Putin Announces New Russian Cabinet

Familiar Confidants Chosen for Kremlin Posts

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: May 22, 2012

Observers have closely watched this week’s back-to-back staffing announcements for clues to whether the government will push through major political or economic changes in the coming years.

On Monday, Mr. Putin unveiled a new cabinet of ministers, replacing all but a handful of long-serving officials. State-controlled television emphasized the appearance of new faces as a signal that Russian politics is being imbued with fresh energy.

But most of the new appointees are career bureaucrats rather than independent political stars and none serve as links to Russia’s growing opposition movement.

And although several especially unpopular ministers were removed on Monday — a response to mounting calls for a crackdown on corruption and inefficiency — on Tuesday they all were given jobs in the Kremlin as assistants to the president. The minister of transport, whose reputation has suffered because of a series of fatal disasters, received a slightly lesser title, that of adviser.

A remaining intrigue concerns Igor I. Sechin, who is giving up the post of deputy prime minister and will not serve in the Kremlin. For more than decade he has wielded tremendous power over Russia’s energy sector and led a clan of security and intelligence service veterans called siloviki.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sechin can carry out his essential tasks — in particular, representing Mr. Putin in negotiations with foreign oil companies to explore risky frontier territories — just as easily from another position, said Ilya Balabanovsky, the chief energy analyst at Renaissance Capital.

“In reality, what we see from the new government is exactly what we would have seen from the old government,” he said. “His ability to negotiate deals was not really a product of his formal title.”

The announcements were viewed as a gauge of whether the Kremlin and the government would serve as distinct centers of power, as they did when Mr. Putin was prime minister. Most analysts interviewed on Monday guessed that with Dmitri A. Medvedev’s return as prime minister, the government would revert to a weak status.

“This is not a new force that has arrived on the Russian political scene, this is a rearrangement of personnel to preserve the power exercised by the various clans,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It is more clear than ever that much of the power will be transferred to the Kremlin, and the government will be a tool of the all-powerful Kremlin.”

The new minister of the interior, is Moscow’s police chief, Vladimir A. Kolokoltsev, whom analysts said Mr. Putin had promoted as a reward for keeping order during the recent protests here.

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, Defense Minister Anatoly E. Serdyukov and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov held on to their posts. First Deputy Prime Minister Igor I. Shuvalov, a close Putin ally, will remain in his post, having weathered a recent controversy about his wealth.

Mr. Medvedev’s chief of staff will be Vladislav Y. Surkov, the veteran political guru who helped Mr. Putin centralize power in the Kremlin, but recently began to advocate more open political competition. The return of Mr. Surkov, absent from the political arena for many months, strengthens Mr. Medvedev’s hand, experts said. In the past, Mr. Putin has not hesitated to remove prime ministers during political or economic crises that aroused a demand for change.

“Of course, Surkov is a very competent political technologist, so he will keep his boss alive,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean of the faculty of international relations at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

The most surprising appointment is the minister of culture. The post was sought by a crowded field of bureaucrats and cultural icons, but went to Vladimir Medinsky, the author of pop histories of the Soviet Union and an advocate of chest-thumping patriotic education in schools. As the news of the appointment sank in, Marat Guelman, a gallery owner, mused to the Ekho Moskvy radio station that “the Ministry of Culture could turn into a ministry of propaganda.”

Experts have long said that the next few years may force Russia’s government to adopt unpopular measures like tax or pension reform, as the country weathers global economic shocks and adjusts to a lower rate of economic growth. “I want to wish you success in the difficult situation in which the world economy finds itself, in a situation of uncertainty with many unknown factors,” Mr. Putin told the cabinet on Monday.

Among the first to comment publicly on the cabinet was Aleksei L. Kudrin, a former finance minister who was forced to resign last fall after he told reporters he would not serve in the new government if Mr. Medvedev led it. “It is not a breakthrough government,” Mr. Kudrin told the Interfax news service. “I have serious doubts that it will be able to cope with all the challenges that face Russia today.”