On Sunday, the ruling United Russia party will win a commanding majority in Russia’s Parliament. This is not in doubt. Five weeks before the vote, the country’s Supreme Court struck Yabloko, the only antiwar party, from the ballot, chiefly for alleged copyright violations during the campaign. Even in such a rubber-stamped and stage-managed affair as a Russian election, the Kremlin is clearly taking no chances.
This is, after all, the first parliamentary vote since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the intervening years, President Vladimir Putin has outlawed opposition, crushed dissent and forced countless citizens into exile. For the elite, it has been a rude shock. It had lost its capacity to influence politics long before 2022, to be sure. But it still had room to maneuver, the means to amass wealth and, crucially, the freedom to leave. Now, that room has all but disappeared. Mr. Putin is in total control.
In Mr. Putin’s first term, at the start of the century, a bargain was struck: The elite agreed to live without real power in return for predictability and prosperity. The governors went first. Presidential envoys were installed above them and then they were expelled from the Federation Council, the upper house, where they had used their votes to block laws they opposed. In 2004, citing the fight against terrorism and in violation of a Constitutional Court ruling, Mr. Putin abolished gubernatorial elections. The reconfigured upper house approved the move. Governors stopped being politicians and became managers of regional economies.
Next, Mr. Putin took on the oligarchs. The message was simple: Stay out of politics and what you acquired in the 1990s remains yours. The 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man and a big backer of opposition parties, removed any doubt that the new rules applied to everyone. The lesson was renewed periodically: the job swap with Dmitri Medvedev in 2012 that allowed Mr. Putin to resume the presidency irrespective of term limits; the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, in 2015; the arrest of the economy minister, Alexei Ulyukayev, in 2016. All these acts told the elite that, while it was free to take care of business, politics proper belonged to Mr. Putin.
The arrangement held for nearly two decades — until the invasion of Ukraine. Since then, as the elite has suffered from Western sanctions and a squeezed economy, decision-making has been drastically centralized. Budgets have been classified, with Parliament recently granting the finance ministry the power to spend at will. At the Kremlin’s behest, governors have been recruiting soldiers and processing payments to the families of the dead. War veterans, meanwhile, have been given governorships and senior posts. Personally beholden to Mr. Putin, this group serves to further cement Kremlin control.
The elite’s property is no longer safe, either. The Prosecutor General’s Office has been aggressively pursuing a suite of nationalizations, reopening privatization deals from the 1990s on the grounds that they violated the country’s economic sovereignty. The scale is striking. In the first six months of this year, seizures of private assets accounted for 42 percent of the value of all mergers and acquisitions in Russia. Owners are accused of corruption, extremism or foreign influence — or all three.
The largest case is exemplary. Vadim Moshkovich, the founder of Rusagro, one of the country’s largest agricultural producers, had been a senator for the Belgorod region for eight years. In May, a Moscow court forced him to transfer 68 percent of the company to the state. This was less a case of reprisal than of the Kremlin eliminating property as an independent base of power. Two decades of loyalty bought Mr. Moshkovich no protection. He is in custody facing charges of large-scale fraud and bribery.
Owners can sometimes buy back their assets. After prosecutors moved against an energy company owned by the billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, he settled for about $335 million, roughly the sum he had paid for the company in 2018. The claims were dropped soon afterward. The Economist reported that the payment went to an educational foundation set up at Mr. Putin’s initiative. Along with a presidential decree putting foreign companies’ Russian assets under state control, to be handed out to approved owners, this means that wealth is now held on Mr. Putin’s terms rather than owned.
The same conditionality governs careers. It is here perhaps where the change since 2022 is starkest. There used to be removals and reshuffles, of course, but they have become more frequent and more arbitrary. In April 2024, Timur Ivanov, a deputy defense minister, was arrested on bribery charges; within weeks three generals and a senior procurement official had also been detained. The defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, was moved to the Security Council that May — not disgraced, simply removed from the ministry he had run for nearly 12 years, in the middle of a war.
There are other examples. In July last year, Mr. Putin dismissed his transport minister, Roman Starovoyt, without saying why. Mr. Starovoyt fatally shot himself within hours, as investigators closed in on a case of embezzled funds while he was governor of the Kursk region. He had never been charged, though his successor as governor was arrested over the same issue. Last September Dmitri Kozak left the presidential administration after 25 years of work side by side with Mr. Putin. Again, no reason was given.
You might expect the loss of guarantees to free up the elite. It has done the opposite. When the state can take away your safety, your assets and your career — and sanctions have closed the exit abroad — individual adaptation remains the only rational strategy. Neither the shambles of the 2022 military draft nor the mutiny by the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin the following year fractured the ruling stratum. An official can still soften an instruction, protect a subordinate, place a friend. But that’s the extent of his or her power.
On Sunday, officials whose livelihoods depend on delivering big numbers will count the votes and report them upward to a man who purports to believe them. The process will produce a majority both overwhelming and virtual — easily assembled and just as easily dismantled, should it ever become useful to do so. That is what 25 years have built: a country with one arbiter and a ruling class trained to follow his orders.
Alexandra Prokopenko is a senior fellow at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and the author of the forthcoming “From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia’s Elite.”
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