Happy Friday!
I hope this week is bringing you at least some joy and satisfaction. I’ve spent much of it working on the Russian Security Research Lab (RSRL), trying to get in-text references to connect to the appropriate databases. This has involved writing lots of code (no-code software really means less-code software), merging two massive databases as a workaround to an insurmountable problem, and swearing a lot at my computer/AI. But I’ve nevertheless been making progress.
This week, however, I want to talk about something else: How Proyekt Media have tried to map nepotism in the Chechen regime. While noble, it displays some of the flaws that plague this genre — and it is a genre — of media reporting. As such, I thought it worthwhile to unpick the issues and their consequences for our understanding of elites.
This will be a two-part newsletter. This week, I’ll focus on the project itself and its strengths and weaknesses. Next week, I’ll compare the network of relationships that emerges and compare it with some of my own data to show in more detail how the differences shape our conclusions.
With that in mind, here’s what you can expect this week:
- An overview of Proyekt Media’s ambitious project
- The methodological issues that undermine validity
- A preliminary assessment of how this shapes our assessments of the Chechen elite
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An overview of Proyekt Media’s ambitious project
The data on the Chechen elite comes from a much larger project, in which a team have attempted to map the Russian elite writ large. They started with 1,329 senior officials — spanning the Kremlin and government, the security services, state companies, the regional authorities, and more (see here for the full details) — and mapped how many of them have relatives in positions of influence. In total, they claim to have studied the biographies of nearly 10,000 people.
The project is explicitly inspired by the groundbreaking work of sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya in the early 2000s, which documented the increasingly influence of the security services under Vladimir Putin and sparked extensive academic debates. This new effort looks to document the role nepotism has played in building the current elite and, less explicitly, how it might affect the transfer of power.
Chechnya thus comes into play as part of the analysis of the leadership of Russia’s federal subjects. Proyekt Media identified at least 93 people from Kadyrov’s family who currently occupy positions of influence. It views this as unprecedented even in the context of the high levels of nepotism seen elsewhere in Russia. It also sees it as evidence that “the hereditary transfer of power has effectively been enshrined in law in the region.”
The methodological issues that undermine validity
Discovering that familial ties are important in the Chechen system is a bit like discovering corruption at the highest levels of the Russian state: You’ve probably not spilt your coffee in surprise. But how they have arrived at their figures, what they’ve included, and what they’ve missed all showcase some issues with the data that are probably replicated elsewhere.
Before critiquing the project, it’s important to acknowledge the things that it does right. First, the scale of the work is impressive and those involved should be commended for trying to build a solid evidence base to support their assessments. Second, the authors have explained their methodology in some detail. Both are relatively unusual, especially in the media: all too often, claims about elites are based on anecdote, sweeping assertions, or ambiguity. This puts the project far ahead of many other network mapping efforts, such as Kavkaz Realii’s regular reports on nepotism in Chechnya. Finally, this type of work is time-intensive, information is hard to find, and errors are unavoidable. In short, the flaws on display do not mean that the project should be discarded, simply that the information and any conclusions stemming from it carefully interrogated — and not taken at face value.
That said, there are flaws. I would group these into several categories that reflect common errors in efforts at relationship mapping:
— How boundaries are defined: If you want to map how many relatives of state officials occupy positions of influence, at a minimum you need to define what you mean by relative and position of influence. Proyekt Media do this, but around the margins the boundaries become rather stretched. For example, under relatives, they include blood and marriage ties, as well as more informal relationships, such as lovers, civil partnerships etc. This is reasonable enough, but then they also include “in especially rare cases” compatriots where ties are very close. This matters when the aim is to expose familial nepotism because the numbers become inflated by evidence that does not relate to the conclusion. Another area of ambiguity is how many steps one goes from the principal: do you only include their relatives, or their relatives’ relatives, or their relatives’ relatives’ relatives? This will have a major impact on what the overall network looks like, but it’s hard to determine whether a consistent approach has been adopted here.
— How definitions are applied: Connected to the previous, in some cases the definitional decisions that have been made appear to have been simply ignored and then the methodology adjusted to match. For example, the bottom-line focus is on the composition of the elite as of 1 January 2025, but then they include historical members as well. This matters for regimes like those of Putin and Kadyrov, which have been in power for two and a half decades and have undergone significant transformations. In the analysis of Ramzan Kadyrov’s network, the description says that the influential Delimkhanov and Geremeyev clans are excluded, but then some members are included anyway. Some of the stretching around definitions and their application appears to follow the logic ‘they don’t fit, but we wanted to include them, so we have.’ This is as antithetical to evidence-based analysis as ballot stuffing is to democracy. They note the discrepancies in the text, but appear to still allow them to inform macro numbers and conclusions.
— Ignoring the cultural context: The eternal battle between macro- and micro-level approaches involves fierce debates over whether there is sufficient acknowledgement and understanding of specific contexts. But there is alarming evidence of its lack here. Several people, like Chechen Prime Minister Magomed Daudov and Akhmat-Kavkaz commander Khuseyn Mezhidov appear to have been included on the basis that they are publicly addressed using variants of “dear brother.” If that’s the case: Sweet bejesus! In many cultures — and Chechen political culture is definitely one of them — brother, sister, uncle, aunt, etc can be used to signal endearment, solidarity, or respect rather than blood ties. If one Chechen official addresses another as “my dear brother,” it categorically does not mean that the two are related. Blood ties are also not all meaningful: People can have genealogical connections that carry no cultural weight.
A preliminary assessment of how this shapes our assessments of the Chechen elite
Next week, I’ll map the networks around Kadyrov and compare this data with my own on the Chechen elite. That will allow for a fuller answer to the question of how these errors shape and distort our impressions of Kadyrov’s regime.
Nevertheless, there are several things that can be highlighted already. First, it’s actually unclear how many people are included in their analysis or support their baseline conclusion. They specify 93 relatives in the description, but the list they provide includes at least 95 names. Some are dead, some are no longer in power. Some, as already noted, are not relatives.
Second, the temporal changes within the Chechen system as it prepares to transfer power are hard to discern. For example, just as Ramzan has moved his sons into positions of influence, he has transferred his daughters from state roles to become more entrenched in business. The Delimkhanovs and the Geremeyevs should actually be included, because in recent years Ramzan has strengthened the ties between the clans through intermarriage among the offspring. This all gets lost as time is collapsed.
Finally, the overall picture appears to be imbalanced, for example by only semi-including the Geremeyevs and Delimikhanovs. Both clans have extensive influence of their own and are interlinked through mutual benefits and vulnerability, but this is obscured by the fuzziness over what to include and how many steps to go from the principle. There is also limited distinction between different types of position and their consequences: There is a world of difference between being placed in charge of a branch of the security services and a local posting to a relatively insignificant agency.
None of this changes the baseline conclusion about the prevalence of nepotism — the core of their data is, after all, accurate. But it does affect its extent and distort assessments about how the regime operates. I’ll explore how in more detail next week.
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