Sharon Werning Rivera, assistant professor of government, and David W. Rivera, government department lecturer, published "The Russian Elite under Putin: Militocratic or Bourgeois?" in the April-June 2006 issue of Post-Soviet Affairs. The article investigated the widespread assumption that since Vladimir Putin took over the presidency from Boris Yeltsin on Jan. 1, 2000, large numbers of siloviki, those with experience in the military and security agencies, have been recruited into government service.
The authors examined this claim on the basis of both a reexamination of previously published findings and an original data set. They find that claims of the "FSB-ization of power" under Putin are real but overstated. Moreover, an underappreciated trend in elite formation under Putin is the increasing presence of business representatives in the government and society at large. Even several years into the presidency of former KGB lieutenant colonel Putin, the elite should be regarded as considerably more bourgeois than militocratic, a finding with potential implications for both stability and democracy in Russia.
David W. Rivera
