Table of names

Igor Ivanovich Sechin

Second only to Putin is the president’s longtime friend and adviser, Igor Sechin, who currently serves as deputy head of staff, supervising the flow of documents and the president’s schedule. Like Putin and many other Kremlin insiders, Sechin was born in St Petersburg and graduated from Leningrad State University, where he studied French and Portuguese. Although his biography on the Kremlin website does not mentionthe security organs, Sechin served in the mid-1980s as a military interpreter in Mozambique and Angola, which would have been unusual without some intelligence background. In the early 1990s, he worked for St Petersburgmayor Anatoli Sobchak along with Putin, whom he followed to Moscow in 1996. In 2004, the state-owned oil company Rosneft elected Sechin chairman of its board. Rosneft was then the country’s sixth largest oil producer, but after swallowing the main production unit of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos in 2004 it jumped to second place. According to the newspaper Kommersant, owned by a businessman loyal to the Kremlin, Sechin recently appointed the 25-year-old son of FSB chief Nikolai Patrushevas his personal adviser in Rosneft; the young Patrushev is himself an FSB captain who had been working on the oil sector.

Anatoly Serdiukov

The appointment of Anatoly Serdiukov as the country’s 44^th defense minister on February 15, 2007 flabbergasted and angered the Russian public, even as it passed almost unnoticed in the West. No one in the army had the slightest clue about Serdiukov or his background. No journalist could hearken back to one of Serdiukov’s public speeches or interviews. The Russian generals did not recognize their minister as he appeared for the first time at a gathering at the defense ministry.
After Serdiukov’s appointment, the country and the world learned that he had graduated in 1984 from a trade college with very low prestige in the USSR. He had been such a mediocre student that the president of the school could not utter a single word about his merits when he was swarmed by journalists after Serdiukov’s appointment. In 1985, he started working in Leningrad in the furniture business and after fifteen years became the deputy head of a furniture shop. While working in this lucrative industry, he received a diploma from the law department of Petersburg University, an educational “achievement” considered by most Russians as fake. It was amusing that the minister’s official website did not offer any information about the “commercial period” in Serdiukov’s life, leaving readers to guess what he had been doing for fifteen years after graduating from college.
In 2000, Serdiukov moved from selling furniture to the Office of Tax Inspection; he was initially stationed in Petersburg and later in Moscow. In 2004, he became the head of Federal Tax Inspection, his last job before becoming minister of defense. One Russian author, who could not hide his acrimony about the new defense minister, compared his biography with that of the new secretary of defense in the United States. He derisively noted that when Serdiukov was attending a second-rank Soviet college, Robert Gates was preparing his doctoral dissertation on Russian history at Georgetown University. Then, while Serdiukov made progress in the furniture business, Gates became Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, then Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser and finally Director of Central Intelligence.
Serdiukov served as a drafted soldier for only a year and a half (1984-1985) and left the army as a lieutenant. Some authors predicted that the new appointment would drastically increase the role of Yurii Baluievsky, the head of the General Staff, while others foretold the emergence of tense relations between the seasoned General Baluievsky and Serdiukov. When Baluievsky learned of Sergei Ivanov’s resignation, he was confident that he would be the next defense minister. There were even rumors that Putin had already signed an edict for Baluievski’s appointment, but then had second thoughts.
Meanwhile, Soviet history does not know of a military minister without an army background or long-term ties to the army. Some members of the Kremlin’s pool of journalists, such as Viacheslav Nikonov, justified the choice of Serdiukov because of his “financial expertise” and his ability to control the military budget. Others focused on the high level of corruption in the army, which demands a person with knowledge and experience with corporations that try to avoid paying taxes.
Whatever his objective qualities, contended Kurginian, Serdiukov was perceived as a “furniture dealer” and already became a hero of many jokes that have damaged the military might of the country more than an antimissile defense system in Eastern Europe. Serdiukov’s elevation was characterized as “a rude offense against the army.” There is a consensus in the country that the appointment of the new defense minister is unique in Russian history. Hard to explain the appointment, given the fact that it pitted Putin against officials from the army.
Theories on his appointment range. It’s possible that Serdiukov, with his background in furniture, could not present any danger to the president. Besides, his Petersburg’s origin and personal ties with Putin, along with his active role in the destruction of Khodorkovsky’s oil company “Yukos,” as the head of the Federal Tax Inspection agency, could only enhance the president’s trust in him. Serdiukov does not belong to any clan in the army.
Another interpretation of Putin’s decision is that he wanted to get rid of Sergei Ivanov as the minister of defense in order to diminish his chance of being nominated as his successor. Separating Ivanov from the army would take away one of his major political trump cards. However, other analysts, claiming to have access to the mysterious Kremlin, argued just the opposite, suggesting that the promotion of Ivanov to the position of first deputy prime minister was in fact evidence that Putin had chosen him as an heir.

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2007-76-33.cfm

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