‘When the horse dies, get off’ How Russia’s political consultants built Putin’s regime — and then lost their careers to it
In the 1990s, Russian political consultants were seen as kingmakers — savvy operatives who could sway voters and win competitive elections. They helped bring Vladimir Putin to power and crafted the campaign for United Russia, now the country’s ruling party. But as the system they built tightened its grip on elections, it no longer had much use for them. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev traces how Russia’s political consultants went from shaping the country’s future to struggling for relevance — and explains the Kremlin’s latest plans to repurpose them as “social architects,” now that the very regime they helped create has rendered them obsolete.
Gleb Pavlovsky liked to boast that in the late 1990s, his Effective Policy Foundation could get anyone elected. “It made no difference to me, you understand? I had a machine that could elect anyone,” he told Meduza. “Name a dead man,” he said, “we’ll build a structure, plug him into it, and he’ll get elected too.”
A political strategist who died in 2023, Pavlovsky was one of the architects behind the early image of Vladimir Putin as a Soviet-style intelligence officer — an identity that helped carry Putin to his first presidential victory. Pavlovsky’s foundation helped shape the campaign for United Russia, Russia’s first true “party of power,” and worked on the (unsuccessful) bid to get Sergey Kiriyenko elected mayor of Moscow. Back in 1996, the foundation had run Boris Yeltsin’s presidential campaign, which made extensive use of state resources.
At the time, political consultants in Russia were seen as near-omnipotent figures — capable of reshaping power structures at both the regional and national levels, manipulating voters, influencing elites, and making bank while doing it. A quarter-century later, Sergey Kiriyenko — now the deputy head of Russia’s presidential administration and arguably as central to domestic politics today as Pavlovsky once was — is retraining political consultants as “social architects” and openly declaring that the profession, as it once existed, is effectively dead in Russia.
How Russia’s political consultants cashed in on democracy
In the late 1990s, domestic political campaigns in Russia were remarkably diverse, recalled one political consultant who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity. At the time, he was just starting his career.
I’d wrap up a campaign, take a short break, and within two or three weeks I’d be calling colleagues — ‘What’s going on? Any interesting elections coming up?’ Or sometimes they’d be the ones calling me. If no one reached out, it only took a few days to find the next campaign. And then I’d hit the road again.
This person said he’d decided to become a political consultant after seeing the success of prominent strategists like Gleb Pavlovsky, Igor Mintusov, and Alexey Sitnikov. The profession didn’t disappoint: the pay was generous — clients “paid in cash, in dollars” — and the work was stimulating.
“Those who already had some recognition tried to learn from the Europeans, and especially the Americans,” he said. “They worked in campaign offices there in junior roles, studied the techniques for mobilizing voters loyal to a politician or party, and brought those methods back to Russia.”
At the time, Russia’s political system still ran largely on direct elections. Voters chose the president, State Duma lawmakers, governors, city and district mayors, village heads, and municipal councils. Most races were competitive. Until the introduction of a unified voting day in 2005, elections were held at various times throughout the year. Candidates didn’t have to collect signatures to get on the ballot — paying a deposit was enough, and it was refunded if they won. To improve their chances at both the regional and federal levels, parties and civic movements could join forces and form electoral blocs ahead of campaigns. Regional elites often created blocs for specific elections.
Each election cycle brought work — and income — for political consultants. They organized campaign headquarters, built ideological platforms, and developed political branding. “There were both federal and regional groups ready to pay well to promote their candidates,” said one consultant who began his career in the early 1990s in a central Russian region. “Businesspeople backed politicians or ran for office themselves — as governors or mayors. At the time, getting approval [from the Kremlin] wasn’t enough to win. It all came down to competition, which is why consultants got paid. No one skimped on budgets.”
According to him, the money only grew in the early 2000s. For political consultants, the early years of Putin’s presidency weren’t bad at all.
But the golden age didn’t last. In 2003, the Russian authorities arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos, then the country’s largest oil company. Khodorkovsky had been trying to influence domestic politics, backing candidates for the State Duma as well as for regional and municipal offices. Three sources in the industry told Meduza that, even then, it was clear the space for political consultants to operate — and earn a living — was starting to shrink. “The government made it clear that real competition at the federal level was over. Anyone who tried to oppose it would be steamrolled,” said one.
By the early 2000s, Pavlovsky’s Effective Policy Foundation had evolved into a Kremlin think tank. Pavlovsky himself regularly attended President Putin’s meetings and visited officials from the administration’s domestic policy bloc at least once a week. Around this time, Vladislav Surkov — the head of the Kremlin’s domestic policy bloc and himself a former consultant — began working with his team to make elections more controllable and predictable, with the goal of ensuring victories for government-backed candidates.
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In 2000, less than two months after winning the presidency, Putin established a new system of federal oversight: presidential plenipotentiary envoys. These appointees were dispatched to federal districts — macro-regions created at Moscow’s initiative — to oversee the activities of regional branches of federal ministries, monitor the situation in the regions, and report back to the Kremlin. Most of these positions were given to people from the security forces. In the Volga Federal District, however, the post went to Sergey Kiriyenko, the head of the Union of Right Forces and Russia’s prime minister during the 1998 financial crash.
“The envoys mostly acted as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, relaying orders to regional leaders and coordinating with law enforcement,” recalled a political strategist who worked in the Volga District. “Politics didn’t interest the former generals. But Kiriyenko was different — he was an active player. He started developing his own consultants and eventually began installing his own mayors, even governors.”
Before the plenipotentiary envoys, it was the Kremlin that selected top-tier consultants for major campaigns — or at least recommended loyal ones to friendly elites. In the early 2000s, that role shifted to the presidential envoys. “They could push their own people,” the strategist told Meduza. “Maybe not the best — but ones willing to split [their fees].”
At the same time, the Kremlin began limiting political competition to make elections more predictable. In 2004, single-member district elections to the federal parliament were abolished. That same year, a new law raised the minimum number of members required to register a political party from 10,000 to 50,000. In 2005, the authorities banned electoral blocs — coalitions of parties that ran together — from all levels of races, further reducing competitiveness. The state also paralyzed the formation of new parties. Existing parties had to negotiate directly with the Kremlin to stay in the game.
But the single most damaging change for the political consulting industry came with the abolition of gubernatorial elections. In September 2004, just weeks after the Beslan school siege, Putin scrapped them, framing the move as a necessary response to the “terrorist threat.” Every consultant interviewed by Meduza agreed: gubernatorial races were the most demanding, the most creative — and the most lucrative.
Those campaigns often required unconventional solutions. For instance, when Alexander Lebed ran for governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai in 1998, his sponsors didn’t want him to win in the first round, fearing that too easy a victory would make him harder to control. So, his campaign team staged a protest — against their own candidate. Lebed ultimately won, but — just as his backers had hoped — it took two rounds.
After gubernatorial elections were abolished, some of the big players in the political consulting market pivoted to corporate PR or shifted their focus abroad, according to one veteran strategist. He himself began working with a group of industrial companies that tried to get loyal candidates elected to city councils and mayoral offices. “There’s a simple rule,” he said. “When the horse dies, get off.”
How political strategists solved the Kremlin’s problems — and became expendable
The blow the Kremlin dealt to Russian elections during Vladimir Putin’s first term was severe but not fatal, according to a political consultant who began his career in the 1990s. As he points out, the loss of 80 gubernatorial campaigns and 225 single-member races for the State Duma was a major setback for the industry. Nevertheless, elections still existed.
“Regional parliamentary elections were still going,” he said. “More importantly, so were mayoral and city council races in major cities. And those could be even more lucrative than gubernatorial campaigns. A lot of resources are concentrated in cities — construction, retail, transportation. Every local group wants a piece. So there was still money to be made.”
The introduction of a unified voting day in 2005, he said, was another heavy blow. Initially held twice a year, it shifted in 2012 to a single annual date — the first Sunday in September, with only the presidential elections remaining in March. Officials justified the change as a cost-saving measure.
But shifting elections to early fall forced campaigns into the summer, when most voters are on vacation. Under these constraints, only the ruling United Russia party had the resources to run simultaneous campaigns across dozens of regions.
“In the early 2000s, I could work on four campaigns in a year. Then it became two. Then just one. And the fee? Just one,” the consultant told Meduza. To adapt, he gathered less-experienced consultants and formed teams that could work on multiple campaigns at once. “But not everyone could manage,” he said. “Some were great at messaging, some at fieldwork, some at media. But they weren’t real campaign managers. That role suffered the most [from the shortage of qualified people].”
By then, specialists from the Effective Policy Foundation had narrowed their focus to a single client: the Kremlin. One of their key innovations was the use of so-called “temniki” — set guidelines for news coverage that the Kremlin and regional authorities distributed to loyal newsrooms and television channels.
The same consultants dealt with another of the Kremlin’s problems, reducing the vote share of the Communist Party in parliamentary elections, further protecting United Russia and curbing overall competition. “They did it with pure campaign mechanics,” said one consultant. “Ahead of the 2003 elections, they created the ‘Rodina’ party, which echoed the Communists’ patriotic messaging, with a touch of nationalism. It pulled off votes, dragging the Communists’ results down — and they never returned to their previous numbers.”
In the 1999 State Duma elections, the Communist Party won 24.6 percent of the vote. By 2003, that number had dropped to 12.6 percent. Rodina, the Kremlin-aligned spoiler party, took nine percent. After that, the Communists never broke the 20-percent mark again.
By the mid-2000s, Russia began phasing out direct mayoral elections. Once significant political figures, mayors were gradually replaced by city managers appointed through nominal “competitions.” Elected opposition mayors were squeezed out of the system. Some faced criminal charges — Vladivostok Mayor Vladimir Nikolayev and Arkhangelsk Mayor Alexander Donskoy were both arrested in 2007.
Federal and regional elites quickly adjusted to the new rules. They swore allegiance to the Kremlin (prominent businesspeople joined United Russia en masse) and stopped organizing competitive campaigns. “Even if a city technically still had a mayoral race, [as a rule] the mayor was a United Russia member,” said one consultant still active in regional politics. “If he wasn’t at odds with the governor, he knew the entire administrative machine would back him. He also knew serious opponents wouldn’t run. Why spend big? Local rivals knew, too — if you win as the opposition, they’ll throw you in jail. Real competition became rare.” And with that, the demand for political consultants again declined.
According to a prominent figure in the field, the Effective Policy Foundation — which had by then migrated to ideological work — had a hand in dismantling the industry. It was the foundation that recommended eliminating elections, banning electoral blocs, and creating a unified voting day. “But once you eliminate the root of the problem, you’re no longer needed” he added, “There’s nothing left for you to solve.”
By the end of the 2000s, political consultants still worked throughout the system — but not at the highest levels. The Kremlin no longer needed them. Elections were being won with administrative pressure and outright fraud — tactics that would eventually spark mass protests in 2011 and 2012. And the opposition, already almost completely cut off from meaningful participation, had little use for high-end campaign professionals.
In 2011, Gleb Pavlovsky — the strategist who helped Putin become president of Russia — lost his access badge to the Kremlin.
How political consultants went looking for other work
Even before the “Snow Revolution” of 2011–2012, the Kremlin changed the leadership of its domestic policy bloc, replacing the charismatic and theatrical Vladislav Surkov with Vyacheslav Volodin, a United Russia insider with public political experience but without Surkov’s aura of a behind-the-scenes mastermind.
By then, the political consulting industry had changed dramatically. Many strategists had taken government jobs as deputy governors, department heads, or advisers — serving as shadow policymakers to regional leaders, according to three political consultants who spoke to Meduza. Others had found jobs in federal or regional party offices.
Volodin insisted publicly that Russian elections remained “competitive, transparent, and legitimate,” but campaign veterans from that period tell a different story. “The focus was on so-called work with election commissions — basically, falsifying results,” said one consultant who still works on regional campaigns. “Volodin’s people invited me to help with a United Russia campaign [in 2016]. I came prepared with proposals on ideology and messaging, but the first thing they asked was: ‘How are you with the [electoral] commissions? Have you got the skills?’ In other words, the priority wasn’t strategy — it was rigging. I walked away.”
Two other consultants recalled a new side job they had under Volodin: monitoring the political climate in Russia’s regions. In other words, assessing both public sentiment and local elite dynamics. “Governors and regional United Russia offices could sugarcoat things [for the Kremlin] and then there’d be a problem during the election,” said one consultant. “[To avoid this], they’d send in an external auditor to meet with officials, party members, activists, opposition figures, and local experts (if there were any) to provide an independent assessment.”
Under Volodin, the Kremlin also accelerated efforts to eliminate direct mayoral elections. In 2014, the power to abolish them was transferred from local councils to regional legislatures. That year alone, 19 regional capitals lost their mayoral races. By 2019, just seven regional centers still held direct elections for city heads. A once-lucrative revenue stream for political consultants had all but disappeared.
The return of gubernatorial elections in 2012 did little to offset this loss. Every candidate was now required to pass the so-called “municipal filter,” gathering signatures from 5 to 10 percent of local lawmakers, depending on the region. The restoration of these elections had been one of the demands of Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square protesters, and it appeared as though the Kremlin was making a concession to the opposition. In practice, however, the filter served to exclude independent and opposition candidates: most municipal deputies were either United Russia members or employees of publicly funded institutions, and regional authorities could easily pressure them.
By 2016, when Sergey Kiriyenko took over the Kremlin’s domestic policy bloc, genuine political competition in Russia had all but vanished. Nearly all remaining avenues for independent or local candidates had been sealed off. At the same time, Kiriyenko’s own team began introducing corporate management practices into the domestic policy bloc’s operations — methods they’d previously used at Rosatom, the state-owned atomic energy corporation Kiriyenko led from 2005 to 2016.
One such practice was “corporate mobilization” during elections — a complement to existing tools like administrative resources and rigging. The Kremlin required major state-owned and private companies to compile employee databases that could be used to track and boost voter turnout. Ahead of the 2018 presidential election, the Kremlin hired political consultants to work on implementing this new system. “When a new strategic method is introduced — and corporate mobilization is a method — it creates work. You had to train [corporate] HR managers at the federal and regional levels [and] build the databases,” one consultant recalled. “But after that, it ran on autopilot: the domestic policy bloc and regional authorities gave the companies their marching orders, and the databases were already in place.”
Some out-of-work consultants even drifted into projects run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group. In Africa, they conducted sociological surveys and helped local authorities who cooperated with Wagner Group set up loyal media outlets. “Different types of people worked for [Prigozhin],” said one consultant. “Some were top-tier specialists who clashed with Kiriyenko’s team, others were rank-and-file who simply couldn’t find enough work.”
Meanwhile, the Kremlin continued clearing the path for its preferred candidates. In 2020, it organized a national referendum to amend the Constitution, effectively allowing Putin to remain in office indefinitely. Under the pretext of pandemic safety, the Central Election Commission — acting on Kremlin orders — introduced multi-day voting, which further streamlined corporate mobilization. Public employees and workers at loyal companies were urged to vote on the first day, giving authorities time to pressure holdouts in the days that followed.
The State Duma later codified the option of three-day voting into law. Election experts have warned that the practice, which leaves ballot boxes unsupervised overnight, opens the door to tampering. But even after the pandemic, the system remained — officially, for “voter convenience.”
Another blow to the political consulting profession came with the expansion of remote electronic voting, which the Central Election Commission says is now used in more than 30 Russian regions. A new bill before the Duma would make online voting the primary method of casting ballots nationwide.
This is already the case in Moscow, one of the first regions to adopt remote electronic voting. The shift helped United Russia seize control of the capital, which had long been a stronghold of opposition support. In the 2019 City Duma elections, opposition candidates won 20 out of 25 seats. But by the 2021 State Duma race, candidates backed by the mayor’s office swept every district.
In the 2024 Moscow City Duma elections, pro-government candidates’ campaigns were mostly managed by little-known consultants from the regions working for modest fees. But thanks to electronic voting, Kremlin-approved candidates won in every district.
How the Kremlin turned political consultants into obedient ‘social architects’
“Political consultants are only needed where there’s competition,” said one former strategist who left electoral campaigns behind to go into business. “[Russia’s] systemic parties have no real interest in competing.” According to him, the Kremlin doesn’t need a large reserve of consultants for difficult races. While a few teams are still “kept in the fold,” he said, most are no longer needed.
“What’s the path for a good specialist today?” asked another consultant who now works with a major federal media group. “Become a deputy governor for domestic policy, join United Russia’s staff, work in the federal apparatus or one of its branches. Or you move into corporate PR and government relations — that’s what I do. Loyal people get hired for elections or recommended to acting governors. But honestly, at this point, any regional administration can run an election in-house.”
In 2025, the Kremlin launched a “social architects” contest — an attempt to keep unemployed political consultants within its sphere of influence. During the contest’s rollout, Firdus Aliyev, the managing director of the Kremlin think tank EISI, remarked that “at the dawn of Russian democracy” there was demand for political consultants who ran election campaigns. But today, he said, “social engagement in society goes far beyond elections.” Aliyev urged Kremlin-loyal consultants to “transform” and put their skills to work on new tasks.
At the same event, Sergey Kiriyenko, who heads the Kremlin’s domestic policy bloc, called the program “a new step in the development of social, civic, humanitarian, and political sciences in Russia.” There is demand today, he said, not just for political methods, but for social ones. “There’s a need not just for expertise or scientific analysis of what’s happening, but for improvement to people’s lives.”
One former regional political strategist — now a government relations consultant for big business — sees this as a logical endpoint for the profession. “There was a time when a good political operator or even an official in the presidential administration could say, ‘If you want results, do what I do.’ But since Volodin’s time, the Kremlin is staffed with political officers whose attitude is: ‘Do what I say.’ The center now expects only three responses: ‘Yes,’ ‘Got it,’ and ‘Absolutely.’”
The ex-strategist doesn’t spare much sympathy for his former colleagues, now rebranded as “social architects” and tasked with organizing city anniversary celebrations or outings for senior citizens. “The market has degraded in the absence of competitive elections — it’s been years. It’s just a mess now. Put one of our [top strategists] next to an average American consultant who’s been working real races, and ours will come up short,” he said. “Still, the Kremlin can’t fully discard the consultants; there are friends, decent people among them. So they say, ‘Let’s support them this way.’”
A regional official who spoke to Meduza believes the Kremlin sees value in keeping these consultants close. Even if elections are mostly staged, he said, these operatives still understand how the system works: “They know where the pressure points are — and in a crisis, that knowledge might come in handy.”
But, he noted, after more than a decade without serious campaigns, Kremlin-linked consultants have lost the skills needed to win in “problematic” regions where public frustration runs high. When local elites put forward their own candidates, it’s often easier to reassert control through force than finesse. Before the 2022 city council elections in Vladivostok — where the Communist Party was gaining ground — a criminal case was opened against local Communist Party leader Artyom Samsonov for sexual misconduct involving a minor. Samsonov called the charges “completely fabricated” and said he had never met the alleged victim. He was sentenced to 13 years in a maximum-security prison.
In 2018, Kremlin-backed candidates lost gubernatorial races in four regions — Khabarovsk Krai, Primorsky Krai, the Republic of Khakassia, and Vladimir — to candidates initially considered token opposition. The driving force was public anger over the pension reform. In Primorsky Krai, the results were annulled. In Khabarovsk Krai, the victorious LDPR candidate, Sergey Furgal, was arrested in 2020. His party colleague in the Vladimir region, Vladimir Sipyagin, stepped down voluntarily a year later. But in 2023, Communist candidate Valentin Konovalov won a second competitive election in Khakassia, even though the presidential administration’s domestic policy bloc closely managed his United Russia opponent’s campaign.
“If people are broadly unhappy, you can’t send a security officer to everyone’s door,” the official told Meduza. “That’s how things like Khabarovsk and Khakassia happen. They throw everything they’ve got at the problem, send their best teams, and still come up empty. These people just don’t have the skills anymore.”
Story by Andrey Pertsev