The new leadership of the government apparatus will take its final shape in the next two days. Today or tomorrow, Mikhail Sinelin will be appointed First Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, who will simultaneously retain the post of head of the Prime Minister's Secretariat. According to high-ranking sources in the house on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment, combining the two posts is logically justified, as it allows merging the government apparatus with the Kasyanov secretariat into a single whole and getting rid of any confrontation between them, as well as duplication of functions. As a matter of fact, the latest appointments in the White House were conceived so that the prime minister’s secretariat would become a full-fledged White House apparatus with all the influential powers that entails. Despite the significant increase, Mr. Sinelin's responsibilities will, in fact, change little. He will continue to oversee general issues. The bureaucratic technology of the apparatus will come under the control of the first deputy, and the head of this apparatus, Konstantin Merzlikin, will certainly remain the ideologist. As for economic issues, according to government sources, this area will be completely handed over to one of the deputy chiefs of staff, Oleg Buklemishev.
Good people say that Mikhail Sinelin will be able to quickly debug the mechanism for clear passage of documents inside the device. The new first deputy is called a strong apparatchik and an absolutely loyal person to the prime minister.
Vera KUZNETSOVA
Merging in hardware ecstasy • Vremya novostej • RIMA — Russian Independent Media Archive
