	So the talk is going to be called How Dictators Recruit Talent.
	Which is chapter 4 in the manuscript.
	Oh no, down arrow.
	Great.
	So the project is motivated by a trend that we're witnessing in Russia as well as authoritarian regimes around the world.
	And that is that the general level of educational capital in top-level officials has increased markedly since the 1970s around the world.
	And this graph shows in Putin since 2000 to 2024.
	So I use a measure, which I'll talk about in the next slide, of technocrats, right?
	You know the technocrats, they come to mind, Nabulina, Saluvanov, and a lot of the very kind of well-educated, highly credentialed individuals and officials that are currently running key parts of the Russian government.
	In 2000, the measure I'll talk about, only five, six percent of all top officials had that type of technocratic background.
	In 2024, the number had nearly tripled to about one in six members of the federal executive branch.
	At the same time, you see a decline in the number of Siloviki, people with backgrounds in the FSB or other educational institutions.
	And if you exclude Silovya Strokturi, there are more technocrats working in the Russian government right now than there are people with that type of security background.
	This is one of the big motivations of the project: why do dictators rely on technocrats?
	Because they seemingly have really important effects for governance and the durability of authoritarian rule.
	So, the wrong button again.
	So, I'm sure you're asking what is a technocrat.
	I want to use a very formal, but objective discussion or definition of this, rather than trying to say, look, this person is described as a technocrat, I think this person has expertise or not.
	So, I use three criteria in the Russian case.
	You've had Western education at any point in your career.
	You've had foreign work experience, really, for a multinational corporation.
	Think KPMG, Morgan Stanley, a big French bank, right?
	Some exposure to Western corporate standards, and you had to compete with other really talented people in order to convince a hiring manager of your competence.
	Or you're affiliated with the Center for Strategic Research, this hub for technocratic thinking since the graph days in the early 2000s.
	Collectively, if you had any one of those attributes, I'm going to label you a technocrat, partly for reasons of legibility so we can start the conversation.
	There are, of course, people like Beli Usov who do not have any of these characteristics but are generally referred to as technocratic.
	But we need a definition that is a little bit more solid rather than subjective, and this is what I use in the project.
	Now, I'm going to draw on a brand new data set called Peer, the Political and Economic Elites of Russia, which I created over the last three years, which documents every single top official from the deputy minister level up since 2000.
	So, year by year, who served where, and when, and their complete career background, educational experience, and then I'm going to show you even things like their income and asset disclosures, anti-corruption prosecutions, and generally their behavior in office over the last 25 years.
	This is the foundational data set for the entire work, which I'm calling the Technocrats, right?
	Pretty obvious title.
	Kind of cue off David Hoffman's work, The Oligarchs for the 1990s, and say this is a really key constituency that we need to better understand if we're going to really know the direction of Putin's regime.
	So, the book itself is not just about Russia.
	The Russian data set is central to it, but I'm also interested in the Chicago boys who work for Pinochet Chile, or the Berkeley Mafia who worked for Suharto's Indonesia.
	It's really a study of why smart people work for dictators and when dictators turn to smart people to help run their government.
	There's five questions.
	I'm not going to be able to go through all five, but I just want to give you a sense of what the project does, right?
	So, first, when do autocrats trust technocrats with power?
	So, what we talked about today is why do smart people join corrupt and repressive regimes?
	How do regimes control these technocrats so they don't defect and challenge them?
	Why do technocrats remain loyal during crisis?
	And obviously, I'll be talking about the war.
	And finally, what effect do technocrats have on authoritarian rule?
	And I really make this argument that they strengthen dictatorships.
	They don't modernize countries, but they strengthen dictatorships, and that's something we need to have a much better understanding of.
	Forgive me, it's just out of habit from teaching.
	So, there's a very simple theoretical framework in this chapter, which is that there are a lot of costs and benefits for working for these regimes.
	You get prestige, you get, I'm going to show you some money for your time, but there's also real costs, right?
	Working for Putin's regime has risked your reputation.
	There are personal danger for yourself and your family.
	You have clear opportunity costs from saying no to that job in the private sector or Wall Street or whatever was trying to recruit you.
	I mean, potentially later on, there are limits to your further career groups because people label you as complicit in whatever that regime was a part of.
	So I understand a lot of people went into the Russian government because they were patriotic, because they believed that they were going to make Russia a better place.
	Now, every single person in this room, there's a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations when we make career choices.
	The money matters, but we also like to care and feel passionate about our work.
	And it's really hard to quantify for myself or any of you what the balance is.
	I'm acknowledging that there is this mix, but the goal of this chapter is to say that extrinsic motivations, and specifically, money matters for technocrats staying in office over the last 25 years.
	And as these costs matter and vary, right, as the risks increase, as the danger increases, as the reputational damage increases, we're going to see an increase in the amount of money autocrats have to use or to spend in order to keep technocrats loyal to the regime.
	So I'm going to draw on this brand new data set, which includes all income and asset disclosures from about 2010 to 2021 when they, of course, stopped sharing this data.
	So the first kind of data point here is in 2021, the year before the war, technocrats made 40% more money in official salary than everybody else in the Russian government.
	That's both and bureaucrats without that type of technocratic experience.
	Just those three indicators: Western education, multinational experience, or affiliation with the Strategic Center for Strategic Research, got you a 40% wage premium.
	And I'm going to call this the technocratic wage gap.
	So right there, we see at the brink of war, there are these financial incentives that people are gaining from the regime.
	But what's interesting is that this raise that they got occurred basically at the moment of Crimea, right?
	Exactly when the reputational cost of working for Putin started to kick in.
	You've seen a massive gap for the technocrats increasing their salary, official salary.
	I'll talk a little bit about informal income at the end of the salary at the end of the presentation, but that's going to continue throughout the rest of the Putin regime.
	And this is very much localized.
	What I think the three most important institutions right now in the Russian government: the presidential administration, the government, the government, the Provisa, and the central bank.
	So, again, the only difference is people's background, their education, they're multinational, but they get this 40% wage premium that is non-existent pre-Crimea, but after Crimea, it kicks in.
	I'm going to say this is evidence that autocracies are basically buying talent on the private market.
	And when people are more interested in leaving the government, they have better outside options, and they really don't like the vibe of staying with the Putin regime.
	Putin has to open up the pocketbook in order to compensate them more, whether through networks or other kind of incentives to get them to stay.
	What's interesting is that you don't see that technocratic wage premium being so visible for the rest of the ministries for the rest of the government.
	So it's really those top-level officials that are determining policy.
	You can see that technocrats generally make about 10 to 20% more over this period, but that huge difference that we see after 2024 is really concentrating among the top officials in the government.
	So I, you know, I'm not naive that there's a lot of other ways to make money in the Russian government, and that is very attractive to officials of all stripes.
	So what I really want to argue in the second half of the chapter is that that money matters because it invites people to start engaging in different types of corrupt schemes that later can be used against them in order to prevent them from defecting.
	So I'm going to draw on some work from Novaya Gazeta from about 10 years ago, which talked about Sluzhevnikartieri, right?
	Service apartments, one of the key perks of working for the Russian government.
	When you get basically a free apartment, and then over time, you have the right to privatize it.
	And these apartments, as you can see, are located in central Moscow, right?
	They're really, really expensive at the end of the day.
	They're market value, and they're transferred free of charge.
	The Russian government was running out of these departments, so it started building new buildings in the 2000s and 2010s in order to increase the availability of this benefit.
	So there are five buildings that were kind of examined in this investigation.
	And what we see is that the technocrats didn't say no to this benefit.
	If anything, they participated in this corrupt scheme at the same level as bureaucrats with different types of backgrounds.
	So I want to kind of dispel this notion that just because you were educated in the West or you worked for multinational corporations, you're somehow cleaner or more honest in general than the rest of bureaucracy.
	Of course, there are exceptions.
	Of course, there are people that say no.
	But we have to acknowledge the fact that corruption and compromise and compromising information is going to be a major influence on decision-making amongst officials.
	And when you look in the data, so this from the disclosures, we know the size of the real estate assets of every single official from 2010 to 2021.
	So this is the same plot that I showed you before, but instead of income being shown, I'm just going to show you the total square meters of all the real estate assets among the two groups of the government.
	And what you see is the technocrats really started investing in domestic real estate a couple years prior to the war.
	There are a lot of different reasons for this.
	Maybe they thought they were staying put.
	Maybe the deofturization and the laws on foreign investment started to kick in and they thought it wasn't worth the risk.
	There are definitely technocrats that have apartments in France and in Bulgaria and the United Kingdom.
	But we see that that wage gap is important because then you have that extra disposable income that you're going to invest in domestic real estate that is highly illiquid.
	So if you're not prepared for an invasion in February 2022, there's a greater cost and you aren't as able to unload those assets and there's just a lot more financial baggage that's going to drag you and keep you closer to the regime.
	I've got other explanations of why people stayed.
	I don't think there is one idea that explains everybody's decision, but I want to focus this idea on a corruption trap, at least for a substantial number of Russian officials that had made these investments and therefore were kind of caught flat in February 2022.
	So a couple of big takeaways and then we'll happily seed the floor.
	So the big one is that authoritarian regimes must have to buy talent on the market in the 21st century.
	Things are just too competitive.
	There's too many ways to kind of self-actualize and there's too many ways to make money, especially with the vibrant private sector in the West.
	So if authoritarian governments want to compete in this global economy, they have to be able to offer competitive or relatively competitive salaries that are commensurate with the other options that people are getting on the outside market.
	And that price is often determined by how much bad behavior the regime is guilty of.
	When they're invading neighboring countries, the reputational costs increase, and we see this rise in the salaries of the most competent people working for the government.
	And that just stays put for the rest of the regime.
	And also the second point that, you know, meritocracy is not sufficient, and that smart people also steal.
	One of the big kind of takeaways of this book is that the competence doesn't necessarily mean you've developed a moral compass.
	I think during the 20th century, we thought the more people we invited to our universities and educated in the tenets of democracy and exposed to our curriculum, they would go back to their own countries and really push for democracy and try to transform those societies.
	I think, unfortunately, that dream is really far from reality.
	And right now, in 2024, there are just one in every four cabinet ministers in the Thorotian regimes has been educated in the West.
	And they're not necessarily pushing for regime change.
	If anything, their presence there is strengthening the ability of the dictator to stay.
	Stay in power.
	So then the second correlated of this is that there is this idea of a corruption trap, right?
	You get people to join, maybe based on financial incentives, maybe based on appealing to their desires for realizing visions of Russian economic growth or improvements in governance or their overall patriotism.
	But those extrinsic motivations really matter.
	And there's just a lot of evidence that I talk about cars in the book.
	I talk about just about any way of thinking and conceptualizing about informal income.
	The technocrats are basically just as complicit as the rest of the bureaucrats in many of Putin's corrupt schemes.
	And I think we need to acknowledge that as a drag or as a hindrance to them kind of picking up shop and defects.
	So thank you very much.
	I look forward to your questions.
	Fantastic.
	So, Eleonora, your turn.
	Um, all right.
	Thank you very much.
	And I will keep talking about officials, but not about top-level officials, but about local-level officials in Russia and also in other autocracies.
	So I would like to start with an anecdote, short story from one town in the Euros, Russian Euros.
	Since 2015, the City Council abolished popular mayoral elections in this city.
	And mayors were not anymore elected, but they were appointed by the City Council together with the regional authorities, regional administration.
	And this January, in 2025, something unexpected happened.
	A technical candidate, a wife of mayor's driver, won the elections.
	She was elected by an accident because of the conflict between the city council and the incumbent mayor.
	However, she refused to take the office and sued the city council.
	In the end, the court ruled in her favor, saying that the vote brought her negative consequences.
	So this sounds like an absurd, but it tells us a little bit more about local appointments in autocracies.
	It says that even control procedures may lose their meaning, and legitimacy may collapse not only for the voters, but also for the elites.
	So in this presentation, I'm talking about sub-national electoral institutions.
	And just to conceptualize what I'm talking about, in political science in general, scientists talk about devolution of powers, usually talk about administrative and fiscal powers.
	But I'm studying here political decentralization, how I call it, because both administrative and fiscal devolution of power doesn't make sense without even fraud and elections, even those elections that are controlled.
	Because even in authoritarian context, as we know, elections may play a role and may moreover they give some part of legitimacy, distinct legitimacy to local officials distinct from the national authorities or regional authorities.
	So yes, here I'm talking about political decentralization, meaning that sub-national authorities are elected, and political centralization, where sub-national authorities are appointed.
	Here I use VDAM data from the Second World War times until today.
	And I use two variables about institutional changes at the sub-national level, both for regional and local authorities.
	And on the plots, oh, first, I must say that maybe surprisingly for you, maybe not, but autocracies more introduce sub-national elections than abolish them.
	So we see that decentralization happens much more often.
	And if you look at the plot, you will see like a blue line which says decentralization.
	And you see the big wave in the 90s.
	And in the plot below, you can see the regions and the reforms that happened in different regions.
	And in the 90s, it's not only the Soviet Union collapse, but also the programs of the World Bank, for example, which facilitated these decentralization reforms, especially in Africa and Middle East.
	Russia was following this trend pretty much.
	After the Soviet Union collapsed, we can see the decentralization.
	And then through different stages with Putin's desire to build the power vertical, we can see that this level of decentralization is going down and down.
	And it's not only the absence of local elections, but also their dependence on non-elected officials.
	And here I will briefly tell you about my study together with my colleagues, Margarita Zavatska and Alexandra Romensova.
	We studied the last wave of centralization in Russia.
	At the local level, we particularly studied the latest reform of the reform which allowed regional authorities to cancel elections of mayors in the cities and reins in Russia.
	It happened in the end of 2014, the beginning of 2015.
	And basically, yes, it allowed regions to replace popular elected mayors with appointees selected by special commissions.
	As you can see here on the plot, share of elected mayors dropped from 43% in 2014 to 12% in 2018.
	And it was going down after 2018.
	So we were interested in how has the cancellation of direct mayoral elections affected loyal authorities' capacity to deliver turnout and votes for the president, for the regime.
	Simply, whether appointees are more loyal than elected mayors.
	We were arguing that political appointees may have stronger institutional incentives to signal loyalty and deliver electoral support, simply because how they are selected.
	And we also put the first hypothesis basically says that appointees deliver more turnout and votes for the president, while the second stresses another mechanism which is very well studied in political science about monogorids or towns where there are only one or two firms,
	one or two big factories, which are strongholds usually of electoral mobilizations.
	So we were expecting to see even stronger effect for turnout and voter delivery in those localities.
	And the results confirmed our hypothesis.
	So Overall, municipal reform increased vote share for the incumbent by almost 4% points on average.
	So indeed, appointees delivered much more votes for the president.
	In monogods in those towns, the effect was even stronger, almost eight percentage points.
	But what we didn't confirm, we didn't see statistically significant effects on turnout.
	It actually says that this capacity was like a ceiling effect.
	Reform indeed optimized loyalty delivery, signaling about loyalty, but it didn't raise electoral participation.
	So those appointees maybe were not able better to communicate with other actors at the local level, or it simply mobilized people for higher turnout.
	And going back to the broader picture, I was wondering how Russia is differ from other autocracies.
	Well, here I collected all these changes at the sub-national level across the world in authoritarian regimes.
	And you can see that sometimes the change happens when the regime collapses or when the regime starts.
	But in the majority of cases, actually the reforms happen without the change of the regime, just in the middle of the regime's life.
	And I was wondering, like, why?
	What may trigger these changes if it's not a regime change itself?
	I used panel matching with panel matching for this data, for this panel data, and I basically formed my samples so that I could have treated and untreated groups which were more or less the same for the same by coverage.
	And I, based on the literature on national elections, on national institutions in autocracies, I tested three, let's say, shocks, three triggers that could potentially influence these changes.
	And as you can see, there are three triggers.
	Mass uprisings, anti-regime uprisings, failed co-attempts, and economic crisis.
	So basically two political shocks, mass uprisings and failed co-attempts, predict centralization, predict the abolishment of elections at the sub-national level.
	While economic crisis leads to decentralization, it leads to introduction of sub-national elections.
	It says that in more stable political conditions, autocrats tend to decentralize.
	But when they are threatened, they centralize power at the sub-national level.
	Then here, my last part of my investigation here asked about the regime duration and decentralization.
	Whether decentralization or centralization predicts how the regime will survive, how long it will last.
	And on these plots, I wish it was bigger, but you can see that there is like a small negative correlation between duration of the regime and its level of decentralization.
	So the higher, the more decentralized, right?
	And you can see that actually there are several clusters here.
	And for example, we see those monarchies which survive very long and they are not decentralized at all.
	They don't have sub-national elections or very limited.
	And we see, on the other hand, those party regimes, especially like Mexico, famous party regimes, which are pretty much decentralized.
	They have elections because they are party-based regimes.
	And they survive also very long.
	But this may doesn't mean that survival predicts like it may reflect that survival bias may basically longer, maybe the survival happens in the most centralized regimes.
	So maybe centralization doesn't predict the survival of regimes.
	And this is what I was.
	It's like I decided to test it more directly with the survival analysis.
	So I just wanted to basically check how centralization and decentralization predict the survival of authoritarian regimes.
	And what it says is quite interesting, because decentralization doesn't have a significant effect on the survival of regimes.
	So it's more safe while centralization increases the risk that authoritarian regime collapses.
	So in those regimes where initially there are institutions with elections at the sub-national level, when autocrats demolish them, it's more risky than in the situation when autocrat doesn't do anything or in the situation when the autocrat introduces elections.
	And going back to the story that I used as my anecdotal evidence, we can say that, okay, centralization increases control, right?
	We saw this on the Russian example.
	Loyalty sharing also increases when you demolish elections, and it definitely reduces unpredictability.
	But in the long term, centralization has costs.
	It may increase the risk of regime termination, first of all.
	It may erode elite quality and capacity, especially in the absence of party-structured competition.
	And this is what we kind of see from that small example from Berezovsky City.
	It's a symbolic case of a system so non-legitimized anymore.
	And you can see from this case that people don't want to run for these quasi-elections.
	So centralization isn't risky for the regimes, but it may be risky in the long term and it may ultimately hollow them out.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you so much.
	I love those panels when you know I want to become students again and go and learn more about each of the studies.
	So fascinating.
	Thank you so much.
	So now we shift to QA.
	So where do we have makeup?
	Thank you, Mark Hatz from George Mason University.
	My question is for Artur.
	Artur, your discussion of how legislators in the Duma quote Putin for their own purposes now reminds me of research I did back in the 1980s about Soviet military writers who often quoted Lenin, always in support of their own argument, always.
	But he was conveniently dead.
	I'm wondering if there's a danger in quoting a live leader like Putin now, either he or his minions can come back and said, I didn't say that, or you're twisting my words, or shut up, jerk.
	I'm just wondering, is there any pushback?
	In other words, if you quote Putin for your own purposes, it might not be his.
	And do they notice, or is it they're just always pleased that he's quoted?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I would like to pick on that.
	Yeah.
	So, first of all, yes, I think there is also sort of historical tendencies here, and they're pretty much vivid.
	So, the way you think about that is exactly how it could threaten in the long term, right?
	They're basically, by quoting Putin, they're giving up their powers right now, right?
	And in the long term, as I show, it's pretty costly.
	He can get easily rid of you, right?
	But your question was about the future after Putin.
	I don't know.
	But even in the system that Putin set up, it's super dangerous to over-rely on him.
	You are basically giving up political power.
	I hope that's a satisfying question.
	Well, answer him, sorry.
	And I'm sorry, the question was evidently to you, but still.
	As different from the Soviet practices of quoting the classics of Marxist-Leninism, the current Russian bureaucrats do not quote Putin.
	They allude to him.
	And this has been shown in the presentation.
	They say, the effective and patriotic policies of our president has led to our unprecedented welfare.
	Whatever.
	As our president has said, we all need to win.
	Whatever.
	So it's not a quotation.
	They are not quoting passages from his wisdom to defeat their opponents in a discussion.
	They're just referring to him as a figure of unquestionable authority.
	This, I think, is the difference, because the classics of Marxism-Leninism provided an ideological basis to the Soviet regime.
	It was a kind of Bible.
	Our regime has no Bible.
	It has no ideological foundation.
	But you need to constantly refer to the president exactly for the purpose Deliana in the presentation to signal your loyalty.
	Thank you so much.
	Please, where we have the mic.
	Hi.
	Thanks for the excellent presentation and very interesting data.
	I have two questions, so I'll be very, very quick.
	So, first for Artur: have you seen any outliers in the data at the level of individual lawmaker or deputy that buck the trend that you've shown?
	Or have there been any discrepancies between the in-parliament docs that are in writing versus the sort of media-oriented verbal deliveries?
	And for Eleonora, you know, narratives matter just as much as actual data.
	Have you seen other examples similar to the Birzovsky that you can cite that support the centralization risks for the government?
	So, this is a great question, and I was not as transparent, I guess, in the presentation.
	So, my unit of analysis is partially, so I wasn't following specific deputies, though I presented the quotes of those deputies.
	But there's some fun stuff going on in the data for sure, right?
	It's hard to identify outliers, but there is a clear pattern how people start prioritizing loyalty more in the long term, right?
	The longer they see in state Juma.
	Those are outliers in a sense that it's relatively hard to survive in State Duma, and maybe that's how they are doing that.
	But to provide you an example of some weird thing I discovered during the analysis of the data.
	So a lot of my models were highlighting Zhirnovsky's speeches almost 24-7.
	Whatever that guy told us was captured by the model as either too loyal or too democratic.
	So he is a clear outlier.
	He, I mean, yes, I mean, who knows Zhenovsky can guess what he was talking about, speaking about.
	But generally, it kind of depends on the duration of your mandate in the state Juma.
	There are a lot of outliers, just views of that.
	Hope that helps.
	I will be very briefly.
	I cannot name other citizens, but I did a lot of field work before the war and basically interviewed mayors and their administration officers and other people who were telling me that, yes, this absence of elections influences negatively on the quality of people who run this selection procedure, this quasi-election procedure, de facto appointment system.
	So I have a feeling, just like a qualitative, based on qualitative research, that it does at least in Russia.
	So, Stefan was next.
	Thank you.
	A lot of creative, both quantitative and qualitative presentations.
	But I have a question on the technocrats.
	So you mentioned you used those three criteria, which to me seem quite restrictive.
	So I just wonder if you checked the other way around.
	You mentioned there's a lot of people who are quoted as being technocrats, but it didn't correspond to my criteria.
	What percentage would you say that was?
	And did you ever try to reverse engineer that?
	Why do certain people get called technocrats despite lacking some of your criteria?
	Sure.
	I hate to say this, but I was 94% correct in labeling technocrats.
	I looked for the top 25 Russian officials where that label had ever been assigned.
	And those three criteria capture 23 out of 25, or 92%.
	The two that they missed, I said, were Belugusov and Silvanov, because Silvanov never had any Western education, has been a government servant his entire career, and has never officially been affiliated with that think tank.
	So I talk about them throughout the book as outliers and try to work in what that implication is.
	But as a quantitative social scientist, I'm pretty happy with 92%.
	The other question I get is: what about Russian higher education?
	I mean, there are incredible universities.
	The problem is Distranet and using the diploma as a proxy for competence.
	And unfortunately, Distranet, as broad as it is, just hasn't done every single top Russian official.
	So there's just a huge missing data.
	And we don't see, for example, that these income trends that I talked about map onto just having a Russian PhD.
	It's just not valued in the same way.
	But I don't want to, you know, I don't want to equate the Russian PhD and the Western PhD because of the level of politics.
	But Belo also has a brother who runs a think tank.
	Does that count?
	And that think tank took USAID grants in the early 2000s.
	So I do talk about that.
	Like maybe he is indirectly influenced by the West.
	The more I change, the more tricky it gets.
	Vladimir.
	Thanks, David, for a fascinating presentation.
	But I just wonder to what extent patterns of technocratic recruitment in Russia are country-specific and context-bounded.
	Because I can easily imagine nearly the same approach of, say, Chinese or Kazakhstani government to recruitment of technocrats.
	And maybe it's not much about Russia, but more about autocracies in general.
	And slightly beyond the scope of the presentation, can you summarize findings of effects of technocrats?
	I know that it's a topic of different presentations, but maybe you can say a couple of sentences on the matter.
	Thank you.
	Sure.
	I think, so I've done more or less case studies of 20 countries that either had or did not have technocrats over the last 50 years.
	The patterns I think are really idiosyncratic.
	You have Kazakhstan with its Balashak program, which GW has benefited from, which has been a huge source of technocratic expertise.
	Other countries have invited Ivy League universities to create joint ventures and try to create technocrats at, say, NYU Abu Dhabi or other Northwestern Qatar, or I think that's right, or Georgetown Qatar.
	How could I forget our esteemed colleagues?
	So then, other times, technocrats are part of the diaspora and they get invited back in shortly after regime change or during moments of economic crisis.
	That also happens in democracies.
	But there's all these funny examples of, especially generals, but not only coming into power and not knowing the first thing about macroeconomics or education service, then getting converted during seminars and courses with like PhDs that flew back during this time of political uncertainty.
	And then they become sometimes neoliberal or sometimes more statist, but they just really get influenced by their interactions early in the regime with technocrats.
	So I think the patterns of recruitment are very, very country-specific.
	But I really make the argument is that it's a 21st-century phenomenon.
	Regimes think that their legitimacy relies on their performance in office, and their citizens are getting richer and expect more.
	And technocrats are really the mechanism by which, without ideology, without coercion, to satisfy citizen expectations.
	You mean there's a massive correlation between performance, legitimacy, and the use of technocrats.
	And I don't want to talk too much about the effects of technocrats.
	Having a technocratic government doubles your time in office, right?
	So about 50% of authoritarian regimes that had what I consider a technocratic government at some point during their tenure, and they last on average about 10 years longer.
	So it is a good strategy.
	And I talk about the effects through economic stability and stabilization, not necessarily growth, but especially stability, and also through modernizing bureaucratic rule through digitalization and just bringing things like KPIs and corporate governance in order to increase accountability as like the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes last longer when they invite these experts in.
	Thank you.
	Also, question to David.
	David, I think something that would be interesting in today's moment globally to compare authoritarian technocrats to democratic technocrats and to see the evolution of technocratic knowledge and involvement in American politics over the past, I don't know, 20 years.
	And something that I think you can, you know, just we tend to focus on autocracies or democracies, but those times seem to have passed.
	We need to compare, right?
	And that's where the leverage from your research on authoritarianism and technocracy will have for general public and general knowledge here as well.
	That would be my, I guess, comment rather than a question.
	How does it reflect on, say, American politics?
	I'll leave it there.
	Sure.
	I was very concerned about the current regime in American politics being very technocratic within the first two, three weeks because the experts seemed to know how to target payment systems and shut down key parts of the government.
	Then it turned out that four or five months of expert analysis of optimal tariff policy was thrown out 48 hours or less than before that announcement.
	And it seems like there's been a rejection of expert expertise when it comes to key economic decisions.
	And I think the administration is jeopardizing its performance legitimacy and ability to win elections by being anti-technocratic.
	And I didn't expect that in the first two weeks, but over time, I think we're going to see the consequences of that.
	Yeah, I do compare a bit with democracies.
	You know, 98% of the work on technocrats in political governance has been on democracies and about 2% on autocracies.
	Even there's a new review article that says, look, we don't really, this is a gap.
	So I haven't had the chance to explore beyond, like, you look, populism and anti-elitism are currents in democratic countries, maybe less so in a lot of authoritarian regimes.
	And that there are also coalitional governments.
	So technocrats can play different electoral roles in Democrats.
	Whereas what I'm really looking at is a single authority, a dictator or a small ruling coalition making decisions to delegate to experts rather than parties coming together and deciding maybe we need a technocrat because there's such a high level of political polarization or we want to shift the blame onto this person because there are electoral factors.
	So I think those are the elections and coalitions are one of the big differences between democracies and autocracies and how much this comes down to one leader versus a consensus decision based on how to keep power.
	Two questions for David Cicane.
	Yeah.
	David, the perks of technocrats are pretty impressive.
	Have you looked into the risks?
	And what is the likelihood for a Russian technocrat, well, reasonably high ranking, to be prosecuted?
	And it would be interesting to know how it compares to the risks for other VIPs or other government officials.
	I refer specifically to the work of Nikolai Ketrov, who calculated the risk for peaceful such as governors, deputy governors, etc.
	So how does it compare in your category?
	And the other question is about the background, and I mean the family background.
	How common is it for the constituency that you're looking at to be the progeny of somebody already important in government or however?
	Again, here a comparison may be to the late Soviet period when children of party officials, of high-ranking party bosses, never aspired to become party bosses.
	They looked into other careers such as in diplomacy or foreign trade.
	I feel like I'm monopolizing, so I'll be quick.
	If you are a non-technocrat and you're investigated for corruption, there's a 40% chance you'll sit in prison.
	And that means you will be investigated, you'll be arrested, you'll be convicted, and you'll be given something other than house arrest.
	If you're a technocrat, of which there have only been six that will be investigated, there's 100% chance that you're going to go to prison.
	And if you do serve in prison, you're going to serve twice as long as that other official who was also convicted in prison, so in sent to prison.
	So I think under a very small sample size, we see the ulikaives and the abusives of the world being disproportionately punished.
	And whether that's because they're technocratic expertise or their membership in political networks, it's hard to decipher.
	But the hammer does drop, it seems, based on the data that I have.
	And you're just kind of screwed if they come for you.
	And you have this type of Western background.
	But again, I don't want to overgeneralize from that.
	Less than 3% of the data have nepotistic connections, and there's only one relative of a Chetnik that I was able to identify who has served at the level they look at, and that is Vorkovich's wife.
	But they met while they were working together and then got married after.
	So I'm not sure it was nepotistic.
	So the argument I make in the book is that most of the nepotistic connections go to the state-owned enterprises and they don't go to the government because the government is hard work and not as lucrative.
	So I think when we think about nepotism, it's extremely important in the Russian context, but it's not in the executive branch to the extent that we might expect.
	yeah now we'll collect a couple of questions so please raise your hands again so thank you This was great.
	David, I have a question for you for another indicator.
	You can't sell your apartment, but you can move your kids out of the country.
	And I think it would be very interesting to have this data for several reasons.
	One is you're serving your government, but you don't want your kids to grow up under that system.
	And I think this ought to be information that should be public because not because anything will happen to the kids, but it's embarrassing that you're there, but they're not.
	And then for you, Artur and Katerina, how about Boloshin's statement?
	You know, Duma nimiesta de la discussia.
	You know, the Duma is not a place for discussion.
	Without Putin, there's no Russia.
	Without Russia, there's no Putin.
	I mean, you know, what do these kind of statements tell you about what's happening?
	And then, general, are Western-educated experts just as loyal, just as dangerous, and just as corrupt?
	Because I wouldn't have asked this question a year ago, but now we really have to.
	So I wonder, you know, I read your presentation.
	If you change Russia to America, you could have fooled me.
	I've been educated, so why are you doing that?
	I'm joking.
	Have you talked to officials who have left?
	Thank you.
	I have a small question to Arthur and a sort of comment to Eleonora.
	So these two strategies, loyalty demonstration and democratic procedures, how they are related or correlated with each other.
	Is it the same continuum or are there different factors influencing?
	And does, for instance, I don't know, decline in loyalty demonstration, like in one of your charts, means an increase in democratic procedures.
	And for Eleonora, you know, it's kind of interesting because your findings sort of put onto the question the effect of sanctions.
	Because sanctions, economic sanctions against Russia will increase economic crisis.
	That means that they will increase decentralization and that will prolong authoritarian regime in Russia.
	So what do you think about this?
	Thank you.
	Yes, one more question.
	Just David, when you, you know, words matter and you put corruption, are you objecting to a compensation package that includes housing, or do you want to use the word co-option where the government is co-opting the influence underlining?
	It was part of the Soviet system.
	They had apartments, they had cars, they had no place to go.
	Here they do have places to go.
	They go some other place.
	But they are co-opted by giving this privilege in a community.
	So maybe the words corruption, which means something very different, may be important for you.
	Thank you.
	Yes, the question for me was about loyalty signaling as done by the various speakers of the State Duma.
	The Parliament is no place for discussion is a phrase belonging to Baris Gryzlov.
	And no, no, Putin, no Russia.
	That is the quotation from the current speaker of the State Duma, Vycoslav Valodin.
	If, and since Duma is not a real parliament, it is part of the system, so they need to demonstrate loyalty rather than any sort of institutional competitiveness.
	So it is necessary for them to say these kinds of things.
	And as has been mentioned here already on this panel, still authoritarian parliaments serve as intra-elite playing grounds or sort of administrative stock exchange places where interest groups can compare their positions and can make bargains.
	Secret parliament is the most convenient place for this.
	And we can see from legislative dynamics, among other things, how these battles are being played out.
	Not all the bills introduced into the Duma are then adopted during the course of one week.
	Some linger for months and maybe years.
	Some get changed beyond recognition during the second reading phase.
	And in those movements, we can see the various, often conflicting, interests represented in the Duma.
	Unfortunately, these are not societal interests.
	Citizens are not represented.
	But economic groups, ministries, security services, central banks, Bearbank, Gazprom or Rosneft, they all have their lobbyists, well-known lobbyists.
	Whole committees, profile committees belong to them in the state Duma.
	So it is a kind of quasi-parliament, but just not for the society in general, but for the elites.
	Sure.
	So a word on corruption.
	I don't want to be too cavalier with that term, but I think they're corrupt.
	I followed Navalny and collected all the data on the cars that they drive, assigned a value to the cars that they report, and divided it by their income.
	And they drive cars that they shouldn't be able to afford based on their official salaries and at the same level as other officials.
	The Sluzevnik Kartiri are supposed to be for poor people, and they're supposed to be for officials that can't afford them.
	So I'm okay with a housing benefit being part of a government compensation package.
	But there has to be opacity and there has to be a law that regulates that so that people can hold the officials accountable if that system is abused.
	There's no transparency in this program at all.
	They're supposed to sell the apartment that they own and give all those proceeds to the state in order to access the Slujevnik Kartiri, but there's no record that they actually do this.
	And the accusations that there's abuse in this program aren't just rife.
	So again, I don't want to make accusations that could get me in court, but I think the red flags are really visible.
	I would love to know where their kids are studying.
	I think there are people in this town that probably do know where the kids are studying.
	I think in my interviews, it's not just the kids, it's the parents, right?
	I think the examples of Volkov and Saldatov recently have shown that your parents are also potentially can be used to influence your behavior.
	So yeah, I think even if we had complete visibility about who studied where, we'd also need to go up a generation and figure out how comfortable people are severing ties with their loved ones or even putting them at risk by leaving.
	I can't really dabble whether all Western officials are loyal, dangerous, and corrupt.
	I think there's variability in human nature across societies.
	And I think we don't have a lot of work on this, but I don't think necessarily having a higher education automatically makes you a better person.
	And I think tragically, we're seeing the consequences of that.
	And I think that's probably the fault that higher education means a lot of things.
	And maybe it's different than it was 100 years ago in the way that it changed young people's minds.
	But again, that's very speculative and it's a big research question.
	So, slightly returning to the parliament and the discussions in the parliament, right?
	So, this famous phrase about the parliament and the lack of discussion there is crucial.
	And I briefly mentioned that in my presentation, we can quantify that and tackle that a bit.
	When we think about the discussion, basically, we imply some sort of conflict, right?
	Discussion implies we argument between each other, right?
	And that's relatively easy to measure.
	I did that using sentiment analysis, right?
	And we see that in authoritarian Russia, we see the decline in the degree of conflict.
	This is the thing I briefly mentioned in the slides.
	And yes, absolutely, they have their strategy with getting rid of the conflict.
	I mean, maybe they need to have a picture of authoritarian system being stable and everyone agrees with each other.
	So, and related to how deputies make choices between loyalty and democratic procedures, right?
	So, the way I think about that is the following.
	So, in one given moment of time, I'm as a deputy.
	I have an interest to promote something.
	And I choose either I refer to Putin or a person, whoever they do sometimes, I don't know, or I refer to democratic procedures, right?
	So, in one moment, it's a binary choice.
	But here, in the work I presented today, I show the aggregate of that, right?
	So, I think about that on the level of parties to a greater extent, right?
	So, that's why I think it kind of depends, and the proportion is not as I mean, those are not mutually exclusive strategies if we think about that in monthly terms or annual terms.
	Thank you for the question.
	Yeah, sorry.
	Thank you for the question, Irina.
	I haven't thought about the link between sanctions, decentralization, and the regime survival.
	Sorry, what I can say is that overall, the economic shock's influence is based on at least one big evidence, which is China, which was very well studied, and which basically says that overall, in general, in all autocracies, not only in China, electoral institutions prolong the regime survival, the authoritarian regime survival.
	But also, particularly with the economic shocks, Chinese case shows the motivation for the regime to introduce local elections when the capacity of the central state decreases and then demolishing them or like lowering them influence their influence when the capacity of the central state increases.
	Because what it means, because if it's an economic shock, you need to maybe shift the responsibility or improve your legitimacy and, in a way, also performance, how the government rules.
	So, then you equip sub-national authorities with this electoral power, let's say.
	And about sanctions, yes, as I said, I don't know.
	Hard to say, but the World Bank programs that were introduced, implemented in South in Africa in general, in Middle East countries, for example, like in Jordan or in Uganda.
	I mean, I cannot say that they prolonged the regime's survival, but they were implemented.
	The decentralization was adopted, and the regimes survive.
	So in the very last question.
	So we have a gentleman in the middle.
	Can you raise a hand again?
	With the glasses here, Roda First, yeah.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, so this is for Katerina.
	So kind of in your opening statement, you talked about also the closure of the restriction of data and information flows.
	Another aspect of that, do we know anything about the way that internal channels of communication have been restricted or closed, say from one department or ministry, I guess, to another, and how that varies or if that situation has changed compared to its pre-war situation, if there's kind of been internal compartmentalization as well as kind of restricting flow of information to the outside?
	That's a very good question.
	And while we don't have a full aggregated data to completely answer it, we still have some anecdotal evidence.
	Russian authorities, ministries and services and the like have a perfect passion for registries.
	They organize all kinds of registries to enter information in.
	Every ministry has something according to their sphere of responsibility.
	And these databases tend to find their way into the open market.
	And so the citizens' data is being sold there.
	But that's not the most important point.
	The important point is that these registries serve as a kind of resource base for the relevant ministries.
	And they very much dislike sharing them with each other.
	This affects sometimes quite politically important projects like the necessity to create a unified registry of all people who can serve in the army.
	This is a top, top priority issue.
	It has been announced by the president.
	Terms have been declared, dates by which it has to be in operation.
	It's actually two registries, this registry, the general one, registry of all the militarily responsible persons that ought to be available to the authorities and the minor registry of Ryestar Paivestak, the registry of letters, which ought to be available to the people themselves so they can check whether they have been summoned or not.
	So date after date has passed without producing a fully functional registry of either kind.
	The Ministry of Defense and the Minister of Informational Technologies are sharing the blame or throwing the blame ball at each other.
	You can read fascinating things about it in one of my favorite publications, the regular magazine Military Commissariats of Russia.
	By the intonation of officials, the Minister of Defense officials, who say that, yes, according to the presidential decree, we are putting extra effort into completing this assignment by which you understand that it is not completed.
	And one of the reasons why is exactly because of the point that you mentioned.
	This unified registry has to combine information from a dozen of ministries, from the Ministry of Sports to the Ministry of Agriculture, that has to submit the list of people who can work on tractors so that they won't be mobilized or whatever.
	Ministry of Healthcare, Ministry of Finance.
	So every governmental body out there has to submit information and they don't want to.
	And at the receiving end, we have the Ministry of Defense that wants a database that will be simultaneously available to users and unavailable to enemies.
	So it has to be out there, but not out there.
	Which is doable.
	We have intranet systems.
	The very sources that I have been citing used to be an intranet network available only on computers inside the state Duma and to some in the government.
	But it is still difficult.
	So the degree of secrecy of this database is such that they can't figure out how to do it technically.
	And again, let me repeat, this is a top priority project because it will allow to mobilize any given number of people without resorting to the mass panic and scare of publicly announced mobilization.
	And this system will also allow, in theory, to, for example, close the exit across the border for any person so summoned.
	Not just the ability to leave the country will be annihilated.
	They will also not be able to, for example, operate their cars or to sell their property.
	All sorts of restrictions are to be imposed on people who do not answer the summons.
	All this is based on the functionality of the registry that is not in existence yet.
	Exactly because, again, our passion for registering things is only secondary to our passion for secrecy, and ministries don't want to share information.
	Thank you so much.
	Let's thank our panel.
	So we now have lunch served outside of the room.
	So feel free to grab a plate and intermingle here.
	So we shall start at 1:30 strict because we have cameras out there, right?
	And I highly appreciate it.
	We will all be seated by 1:30.
	Thank you.
	You've been watching a discussion on Russian society and its governance, hosted by the George Washington University.
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	Technology reporter Nicole Kobe, author of The Long History of the Future, talks about how technology evolves and discusses why many predicted technologies, including driverless and flying cars, smart cities, Hyperloops, and autonomous robots, haven't become a reality.
nicole kobie ▲ ● ▼		If you've ever tried to build anything, you know, whether it's like an IKEA cabinet or, you know, something a little bit more complicated than that that doesn't come with instructions, it's very difficult to build something.
		So engineers who are working on these kinds of problems, you know, whether it's driverless cars or flying cars or, I don't know, even sillier ideas like Hyperloop, they're taking science that we Know works, and they're applying it to the real world, to a physical object.
		And then they're trying to build that.
		And it's kind of in the details where things start to fall down a bit.
		It's kind of in how you actually make it happen, the materials you choose, the business model.

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