Between this public service and his private sector background, many commentators say, Mishustin’s nomination underscores President Vladimir Putin’s concerns about the resuscitation of Russia’s stagnant economy. They are not wrong. But to view the significance of Mishustin’s nomination only in terms of its first-order implications for Russia’s economic growth is to indulge a myopia that would itself advance the farther-sighted strategic vision for Russia that his appointment likely reflects: a pivot toward a new brand of techno-authoritarianism. [...]
If the direction in which Mishustin’s appointment signals Putin’s Russia is about to head has any contemporary analogue, it lies in a country that is increasingly its ally and also the world’s epicenter of techno-authoritarianism: Xi Jinping’s China. Like Xi, for Putin, economic growth is likely only part of an overall strategic vision. By his own admission, in spite of his Ph.D. in economics, Mishustin’s role as tax czar was more technologist than economist. And so he is poised to fill the prime minister slot within Putin’s authoritarian regime, in effect, having thrived in a government post as a self-identified technologist who developed new and impressive ways of extending the state’s surveillance of the economy.
As taxman, Mishustin developed a set of futuristic technologies that allowed Russia’s government to raise revenues. But these technologies also enhanced surveillance capabilities of Putin’s authoritarian state. For it’s not as if Russia’s tax authorities simply set an algorithm on heaps of data to do the impersonal bidding of state administration. Putin’s political appointees, like Mishustin, also maintain the ability to identify subjects and dredge up transaction-level data at their own discretion. [...]
The new Russian prime minister arrives with a track record of success at this task from his days as tax czar. Putin draws no shortage of Western criticism for security and human rights issues. But economic technocrats even in bastions of Western liberalism praised the economic panopticon Mishustin constructed for him. One official with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conceded that addressing “Big Brother”-type concerns would require additional work but praised the system as a “game changer” that could allow the world’s governments to raise “hundreds of billions” of dollars in new tax revenue. The OECD was founded in 1961, amid the heights of the Cold War, at least in part to serve as a mechanism to promulgate Western liberalism.
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