Interview: The Notion Of A Russia With Limitless Resources 'Is A Propaganda Picture'

Yekaterina Schulmann is an exiled Russian political scientist, professor, and commentator with a long history of outspokenness.

She gained influence in the 2010s as a specialist in legislative processes and an increasingly outspoken critic in print, radio, and on social media of persecution and perceived rights abuses in Russia.

In 2019, Schulmann was dismissed after a yearlong stint from Russia's Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, a consultative body. In 2022, two months after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, she left her homeland for a teaching post in Germany and days later was declared a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities.

She talked to RFE/RL's Georgian Service recently about "power games" in Vladimir Putin's Russia, the autocratic Russian president as an "agent of chaos," the “wild capitalism” that fuels his war effort, and the ways Putin and others have exploited Russian society.

RFE/RL: Let's begin with the latest government reshuffle in the Kremlin. What transpired and why?

Yekaterina Schulmann: As far as we can judge, the whole reshuffling thing that has been so widely discussed before the presidential elections didn't amount to much, as all the principal figures are [still] in their places. Among the Siloviki [the network of former and current state-security officers], the so-called presidential ministers, although significant change has taken place as there’s a new minister of defense, all the rest have stayed…. It's a kind of bureaucratic etiquette in Putin’s system that everyone ought to somehow declare that they don’t desire the post they occupy and would gladly leave if only allowed to do so.

But my point is that the head of the FSB [Federal Security Service Director Aleksandr Bortnikov], the head of foreign affairs [Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov], the FSO [Federal Protective Service Director General Dmitry Kochnev], all the rest, they are in their places, no matter what their age, health, or success in their position.

This system doesn't get rid of people unless they were disloyal; incompetence is not normally the reason for demotion. This is the law of every autocracy.

RFE/RL: Let's talk about two of the most high-profile figures involved in the reshuffle: [longtime Defense Minister] Sergei Shoigu and [longtime FSB head then Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai] Patrushev. Is that a sign of falling out of favor? A demotion?

Schulmann: You hear a lot of interpretations of that; I'll tell you mine. Shoigu and Patrushev are both big beasts, and they are both old timers and their careers are older than the president’s. Shoigu was in ministerial work before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the incumbent [president] was a nobody. Patrushev outpaced him in career terms until Putin became head of the FSB; before that, in the FSB, Patrushev's career was the more successful one.

Putin didn't make much of a hit in the KGB, which is an open secret. His true career only started once he became, by fortunate chance, an aide to the mayor of St. Petersburg [then Anatoly Sobchak]. Before that, he didn’t advance within the KGB at all; but Patrushev did.

Shoigu and Patrushev are not merely heavyweights but also the heads of their respective clans. They have dependents, clientele, “children” -- this is what is called extended political family, which is a feature of patrimonial politics in post-Soviet autocracies. It resembles mafia structures. So we see them both demoted -- you can’t circumvent that fact -- [but] they haven’t been purged, they haven’t been accused of anything.

This is another interesting feature of our highly conservative and, at the same time, highly personalized system: We don’t do purges. Even when we have criminal cases against people, they’re never given a political dimension; it’s always a bribe, it’s always an economic crime…. The elites are accustomed to economic crimes accusations, but state treason, espionage, that's a different cup of tea altogether. It's an imaginary crime; it has no substance. That would be an altogether Stalinist thing, and they’re afraid of that.

RFE/RL: Any of them, I suppose, would gladly accept being called a pickpocket rather than a traitor.

Schulmann: Of course. State treason is for scientists or journalists, for some of the lower-civilian personnel who have run afoul of red lines, but not for the big guys. So coming back to our big guys, to Shoigu and Patrushev: We are dealing with an aging personalist autocracy. Personalist autocracies statistically more often fall victim to coups than to mass protests.

The chief business of an autocrat is to remain in power. To do that, he needs to preserve the balance of the clans without unduly weakening anyone or allowing anyone to strengthen themselves too much. I think the Shoigu clan and generally the Ministry of Defense have been overly strengthened by the war.

A war has consequences. If you spend that much money on your Defense Ministry, it grows. If you publicize a war as a kind of new patriotic war, you'll probably have popular military leaders; and you can't allow that, because you’re supposed to be the one and only, of course. So you have to act very carefully and very delicately and, again, I know the term sounds strange, but this has been delicately executed.

RFE/RL: All these seemingly 5D chess moves by Putin lead me to a question: We all know who the top man is in Russia, but who is second and how much sway and power do they hold?

Schulmann: I’ve called Russia a “bureaucratic autocracy.” It’s a personalist autocracy in strict political science classification. We don't have a ruling party like party autocracies. Russia is not run by a military junta like military autocracies. We don't have an established succession mechanism that monarchies have. So we’re a personalist autocracy: Power is concentrated in the hands of the leader and his immediate surrounding. However, we’re a big country that can't be run by a president and his five friends [alone].

In my opinion, the one real institution of Russia is its bureaucracy, both civic and armed. People change, institutions remain; this is the technical definition of an institution. So we don't have a vertical in the sense that you have the second man, the third man, the fourth man, etc. We have the first person and then after that [empty] space. We have these big clans, and it’s the job of an autocrat to preserve the balance. He's an arbiter of intra-elite conflict. He's not very good at that.

RFE/RL: Does the job include making sure that no second man ever emerges?

Schulmann: Yes, exactly. So that no second clan or primus inter pares emerges. You have those clans and you try to keep them there, not allowing anyone to become the first and gain inordinate power.

RFE/RL: And are the clans vying for second status after the tsar, or are they vying to become the tsar themselves? What are the maximum and minimum goals if you are a clan vying for power in Putin's court, if we can call it that?

Schulmann: I don't like this monarchy metaphor; I think it's misleading. Of course it's natural to call a man a tsar if he's been in his position for 25 years. But a monarchy, first and foremost, has a formal succession mechanism. We don't have that.

I’d look at this clan system from the resource-based angle: They’re vying for resources. They need to preserve their resource base, at a minimum. At a maximum, they need to expand. That's what this power game is all about. Of course, the clan which manages to install a successor of its own wins the game. But now that's only a distant perspective. Before that, they have to “run twice as fast” to stay in place, like in Lewis Carroll’s [Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland], to preserve their resources or to grab other people's belongings.

RFE/RL: Roughly a year ago, you gave an interview in which, among other things, you said that thinking war has become the norm in Russia would be a mistake. Is this still true after [former mercenary leader Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s demise, [jailed opposition leader Aleksei] Navalny’s death, Russian fortunes seemingly turning for the better in the war, and Putin seemingly very strong domestically? Has it perhaps become a new norm now, has society consigned itself to it?

Schulmann: I think that accustoming themselves to a war and being tired of it appear to be one and the same thing. We know from sociological data that war ceased to be popular with the majority [of Russians] approximately by the end of 2023. Still, support is concentrated in the elder demographic. The main concern expressed by respondents is that it is taking so long, they don't understand why it should be taking so long.

RFE/RL: To win?

Schulmann: It's not “why is it taking so long for us to win?” It's not about losing or stopping the war. In a situation of military censorship and lack of public discussion, it's hard to know exactly what people mean. But we can assume the majority would be glad to have this war over. They don't understand all the implications of it. They can’t picture all the consequences. But they are tired of living in constant anxiety and unpredictability. They're afraid of the new mobilization. They don't like Belgorod being bombed.

Some of them might say the only way to stop Belgorod from being bombed is to take Kyiv, but the idea of the majority is an end to the war would be a good thing. Some of them say the war should end in our victory: “That's why we want the war to end, because the end means we have won.” But I suspect this is something like lip service, the right thing to say, the socially approved answer. Because you can't very well say, “I want this war to end no matter how it ends.”

And for the elites, since we’re not in a democracy, what people want doesn't matter much. But this mood of the elites is fluid, they're not very strategic people. For example, a couple of months ago the general idea among the elites was that “we'll just have to hold on through the end of 2024 and then Donald the savior will come and make everything right for Russia.” This has changed. There isn’t much hope in [presumed Republican presidential nominee and ex-President Donald] Trump any longer.

So there's been much more talk about an agreement. I’d describe it like this, which may seem paradoxical but I hope you'll understand what I mean: The elites love the state of war, because it strengthens their position internally. They have more money than they had previously, they have more political sovereignty. They like the besieged fortress situation, which again simplifies internal policy management. They like everything except the actual military action, because it's unpredictable, it's costly, it elevates people like Prigozhin, it creates constant anxiety, and it costs a lot of money, and some of this money goes to the people and they don't like that, they don't like paying that much.

The Russian state has never paid that much money to its people for anything -- for their work, for their life, for their death, for whatever. The idea that Russia is a country of limitless resources is a propaganda picture. But the strange thing, and it is so strange that we can't realize it, is this: It has always been the case in Russia's history that people are abundant but money is scarce.

Hard currency, gold, or foreign currency have value; people have no value whatsoever. “We have as much [human capital] as we need.” Now it's the other way around. I can't adequately explain to you, I can’t even explain to myself what a gamechanger it is. They don't understand it themselves, because they've never seen anything like this.

RFE/RL: For the first time in the history of Russia, Russia has to pay for dead Russians.

Schulmann: Exactly, and we don't have enough Russians. We have more money than we know what to do with, but we don't have the people -- either on the front lines or back home. We have a huge labor deficit, and very slowly there comes a realization that you can't pay 1.25 million rubles to a person who in two weeks’ time will be killed in a senseless “meat grinder,” as the expression goes.

The army management doesn't understand this yet. The political leadership doesn't understand it yet but is slowly beginning to realize it. I don't know what the implications will be; I can only tell you as a social scientist that it's a huge change.

RFE/RL: In the first year and a half of the war, a line that I heard former Western military commanders repeat over and over again in interviews but which has now disappeared altogether from the narrative was that Russian mothers will rise up “when the coffins will start flowing back home.” Much like in Afghanistan, they'll say enough is enough, and it will be a huge gesture, it will have symbolic meaning, it will have political weight, and so on. More than two years into the full-scale war in Ukraine and, according to some estimates, more than half a million dead Russian soldiers later, we don't see Russian mothers in the streets much. Where are the Russian mothers?

Schulmann: It's so typical for generals to be forming their estimation based on previous experiences. There was a soldiers' mothers' movement during and after the [Soviet-era] Afghanistan war and the two Chechen wars because those wars were waged with conscripts, and anyone can become a conscript. It was a death toll that implicated the whole social base, every social strata could be affected. This war is run on strictly feudal lines, on the lines of, I would say, wild capitalism. It's a market arrangement. Money is paid and you go voluntarily.

RFE/RL: You're not corralled into it, you're getting paid for it.

Schulmann: Of course. Even the mobilized, unless they were very stupid -- and some of them were, again, it was not their fault, they just had no education so couldn't understand their rights and the consequences of their actions -- but mostly people knew what they were after and they were after money. Money for themselves; money for their families.

There’s a movement of the wives of the mobilized that, in fairness, we have to mention. And it has been impossible to either quash it or, as is more customary for the Russian political machine, to take it over. So they had to declare it a “foreign agent,” which is kind of ridiculous. And I read that [designation] as an admission of defeat. They could do nothing with it, so they were driven to a ridiculous decision.

So Putin took a soldier and he got killed defending Russia’s interests, but apparently his wife is a “foreign agent” for wanting her husband back home. This is, again, self-defeating. We need to mention this movement and not dismiss it, it’s important; but it hasn’t become a widespread one.

RFE/RL: Do you think it will?

Schulmann: It will if the payments are stopped.

RFE/RL: Roughly a year ago, when the war didn’t seem to be going in Russia’s favor, there was much talk about inflicting strategic defeat on Russia and Russia being weakened as a result of this war. Is this still in the cards?

Schulmann: I can’t talk about military matters, I don't have the expertise. But I can tell you one thing as a social scientist and as a Russia watcher: Whatever factor we take -- be it the labor crisis that I mentioned, the demographic situation, the economic imbalances, the aging of personalist rule, the infighting of the clans, where now everyone has a little private army of their own -- each and every one of these factors and all of them in combination are factors of long-term decline.

As a Russian citizen, as a Russian educator, I get no pleasure at all in saying this. The question that I get is whether this or that event or occurrence or tendency will, in stark terms, upset Putin or defeat Russia; and the answer is no, not immediately. But none of them will go away. It will be a country with an aging society, with a disbalanced economy, with an incompetent leadership, and these are the factors of inevitable decline. It’s very bad. It's bad for the country; it's bad for the continent.

RFE/RL: Should one be afraid of weakening Russia, as many in the West seem to be?

Schulmann: One shouldn’t be clutching Putin as the devil we know and an antidote to chaos. He is an agent of chaos. The longer he stays, the worse legacy he will leave.

He will leave behind a deinstitutionalized system that is based wholly on personal relations, and when these people disappear those relations are nullified. He will leave a brutalized society with a higher crime rate and all positive social tendencies reversed, from alcohol consumption to violent crime. So the longer he stays, the worse it will be afterwards.

These so-called long reigns, long personalist reigns, are very often followed by what we call in Russian history a “time of troubles” -- a “smuta.” It's not inevitable, but it’s highly possible. Perhaps we'll somehow wiggle out of this crisis without unduly endangering our own lives and the safety of Eurasia, but that’s not guaranteed.

RFE/RL: And finally, let's try to look for any sort of silver lining. If there’s hope for a better Russia, where is it to be found?

Schulmann: There is. And this hope is to be found in the Russian people and Russian society. Russia is urbanized, with a high percentage of people with post-secondary education. In this, we are inferior only to Canada and Israel. We'll leave out the matter of the quality of that education, but at least it's no longer a peasant empire. It’s an aging society with a medium age of around 40 and with a low birthrate.

This society is not a very good one for a full-fledged civil war. It's not like a hundred years ago when it was a country full of young people with high mortality and high birthrates and millions and millions of youths flowing from the countryside to the cities. This is no longer the case. It doesn't require a majority to create a bit of a bloodshed, but it needs a different demographic to have a civil war.

This is an extremely dispirited, isolationist society with low trust levels and which is unpleasant to deal with. But it's not an Orthodox [version of] Iran. First of all, there’s no Orthodoxy: Russian society isn’t religious; religion is getting less popular, not more.

It’s also a society that can be taken over but by another autocratic group. That is not an impossibility. My bet is rather on civic bureaucracy to take over the country and to preserve its functionality.

RFE/RL: I can't help but notice that you didn’t mention the Russian opposition at all.

Schulmann: Because I think the term is misleading. Opposition is a group of people or groups, a constellation of groups, fighting for political power, mostly by electoral means. We can't have that in the country because the existing so-called parliamentary opposition doesn't oppose anything, and we can't have that outside of the country because people outside of the country are forbidden from legal or political participation.

We have what I would call the resistance, anti-war resistance. People forming groups or sometimes individuals who are against the status quo, who don't like this war situation and want it to be over.

And this is important because the pressure to end this whole thing is being exercised even by the silent public opinion. It’s a paradox to say that public opinion can be silent; but in an authoritarian environment, it’s more often silent than not.

So this is a factor that will and does influence even the decisions of an auto-pilot government, and it will shape the country's future. The nonexistent opposition perhaps is for the better, because we have in Russian history the case of a party formed in immigration coming home and taking power -- the Bolshevik party -- and we all know how well that ended. The results are dubious, to say the least.

This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.