Authors

Discussion

How do interstate wars end? Popular explanations acknowledge that leaders need a coalition of loyal elites with the resources and skills to support the dictator's war and governance. However, there has been a shortage of empirical work due to a lack of data on elite dynamics, especially during wartime. 

We theorise that if elite cohesion is a necessary condition for leaders to wage war, we should expect that major changes in the dictator's elite coalition - such as factionalism, defections, reshuffles, or deficiencies in elite mobility and reproduction - should expose the regime's vulnerabilities, which in turn could force the ruler to the negotiating table.

To examine elite coalition shifts, we compiled an original dataset of all deputy ministers and deputy heads of other federal executive bodies in Russia between May 2018 and May 2024. While these officials are certainly not part of Putin's inner circle, they are crucial coalition members for the day-to-day management of Russia's public civilian, security and military sectors. We manually coded these 700 biographies to capture important features of these officials' careers, including sociodemographic data, their career paths - i.e., previous jobs and exit fates after dismissal - their military or security background, elite repression with criminal cases, and personal sanctions.In addition to elite biographies, we use a large dataset of Russian media (independent, semi-controlled business dailies and a state-owned news agency) to track the variation in media mentions of these officials and their executive bodies over time. 

To capture reshuffles and possible defections, our main dependent variables of interest are the officials' tenure and exit fate, with the periods before and after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 as the main independent variable, controlling for a number of individual, ministerial and ministry level factors.

Our main finding is that the war did not significantly disrupt the existing system of elite circulation, at least for this particular type of mid-level elite and in the period of our study. The article discusses the implications of these findings for the resilience of the Putin regime during the war. While the findings contribute to the understanding of Putin's Russia, we also link the case to the broader literature on elite politics, authoritarianism, and peace and conflict studies.