Happy Monday!

In this newsletter, I’ve talked a fair bit about the Kadyrov regime and the succession question. This week, I want to kick off a four-part series that reframes how we look at the topic — starting with why the debate over who replaces Ramzan Kadyrov begins with the wrong question.

With that in mind, here’s what I’ll cover this week:

• Kadyrov is a system, not a person
• Missing the forest for the trees
• Don’t study the player, study the game

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Kadyrov is a system, not a person

The debate over Ramzan’s political future has been ongoing for several years. As I’ve discussed here and elsewhere, there are well-founded concerns over his health and evidence that both the Kremlin and the Chechen elite itself are planning for a post-Kadyrov future.

This debate naturally gives rise to commentary that seeks to answer one core question: Who will replace Ramzan? It is a logical and natural question to ask, given his dominance of the political and media scene.

Yet Ramzan has built a sophisticated regime in which relatives and allies are installed across government, the security services, and business. This regime cannot be reduced to the person of Ramzan Kadyrov — any more than the Russian political system can be reduced to Vladimir Putin. Remove Ramzan and you will still have to contend with the rest of the system.

Asking who will replace Ramzan therefore asks the wrong question. Instead, what we should be thinking about is how do you replace Ramzan?

Missing the forest for the trees

One of the best-known concepts used to explain Russia’s political system is Alena Ledeneva’s concept of sistema (literally: the system). According to sistema, power is rooted in networks, not official positions. People use their positions to help their friends and allies; the boundaries between friendship and utility are blurred; and networks transcend formal hierarchies. At its simplest, the concept captures the idea that it’s who you know, not who you are, that truly matters.

This concept is equally valuable for understanding the Chechen political system. And it helps us see why concentrating on the question of who will replace Ramzan is misleading. It forces us to focus on personalities and positions. It allows perceptions to be distorted by whoever appears to be ascendant in media coverage at any given moment. It leads to a neglect of the question in its entirety when, like now, not much seems to be happening. In short, it asks us to pay attention to who someone is, not who they know. It leads us to miss the forest for the trees.

Don’t study the player, study the game

Reframing the question from who to how and acknowledging that we are dealing with a networked system rather than individuals opens up pathways to a richer analysis of the succession question.

Instead of focusing on the personalities that comprise the Chechen regime, we need to look at the relationships between actors and the ways in which they intersect. We need to look at who is connected to whom, who has installed their allies in positions that give them access to vital resources, who is able to offer or benefit from patronage, and so on. Biographies and personalities are not irrelevant, any more than institutional positions are. But they are secondary — and more often than not reflections of power rather than its source.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll unpack how we can implement this reframing to consider the Chechen regime as a networked system of governance, and how this can help us better understand the succession process. Next week, I’ll explain the system that Kadyrov has built. In week three, I’ll use one key member of the regime to illustrate its key features. Then, in week four, I’ll outline a more systematic approach to this kind of analysis — and show what it makes possible.

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