Personnel reshuffle in 2018 returned to fashion promotion of young officials - relatives of politicians, according to the review "Successors 2.0 (aristocrats)", prepared by the fund "Petersburg Politics". Among the latest such decisions are the appointment of Minister of Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev (son of Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev) and the provisional governor of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District Dmitry Artyukhov, whose father Andrei Artyukhov is an influential United Russia, deputy chairman of the Tyumen Oblast Duma. Among the relatives of high-ranking officials and businessmen who achieved maximum success, the review also noted the president of Alrosa, Sergey Ivanov, the senior vice-president of Rostelecom Vladimir Kirienko, the chairman of the board of Inter RAO Boris Kovalchuk, the deputy manager of the president Pavel Fradkov, the co-owner of Sibur "Kirill Shamalov, head of the fund" Innopraktika "Ekaterina Tikhonova and others.

Talent against kinship

Commenting on the appointment of Andrei Patrushev as deputy general director of Gazprom Neft in 2015, Dmitry Peskov, presidential spokesman, said: "Believe me, at the present time people are recruited into the company only because of their qualifications, talent and possible impact on their work. Any kinship in serious companies does not matter. " According to Peskov, there are a huge number of "sons and daughters of people who do not hold any posts" in state, non-state and mixed companies, and there are far more of them than the officials' children.

The "aristocratic" criterion in the selection of cadres has not previously been considered by the Russian leadership as deliberately unacceptable and inappropriate, the authors of the review recall. But the topic of inheritance of statuses grows with the aging of elites and the growth of their children, and its relevance is stronger now than in the Soviet era, when such an advance was established by an unofficial ban. According to experts, there are several reasons for career advancement of relatives: "assistance in finding work for descendants", involving children in the formation of their own teams, legalizing their income from business or rent extraction, overcoming moral barriers when changing the generation of managers. Members of the families of colleagues can immediately rely on higher trust, and parents - to take moral responsibility or other kinds of "surety", explains the head of the "Petersburg Policy" Mikhail Vinogradov.

Experts consider the risks of such a personnel policy to be low popularity of such appointments among the population and a conflict of priorities faced by heirs: they need to demonstrate "subjectivity", but not to frighten the elders. Risky and accumulation of negative experience in the appointment of relatives, according to the authors of the survey, citing the appointment of the son-in-law of Viktor Zubkov Anatoly Serdyukov as head of the Federal Tax Service, and then the Minister of Defense.

Family against the law

Although the practice of promoting heirs to high posts is not widespread, this trend is growing, and the psychological and political barriers on its way are gradually disappearing, Vinogradov said: "One can assume that such a scenario of power transit will increasingly be modeled in the coming years, especially since other scenarios - succession, classical political competition, various variants of the personnel reserve - do not yet have the necessary history of success. " And personnel competitions like "Leaders of Russia" will go only for average managerial positions, suggesting transfer of control over the winners to management, but not over assets and resources, the expert believes. The most obvious drawbacks of such personnel decisions are related to the ambivalent attitude of society, the lack of historical and political traditions, the contradictory results of similar practices in the post-Soviet countries and the possible dissatisfaction of "artistic" careerists, Vinogradov adds: "It is not obvious that such a scenario is in principle capable of deciding what or tasks that are not related to maintaining the psychological comfort of the older generations of the establishment. "

This is not bad and not good, but it sets a higher level for new managers - they need to prove with double energy their effectiveness and that they received a high position irrespective of their kinship ties, political scientist Alexander Pozhalov said. Although for the federal government, which clearly responds to a public renewal request, the dynasty track in certain assignments may in the future create political risks. After all, if the social results of the breakthrough promised to the society are not achieved, the opposition will not miss the opportunity to try to explain this by "the dynasty of power" and the "irremovability of elite families," the expert adds.

"Nepotism is quite an old phenomenon, and indeed in Soviet times this story was stopped: there was a ban on the employment of relatives," recalls Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of Transparency International - Russia. - In the Russian space, the concept of a conflict of interests emerged rather late - it is only 10 years old, and we are at the initial stage of the development of regulation of kinship ties. But the first conclusions that can already be drawn - many do not like the very idea of ​​regulating such conflicts. " Previously, this was more cautious, but now, formally following the norm of the law, the concept of conflict of interests was emasculated - relatives are not satisfied directly, but through a subordinate organization, the expert notes: "We have made inquiries about the conflict of interests, and if at the regional level this is somehow is restrained, then at the federal level, when it comes to high-ranking officials, there is an erosion of the rule regulating personal interest. The first sign of the decomposition of the system - people begin to ignore the norms that they sang 10 years ago. "