American historian Amy Knight sizes up Russia’s ‘war weary’ elites

American historian Amy Knight has been studying Russian elites for decades. She spent 18 years at the U.S. Library of Congress as a specialist in Russian and Soviet affairs and has written multiple books on the Cold War, the KGB, its post-Soviet ideological successors, and the Kremlin. Some of her most recent work focuses on the culture of political assassinations under Vladimir Putin. Meduza spoke with Knight about the trials, tribulations, and transformations of Russia’s elites since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The costly invasion of Ukraine and the muted response from many of Moscow’s most influential and affluent make it tempting to dismiss Russian elites outright. But that would be a mistake, says historian Amy Knight, who told Meduza that Vladimir Putin is forced to share power with these people, whether he likes it or not. “He depends on the entire elite,” Knight explained, adding that Russian elites in the so-called “power ministries” and elsewhere also communicate with each other, making it possible to talk about the group as a kind of class.

War weariness

Knight acknowledges that predicting Russian elites’ behavior is difficult, but she told Meduza that the fighting in Ukraine is making everyone “very war weary.” She cited oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s willingness to criticize the invasion publicly as evidence that “he too is aware that there is a lot of discontent” (even if he’s not actually a government official). “[It] makes me wonder whether there aren't some other reasons to speculate that Putin isn't completely secure,” Knight said. 

Western sanctions have “laid the groundwork for gradual and real dissatisfaction with Putin” even though “nothing has happened yet,” Knight told Meduza. She drew special attention to how the war has limited the prospects of future generations of elites, rendering children and grandchildren “captive[s] in this shell of Russia.” “It takes away any hope for the future for the younger generation — the younger generation of these government officials and law enforcement.”

Knight said she’s suspicious of the Kremlin’s capacity to buy the support of Russian elites or a new middle class. Asked if surging defense spending has won the loyalty and self-interest of a new generation of Russians, Knight told Meduza that the government’s swollen military budget still isn’t enough "to actually produce a groundswell of support for Putin.” “I think it's interesting that he's doing this, and it shows how desperate he is,” she explained, arguing that Russia’s higher defense spending is unsustainable.

Loyalty among cutthroats

What is Vladimir Putin’s recourse without broad support? According to Knight, it boils down to personal loyalty. “Without a doubt, Putin values loyalty over effectiveness,” Knight told Meduza, saying that the president’s need for faithful allies explains his reluctance to replace officials like former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu despite failures on the job and rampant corruption. 

At the same time, Putin did fire Shoigu, and prosecutors are now waging a full-blown crackdown on many of the crooked generals who enriched themselves while the invasion of Ukraine was underway. These anti-corruption cases, said Knight, are one of the president’s key means of maintaining loyalty. After all, “he can't go around having top members of his elite shot or pushed out of windows or poisoned,” she added. Putin also keeps Russia’s elites in line by “changing the rules of the game” at various times, subjecting officials to political musical chairs. For example, he recently (and surprisingly) demoted Nikolai Patrushev from the National Security Council. (To complicate matters, Patrushev’s son joined the federal government’s cabinet as a kind of consolation prize — though months earlier, Putin pinned Russia’s spike in egg prices on the same man.)

Despite Putin’s favoritism for proven loyalists, the ties that bind Russia’s elites to the regime are fundamentally based on naked interest, argued Knight: “You can never speak of loyalty because these people can change on a dime if it means their own political survival. […] Nowadays, I think it's cynical. It's about money. It's about position. It's about getting on.” This is true regardless of the Kremlin’s outward commitment to patriotic ideology, she said, reasoning that officers in the security services and even the foreign intelligence are not likely motivated by “this whole business that Putin keeps spouting for his domestic audience about special Russian values and the church and all this.” (She pointed out that KGB officers stationed abroad in the late Soviet era demonstrated the same mercantile philosophy by starting businesses and building ties with oligarchs.)

In an environment driven by “money, political survival, and security,” elites are averse to anything that might constitute “a real rumble within the Kremlin and some sort of obvious public infighting.” “All of [Putin’s] elite are in it together in the sense that they certainly don't want to appeal to the broader population,” Knight told Meduza.

The elites’ red lines

While Knight doesn’t predict an imminent uprising against Vladimir Putin, she noted that there were likely “quite a few sympathizers with [insurrectionist Yevgeny] Prigozhin among the people who were really unhappy with the way the military was conducting the war in Ukraine.” Additionally, she told Meduza that “it's not inconceivable that some members of the elite would form a coalition, go to Putin, and pressure him to make concessions to end the war” (assuming they could recruit people who had “some control over Russia’s mechanisms of force and coercion”). “It's possible that the elite could at least pressure him and even say, look, you've got to resign. We've got to have somebody new.”

But this scenario only becomes plausible if the war in Ukraine goes sideways for Russia in a major way, and much depends on continued (and expanded) Western military support, which Knight vigorously endorses. She also told Meduza that she believes Russia’s elites would likely intervene to prevent another major escalation from Putin — namely, the use of tactical nuclear weapons (“I personally think that this is a threat, and it's an empty threat”) or the invasion of a NATO member (“they don't have the troops or the means, and there would definitely be opposition”).