Collective Kiriyenko

It makes little sense to seriously discuss what this or that minister of the new government is capable of and what policy he will pursue. Very little depends on the actions or inaction of these people today, and they themselves can only rely on fantastic luck, without which they will not sit in their chairs for long.
The reason is simple: the Russian economy today more than ever depends on the notorious "external factors", of which the most significant is the price of oil. This humiliating dependence since 2008 (when the current prime minister called for a break with it, and the current president put the economy into “manual control”) not only hasn’t gone away, but has continued to grow exponentially.
The last "accord", which actually turned the current composition of the cabinet into a "kamikaze government", was the pre-election generosity, in which the members of the tandem vied with each other. Literally all sensible economists are shouting at all corners that the announced economic programs of the President and the Prime Minister, taking into account the social obligations assumed by the state, are practically impossible. It is impossible to endlessly increase budget expenditures without having reliable sources of income. The duumvirs were warned about this by Aleksey Kudrin when he was the Minister of Finance, for which he paid with his chair. The only chance to make ends meet is the ever-rising prices of Russian raw materials, which will allow the new government economic guru Arkady Dvorkovich to succeed in carrying out the highly controversial doctrine declared by Putin and Medvedev.
Deputy Prime Minister Dvorkovich will have to simultaneously reduce the presence of the state in the economy, work to reduce the tax burden and improve the investment climate, strengthen the state’s position in key innovative industries, and ensure the “locomotive” role of the defense industry in modernizing the country. And to do all this in an extremely unpleasant demographic situation, which has already brought the pension system to the brink of collapse. „

Most of all, the current cabinet resembles Prime Minister Kiriyenko’s team of 1998: not too much depended on them in the run-up to the impending default

“And the government will also have to develop the Far East, ensure the creation of 25 million “qualitatively new” jobs and reduce housing prices. All this little science fiction can be financed only in one case: if the monetary authorities of developed countries, frightened by a new destructive wave of the crisis, begin to print money with a vengeance, some of which will pour into commodity markets. The scenario is possible, but unlikely. While commodity prices are falling, and markets are frozen in anticipation of the outcome of the European debt crisis.
But even if commodity prices suddenly continue to rise, it is not at all certain that the government will be able to take advantage of this "external grant", as Putin's former adviser Andrey Illarionov calls it. The stampede of capital flight from Russia in the face of record average annual oil prices is rather evidence of the opposite.
The "firing" nature of the new cabinet, which will have to answer for the consequences of an almost inevitable crisis in the Russian economy, is quite obvious not only to critics of the policy pursued in recent years, but also to the direct participants in its development. Most likely, this explains the departure from the government of Elvira Nabiullina and the refusal of the rector of the Higher School of Economics Yaroslav Kuzminov to take the post of Minister of Education.
Most of all, the current cabinet is reminiscent of Prime Minister Kiriyenko's team of 1998, which did not stay too long at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid: not too much depended on it on the eve of the inevitable impending default. It is likely that Sergei Vladilenovich learned that lesson well, since today he preferred a modest “time off” in the much safer Rosatom to the prestigious post of Deputy Prime Minister for the Fuel and Energy Complex.