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Abstract: The creation of the National Guard (Rosgvardiya) in 2016 represented a striking reorganization of Russia's public order and internal security forces, suggesting a growing concern on the part of the Kremlin that it might need to deploy force onto the streets. It also created a powerful new institution with political, business and even cultural ambitions, one that uses its coercive muscle to capture new economic opportunities. As such, its emergence and evolution can be used to assess not only the coercive capabilities and intent of the regime, but also why and how bureaucratic structures compete, seek to build empires, and extend their influence into new domains. In particular, it offers insights into the continued importance of horizontal politics in a system too often conceptualized in purely vertical terms.
The Rosgvardiya, or more formally the Federal National Guard Troops Service of the Russian Federation (FSVNG: Federal'naia sluzhba voisknatsional'noigvardiiRossiiskoiFederatsii), was established in 2016 in the biggest shake-up of the country's internal security architecture for more than a decade.1 While the Kremlin's goal was to tighten its control over the country's public order forces, for the outside observer, it provides a useful case study of how new bureaucratic structures compete, seek to build empires, and extend their influence into new domains. In particular, it offers insights into the continued importance of horizontal politics in a system too often conceptualized in purely vertical terms. In many ways, then, one can find a case study of what one could call late Putinist politics in the creation of this "silovik-industrial complex," a slightly flippant description of a coercive structure that also operates as an economic and political institution, in which coercive capacity is used to generate resources on an institutional level (rather than purely for the personal benefit of its officers) and vice versa.
After all, in Vladimir Putin's Russia, institutions-especially in the security realm-cannot take their tomorrows for granted. Their remits often deliberately blurred and overlapping, they are engaged in a carnivorous, even cannibalistic struggle with each other, sometimes inadvertent, sometimes entirely deliberate. The creation of the Federal Anti-Drug Service (FSKN: Federal'naia sluzhba po kontroliu oborotom narkotikov) in 2003, for example, owed at least as much to Putin's desire to create a counterweight to the powerful Federal Security...