HOW TO GET AHEAD IN WARTIME RUSSIA / THE ECONOMIST

How to get ahead in wartime Russia

The old elite are fretting as a new cast of characters soars to the top

By Kate de Pury

During the first two decades of this millennium, the party scene in Russia was spectacular. 

Glossy magazines documented lavish events at which ministers and oligarchs rubbed shoulders, revellers downed vintage champagne on the dance floor, and Western pop stars, specially flown in, gave exclusive performances. 

During the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, once dubbed the Russian Davos, politicians and technocrats would walk around the exhibition centre gladhanding guests before retreating to the city’s imperial palaces to eat black caviar with foreign business leaders.

Today, nearly four years into a war that Russia is still failing to win, society editors are struggling to fill their pages. 

The elite have become reclusive and fearful. 

At this year’s St Petersburg forum they were scarcely visible, venturing out of the VIP zone only for Vladimir Putin’s panel. 

Some have relocated to the countryside.

Part of the reason for their inward turn is the state of the economy; war spending is no longer enough to sustain growth in the face of tough sanctions and painfully high interest rates. 

But they also scent changes in the air. 

Until they know who’s in, who’s out and who might be informing on them, they limit contact to trusted associates. 

“Members of the elite are not talking to each other about important topics, or networking without the president,” said Mikhail Komin, a political scientist. 

“This is too dangerous.”

Until recently, entrance to—and survival within—the elite was governed by predictable rules. 

People in the top tier of Putin’s Russia were not concerned with exercising political power so much as the distribution of patronage and resources. 

They formed an elite which was never homogenous, but rather a honeycomb of interlinked groups surrounding the president, in whom power was concentrated.

There were those who started out with him in St Petersburg, there were career bureaucrats, there were enforcers, and there were the siloviki—members of the security services through which Putin rose to power. 

There were also oligarchs, some of whom had made their fortunes before Putin became president and were allowed to continue prospering if they pledged loyalty and stayed out of politics. 

Others, such as Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, were close to Putin in St Petersburg and reaped the benefits once he moved into the Kremlin. 

Associates of prominent figures in these elite groups coalesced into clans—affiliation with one of these was usually necessary to make your way up the ladder, and gave you some protection. 

Putin generally sought to maintain a balance of power between the different factions, and individual members found it prudent to stay in their respective lanes.

The war in Ukraine has shaken up this system. 

Today Putin values one thing above all else in people: the ability to help him win the war. 

He put the old elites on notice in February 2024. 

“The true, real elite is all those who serve Russia, workers and warriors, reliable, proven, worthy people who have proven their loyalty to Russia in action,” he declared in a speech to the Federal Assembly.

Top politicians and business bosses alike have since redoubled efforts to be seen as “patriots”, sometimes taking on new briefs and surrendering assets. 

“All sources of power are war-related,” said Komin. Conversely, those Putin blames for the stalling offensive—or who can be made scapegoats for it—are finding that there is nothing to cushion their fall.

Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, failed to deliver Putin a quick victory; last year he was shunted sideways. 

He still carries out official duties in another role but the real punishment was a public and humiliating takedown of his clan. 

His deputy, Timur Ivanov, was sacked and accused of corruption. 

In the months that followed, the new defence minister pursued criminal charges against several officials who had been affiliated with Shoigu

The fall of the Shoigu clan reverberated through the ruling class. 

Their vulnerability was illustrated even more starkly this summer with the suicide of the 53-year-old transport minister, Roman Starovoit.

Starovoit, a protégé of the Rotenberg brothers, had worked his way up the bureaucracy, and in 2018 was appointed governor of the Kursk region. 

When Ukrainian forces broke through the border and snatched Russian territory in Kursk last year, it was clear heads would roll. 

Starovoit had left the job by the time of the incursion but his tenure had been recent enough for him to carry the can. 

First, his deputy was charged with siphoning off the budget earmarked for defence. 

Then, in July, Putin dismissed Starovoit from his ministerial post. 

It looked like even the Rotenbergs would not be able to save Starovoit from public humiliation and a prison sentence. 

Later that day he unboxed a ceremonial pistol and shot himself. 

His former patrons didn’t attend his funeral.

Adding to the elites’ sense of paranoia is the fact that the man on whom their fortunes depend has become increasingly inaccessible. 

“All decisions are taken by Putin alone,” said one Kremlin insider. 

“No one has his ear.” 

Senior politicians, advisers and businessmen do what they think he wants—but it’s often a gamble.

Anna Tsivilyova, deputy minister of defence

In the absence of clear direction, some are starting to speculate about Putin’s intentions. 

One fear is that he might be planning an even bigger shake-up of the ruling class when the fighting eventually stops, sacrificing more of the old guard to free up power and resources for wartime allies. 

“The elite and the government are preoccupied with how the war will end,” said Farida Rustamova, a long-time observer of Russia’s ruling class. 

“They have anxious fantasies about who will be used as a scapegoat to draw negative emotions away from the elite.”

A few siloviki are believed to have access to Putin, and are said to be briefing him on the goings-on within different clans. 

“You’d better know who they are in your circle,” said Komin. 

“The siloviki have a file on every one…and they keep digging. 

When they find something really juicy, particularly if it has to do with a person’s links with the West, this goes to the front of the file and Putin sees it.”

Being deemed insufficiently supportive of the war effort can invite a range of consequences, all the more scary for being hard to predict. 

One threat is the office of public prosecutions, which has been re-nationalising private companies. 

Officially this happens as punishment for offences ranging from “extremism” to tax evasion. 

Assets worth $50bn have been redistributed this way since the start of the war.

In their current state of insecurity, few things irk the old elite more than the spectacle of new people rising into their ranks. 

It is a trickle, not a flood, and the old clans are not going anywhere. 

But the rapid ascent of new kinds of people to Putin’s circle offers a troubling reminder that the rules of the game are changing.

Rule one: relatives can now get big jobs

If you browse the Telegram channels of Russian defence agencies, you will often see clips of disabled veterans being awarded medals and serenaded by choirs. 

Among the stern-faced men who populate these montages there are glimpses of an immaculately groomed 53-year-old woman. 

Anna Tsivilova, a deputy minister at the department of defence, is the force behind the touchy-feely propaganda campaign. 

She’s also widely reported to be Putin’s cousin.

Little known before the war, Tsivilova is now one of its most recognisable representatives. 

As head of Defenders of the Fatherland, a fund established by presidential decree in 2023 to provide housing and other kinds of support to returning veterans, she is often filmed meeting wounded soldiers. 

Since last year she has also had her ministerial position, the first alleged relative of Putin to enjoy such a big job.

Her role with the fund means that she is one of very few people briefed on the war’s casualties. 

These figures are a tightly guarded secret, but The Economist’s data team estimates that Russia had suffered at least 600,000 casualties by the start of 2025 (a figure that has since risen to nearly a million).

Tsivilova acts as a lightning rod for anger at the carnage. 

Not everyone would relish such a position, but she has made the most of it. 

“Her career has skyrocketed since the start of the war,” said Mikhail Zygar, an expert commentator on Russian elite politics. 

“Putin really trusts her.”

Born in 1972 in Ivanovo, a small provincial city north-east of Moscow, Tsivilova (or Anna Putina, as she was known then) did not have a privileged start in life. 

Her father, Yevgeny, was a urologist, but in the Soviet Union doctors were paid less than miners or engineers, and the family lived in a typical Soviet apartment block. 

British intelligence as well as independent Russian media outlets say that Yevgeny is Putin’s first cousin, though the Kremlin has never acknowledged the connection.

Tsivilova trained as a psychiatrist at the medical academy in Ivanovo and started work in a hospital there. 

Shortly after Putin became president, in 2001, she took up a job in a government health agency in Moscow, before working in private health care.  

In 2007 she married an ambitious businessman, Sergey Tsivilov. 

Each was well connected within the St Petersburg circles that surrounded Putin, though an acquaintance says that Tsivilova is the dominant one in the partnership, calling her “very, very tough”.

Tsivilov went on to run a coal company, and in 2018 became governor of Kuzbass, Russia’s primary coal-producing region (Tsivilova was dubbed “Queen of Kuzbass”). 

The couple, who reportedly have three children between them, got very rich, and waited for the call from Moscow. 

It came in 2019: Tsivilova was offered a seat on a state body overseeing women’s affairs.

Richer opportunities opened up when Putin invaded Ukraine three years later. 

The Tsivilovs staunchly supported the campaign—Sergey renamed his region KuZbass in official communications, displaying the Z symbol used by Russian forces in Ukraine. 

Shortly after this gesture of loyalty, Putin invited Tsivilova to run the Defenders fund—a huge promotion. 

The following year Putin sacked Shoigu at the ministry of defence and brought in a fresh team which included Tsivilova.

Konstantin Malofeev, chairman of the Tsargrad media group

She didn’t have the kind of CV that deputy defence ministers normally have, and her inexperience led to an early stumble. 

When answering questions in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, she let slip that as many as 48,000 families had submitted DNA samples in efforts to trace soldiers missing in action. 

(The government hadn’t published estimates of military losses since the very beginning of the war, when it said that fewer than 6,000 had died.) 

The head of the Duma’s defence committee reprimanded her and the figure was struck from the record, though not before a video of the testimony had circulated widely on social media.

Tsivilova survived the gaffe, and has since become an effective advocate for the sacrifices Putin is demanding. 

It helps that she is a woman, the only one at a senior level in the ministry. 

She can portray herself to soldiers’ wives and mothers—a constituency that led protests against Russia’s previous campaigns in Chechnya and Afghanistan—as someone who “gets” it. 

While male colleagues stand stiffly in meetings with wounded soldiers, Tsivilova emanates maternal warmth. 

She teared up recently when awarding prizes to disabled veterans, declaring, “We are with you, we see you, we have respect and love for you.”

Being a woman gives her opportunities to make a mark through her choice of outfits, too. 

Mostly Tsivilova dresses conservatively in blazers and pearls, but she has shown occasional moments of flair since rising to high office. 

At a recent meeting she seemed to be channelling Russia’s imperial era in a scarlet high collar, military-style tunic and long skirt resembling a tsarist riding habit.

She is said to have more one-on-one time with Putin than other senior figures at the ministry of defence, and has accompanied him on his rare visits to wounded veterans in hospital. 

At one event held with soldiers’ families Putin watched indulgently as Tsivilova gave a rousing reading of a poem she said was written by a soldier in the trenches to his mother (“I miss your loving hands”). 

Several people in the room wept, though the president remained dry-eyed.

She is not the only alleged relative of Putin to rise to prominence since the war. 

Katerina Tikhonova, who is reported to be Putin’s daughter, has played a prominent role in the St Petersburg forum for the last two years, most recently appearing online in a panel discussion on the “role of the military-industrial complex in developing the nation’s sovereign technology”. 

She was later seen in the VIP zone ahead of Putin’s own speech.

Before the war, Putin and his associates kept their offspring out of the limelight, presumably because they didn’t want the criticism that a public display of nepotism would have attracted. 

The muzzling of free expression in Russia since 2022 seems to have rendered this concern irrelevant.

Another explanation for Tsivilova’s rise, offered recently by Pavel Kuznetsov, an independent analyst writing in Novaya Gazeta Europe, is “the shrinking circle of people the president can trust”. 

She is loyal, discreet and owes him everything.

Rule two: zealots are no longer held at arm’s length

A few weeks after Ukrainian forces invaded Kursk last year, a video went viral. 

It showed leaked footage of an A-list celebrity event: the wedding of Konstantin Malofeev, 51, a conservative media magnate, and Maria Lvova-Belova, 40, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.

Wreathed in dry ice, the couple, both of whom regularly profess their devotion to the Orthodox church, danced a tango under arches of cream flowers next to a magnificent lake. 

The bride wore a red halter-neck gown, the groom a white open-necked shirt as an accordion player piped the mournful melody. 

This was social conservatism for the TikTok generation, an intoxicating mix of tradition and bling.

Despite being vocal advocates of traditional marriage, the pair were both divorced before marrying one another. 

Blessed by the Kremlin, the union of Malofeev and Lvova-Belova offers a poster couple for Putin’s imperial project and his reactionary agenda at home.

The pair complement each other perfectly: Malofeev has a business fortune and a media platform; Lvova-Belova has the ear of the president. 

Their union might have been forged by genuine romance but much like the Tsivilovs, they are getting ahead by pooling their assets. 

A few years ago the couple’s beliefs—in “traditional values”, empire and Russian supremacy—were seen as old-fashioned and even marginal. 

Now they set the agenda.

During the 1990s Malofeev studied law at Moscow State University (MGU), and then made a fortune investing in telecoms. 

He developed an interest in Russian identity and heritage, embracing Orthodox Christianity, nationalism and even tsarist nostalgia. 

He was fascinated by Alexander Dugin, a philosopher who promoted the idea of Russkiy mir (the Russian world)—an idealised, notional entity potentially encompassing the entire former Soviet Union, and which, according to Dugin, is defined by Orthodoxy, imperial destiny and rejection of “decadent” Western liberalism.

Malofeev didn’t just talk about the greater Russian world. 

He was widely reported to have funded separatist fighters engaged in the shadow war in eastern Ukraine from 2014, including Igor Girkin, a former Russian military officer and operative with the FSB, Russia’s security service. 

Girkin is such an extreme nationalist that in 2022 he criticised Putin for not pursuing the war in Ukraine vigorously enough; he is now in prison.

Vladimir Putin (left) meets Maria Lvova-Belova (right), Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights

In 2015 Malofeev founded Tsargrad, then a satellite channel (it is now a digital streaming service), and hired an executive from Fox News to help him launch it. 

He appointed Dugin its editor-in-chief.

Before the war, Tsargrad was a niche media outlet, but since 2022 its digital audience has expanded enormously. 

On a typical day its shows might include priests expounding on the lives of Orthodox saints, stories of miraculous escapes from the front lines in Ukraine, and triumphalist coverage of the culture wars. 

The number of followers on Malofeev’s personal Telegram channel has grown to over a million.

The alliance with Lvova-Belova has taken Malofeev even closer to the centre of power. 

His new wife is reputedly a Putin favourite, and often appears on television meeting the president, her girlish demeanour accentuated by wavy blonde hair and outfits heavy on bows and ruffles.

She was born in 1984 into a big family in the provincial city of Penza, just over 350 miles south-east of Moscow. 

At school her interests seem to have revolved around church: she was a chorister who taught guitar in her spare time. 

A music student, she married at 19 (her first husband later became an Orthodox priest) and eventually dropped out of university to raise her first child. 

She would go on to give birth to four more children and adopt several others.

In her 20s Lvova-Belova got involved in a number of charities connected with orphans and people with disabilities. 

In 2019 she joined Putin’s United Russia party, and was given a seat in Russia’s upper house the following year. 

Her zeal must have impressed someone in the Kremlin, because at the end of 2021 Putin gave her the high-profile position of children’s commissioner.

When he invaded Ukraine five months later, Lvova-Belova proved herself a fervent and fearsome cheerleader. 

Among other things, she transported thousands of children out of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. 

She called it a humanitarian act, the International Criminal Court called it a war crime. 

One of her own adopted children is a Ukrainian boy taken from Mariupol.

Lvova-Belova doesn’t look like one of the most powerful people in the country. 

“She still dresses like a provincial schoolteacher,” sniped one Moscow fashion editor. 

But her girl-next-door aesthetic fits the Orthodox-inflected mood that has prevailed since the start of the war. 

“She is a picture-perfect ideal of Russian womanhood as far as those in power are concerned,” said Rustamova, the political analyst. 

“Putin likes what she encapsulates—that children come before career and education—so she is one of the few women who’ve got to a high position.”

According to the Russian media’s version of their love story, Lvova-Belova met Malofeev in 2023 while working on an initiative supporting children in eastern Ukraine. 

The following year Russian celebrity-news sites reported that the couple had been seen holding hands in a church procession.

This might have been expected to generate controversy. 

Certainly Orthodox social-media users tut-tutted about the romance. 

But this chatter soon subsided once it became clear they had received the blessing that mattered most. 

“We wish Maria Alexeyevna every joy in her personal life,’ said Putin’s press spokesman,” Dmitry Peskov, a day after the wedding.

One Kremlin insider dismissed the pair as “tabloid celebrities who will never be in the inner circle”. 

But Malofeev’s appeal and reach helps the Kremlin keep Russia’s far right onside. 

This constituency has to be watched, since it was troublingly supportive of a coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former boss of a Kremlin-backed mercenary army, in 2023.

One sign that Malofeev now enjoys something close to establishment status is that he was recently allowed to host an “anti-globalist” conference in the Mariinsky Palace in St Petersburg, a grand neo-classical building where the city’s legislative body is based. 

Delegates from Spain, France, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere gathered to pray for Charlie Kirk, a right-wing American activist who was murdered in September, and to discuss “the situation in the world, migration issues, the defence of traditional values and the fight against global Canaan and Sodom”.

Rule three: it’s the war, stupid

Huge posters calling on men to join the army loom over Russia’s cities. 

Some emphasise the money, a one-off enlistment payment of 695,000 roubles (around $8,500) and a monthly salary four times the average pay packet in the Russian provinces. 

Other adverts push a masculine ideal. 

“You’re a man, so be one”, runs one tagline.

Thanks to the war, cash has washed through regions once notorious for low employment and dismal life prospects. 

For now, many ordinary Russians can absorb rising prices and even splurge on Western goods ordered from websites based in Turkey or the Gulf. 

If their sons, brothers and fathers don’t come home, they will get a compensation payment roughly equivalent to $70,000.

Artyom Zhoga, a former commander of separatist forces in Ukraine who is now a presidential envoy to the Urals

Despite all this, the armed forces are struggling to recruit enough men. 

Cash, it seems, is not enough of an incentive. 

So the Kremlin is pushing the message that joining up is the first step towards a flourishing career, supported by a grateful public. 

Putin holds regular televised ceremonies in the marble and gilt halls of the Kremlin, during which he pins medals on brave soldiers.

At one of these events in December 2023 the president could be seen chatting to a tall, imposing figure: Colonel Artyom Zhoga. 

Zhoga thanked Putin profusely for “freeing” the eastern regions of Ukraine and giving their people the “right to choose” annexation by Moscow. 

“There is so much work to be done,” said Zhoga, “We would like to do this under your leadership.” 

Putin agreed without a moment’s hesitation, “You are right—the time to decide has come. 

I will run for president of the Russian Federation.”

It was a carefully scripted exchange, and Zhoga was assigned a surprisingly high-profile role in it. 

To Russia-watchers, the casting showed the Kremlin had found its role model. 

Now a regional presidential envoy, and the first high-ranking appointment from the trenches, Zhoga is a visible manifestation of the Kremlin’s promise that signing up for the death and killing in Ukraine will be worth it.

Born in 1975 in the remote far-east, Zhoga is not cut from the cloth that Russian elites are usually made from. 

His birthplace, Shiroky, was a tiny gold-mining settlement in the heart of the notorious Kolyma gulag. 

You couldn’t leave the area by train: the only way out was a highway known as the “Road of Bones” because of the prisoners who had died building it. 

For a young man growing up on the outer edges of an empire in decline, the outlook must have seemed bleak.

The family got out after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, moving across several time zones to another mining town, Sloviansk, in the east of newly independent Ukraine. 

Times were hard there, too. 

State coal and steel firms, which had once guaranteed jobs for life, were struggling to compete after being opened up to world markets. 

According to his biography on the Kremlin’s official website, 17-year-old Zhoga started out as a welder in 1992, but quickly became an “entrepreneur”. 

Over the next 20 years he built a chain of fish shops.

“You are right—the time to decide has come. 

I will run for president of the Russian Federation”

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, nationalist fervour spread through eastern Ukraine and a separatist war was launched. 

Both Zhoga and his son, Vladimir, joined the Sparta Battalion, an ultra-right pro-Moscow militia; Vladimir eventually became its leader.

Moscow was keen to keep control of the separatists. 

Over the next few years the FSB tightened its grip in the region, replacing troublesome leaders with hand-picked loyalists. 

The Zhogas became commanders in the armed forces of the self-declared separatist government.

Within the first two weeks of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir was killed in a skirmish on the road to Mariupol. 

Soon afterwards Zhoga was summoned by the Kremlin to receive his son’s posthumous Star of the Hero of Russia medal, the nation’s highest honour.

By the time Zhoga asked Putin to run again for the presidency the following year, he was already one of the public faces of the war. 

He had been invited to the front row of the ceremony in which Putin signed an illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine in September 2022. 

In October 2024 Putin named him presidential envoy to the Urals, a crucial region for arms production.

The capital of the Urals, Yekaterinburg, is home to the Yeltsin Centre, a cultural institution dedicated to the liberal reforms pursued by the former president, who came from the city. 

Russia’s conservative media saw Zhoga’s appointment, which carries a seat on the centre’s board, as a sign that the “caste of ultra-liberals” in the Yeltsin Centre would no longer be allowed to pursue their “pro-Western agenda”.

The centre certainly feels less liberal these days. 

In June a group calling themselves “Patriots of the Urals” invited Zhoga to be the keynote speaker at an event there. 

He called for the media to be more “patriotic”.

Zhoga is also the face of the president’s personal initiative, the Time of Heroes project, which each year offers about 80 war veterans free training in management, business and government service. 

One of its graduates has been promoted so far up the chain he now heads the patriotic-content division at the ministry of education. 

The old elite have been giving lectures to participants—even Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, was drafted in recently for a lecture on the new “multi-polar world order”.

“Putin is conducting an experiment with Zhoga,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst, arguing the envoy is being used to test the old elite’s reaction to having an arriviste in their midst. 

Though Zhoga’s role is mostly ceremonial, the former combatant gets photo opportunities many of the old guard can only dream of.

The president has told regional governors he expects them to provide jobs for veterans. 

Memories of the disruptive effects of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Chechnya live on for many Russians, which makes them both wary of veterans and eager to find them employment. 

Kolesnikov said that the future of war-hardened soldiers in Russia is as yet unclear. 

“No one knows what kind of new monsters will make it out of the lab where the new war elite are being trained to rule.”