Olga Kryshtanovskaya: It’s pretty widely understood that Russia is run by clans. Their leaders include Igor Sechin [chairman and chief executive officer of state-controlled oil company Rosneft], Sergei Chemezov [general director of Rostec, a state corporation that deals in military and other technologies], Sergei Ivanov [former defense minister], Nikolai Patrushev [former director of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB]. There’s no institution that gets together and votes, but somehow they interact and Putin makes the final decisions, keeping in mind the interests of the clans. [...]
It’s somewhat similar to China’s Central Military Commission under Deng Xiaoping. People from Russia’s security services [Putin was a KGB officer] are big fans of China. A lot of them think that if Yuri Andropov [general secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984] had stayed in power, Russia would have followed the Chinese path. All the levers of power would have remained in the party’s hands, and private business would have been allowed to develop only in certain parts of the economy. So it’s the Deng Xiaoping model. [...]
I looked at it using game theory, and concluded that the elite is likely to betray Putin. As soon as Putin indicates which group's candidate he prefers, the optimal strategy for the other groups is to undermine that candidate — because if he wins, they stand to lose everything.
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