State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has proposed introducing KPIs for the chairs of parliamentary committees. “We discussed assessing the performance of committee chairs, but after lengthy discussions we set the idea aside—and in vain. It would therefore be right for us to return to it and establish several key indicators for the relevant committees, including the consideration of issues relating to state programs and oversight of those programs,” Volodin said at a Duma session devoted to the implementation of the 2025 federal budget. He suggested punishing committee chairs with “disciplinary measures” and even removal from office.
Now serving a record third term as speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin is publicly demonstrating that he has received a mandate of trust from Vladimir Putin—and is trying to extract the maximum from it. The speaker is in effect returning to the idea of “parliamentary subjecthood“—or, more precisely, the subjecthood of parliament’s leadership and apparatus—which he sought to advance after taking the speaker’s chair in 2016. At the time, Volodin had just lost his post as first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration for domestic policy, and he took the loss painfully: he understood perfectly well that parliament’s formally elevated status concealed the fact that it had long served the interests of the executive. He understood this, in part, because he had himself issued such directives from the Kremlin.
A decade ago, Volodin entered into an institutional standoff with the Kremlin’s political bloc, seeking to give parliament—that is, himself—greater autonomy and influence. He barred presidential administration officials from the government box, imposed attendance discipline in the Duma (and thereby gained leverage over the parties), criticized federal ministers from the Duma rostrum, and had his people control the United Russia faction. Gradually, this “subjecthood” shrank: in the 2021 convocation, for instance, the speaker lost control of the United Russia faction. Volodin then adopted a different persona—not the head of an autonomous parliament, but its efficient manager and partner of the executive branch.
The proposal to assess committee chairs through KPIs is a new approach to the question of “subjecthood” and an attempt by the speaker to expand his influence. Evidently, the Duma’s Committee on Control, chaired by Volodin’s longtime ally, United Russia member Oleg Morozov, will be tasked with developing performance indicators and monitoring their fulfillment. Many committee chairs have long become bureaucrats: they work closely with the Kremlin and the government, acting as representatives and conduits of their interests, while others are tied to lobbying groups. These “committee men” enjoy a degree of autonomy within parliament, confident that their partners in the executive or in influential elite groups will come to their aid in any conflict with the speaker or the Duma apparatus.
Vyacheslav Volodin has found an instrument to constrain that autonomy. By seeking to influence the work of high-status deputies and make them dependent on his team, he will also be able to influence their patrons. In exchange for good KPI results, the speaker and his circle can expect reciprocal services and privileges. Neither committee chairs nor their “protectors” are likely to welcome the KPI idea—but the fact that the State Duma speaker has voiced it publicly suggests that he feels strong enough to act and has been given a blank check.
It is not hard to see that, despite his strained relations with Sergei Kiriyenko, Volodin has borrowed methods from the political bloc of the presidential administration that Kiriyenko heads. Kiriyenko’s team has long set performance targets for governors on socio-political issues and signals in advance the electoral results it expects.
The introduction of KPIs may do more than increase Volodin’s influence. The performance indicators will be tied to state programs, which are usually presented as Vladimir Putin’s initiatives. The speaker will thus position himself as the figure closely monitoring the execution of the president’s will—and the principal target audience for that image is the head of state himself.
The KPRF on the march
Powerful regional branches of the Communist Party have declared that they do not recognize the results of the State Duma elections. Such statements have been made by the KPRF committees in Buryatia and Komi. They are demanding that the election results be annulled, at least in their own regions, that election commissions be dissolved, and that three-day and electronic voting be abolished.
The Buryatia branch is led by Vyacheslav Markhayev, a popular local politician and former commander of the republic’s OMON. The Communist Party cell in Komi is headed by Oleg Mikhailov, who supported the environmental protests at Shiyes and in 2021 won a competitive single-mandate race for the State Duma. Neither Markhayev nor Mikhailov made it into the new parliament. The former had every chance of winning a single-mandate district, but the party itself has long refused to nominate the former commander of the Buryat OMON—apparently to avoid antagonizing the presidential administration once again and depriving United Russia of another parliamentary seat. Markhayev previously entered the Duma on the KPRF list, but in this election the Communists lost nearly 5 percent of the vote, turning his seat into an unwinnable one. Mikhailov was nominated in a district but faced intense pressure there and, according to official results, lost.
The refusal to recognize election results in the regions can be described as the KPRF’s most radical form of protest. The party has used other methods as well: in several regions, including Moscow, it held rallies against falsification. These were hardly mass events, but the Communists, unlike other parties, made their discontent unmistakably clear.
The KPRF, with which the political bloc has long been at odds, became the biggest loser according to the official election results. It lost nearly a quarter of its vote compared with the previous election, its faction shrank substantially, and it lost seats held by popular regional figures and well-known federal politicians: the aforementioned Markhayev and Mikhailov, Maria Prusakova (Altai Krai), and Sergei Obukhov, one of the most visible figures in the Communist Party and its chief political technologist.
The party faced two paths: become softer and more loyal to the authorities, admitting political technologists from the presidential administration into its apparatus, or raise its voice. The Communist leadership appears to be leaning toward the second option, although its protest voice remains rather muted. If the KPRF leadership changes course, the pronounced discontent of the organizations in Komi and Buryatia could be dismissed as “excesses on the ground,” and Markhayev and Mikhailov could be dealt with demonstratively—that possibility cannot be ruled out either. This is how Valery Rashkin was once removed from big politics after falling out of favor with the Kremlin and the Moscow city government: he lost his State Duma mandate (as prominent regional leaders are losing theirs now), and then his post as head of the party’s Moscow branch. If, however, protest sentiment and the KPRF’s ratings continue to rise—and they are already rising —the party may push its protest-minded regional figures to the fore.
Mobilization on the Agenda
The Defense Ministry has prepared a draft law under which the military police would receive expanded powers to search for servicemen. It could, for example, cordon off areas where they may be located, conduct sweeps and set up roadblocks, and carry out searches in civilian clothes. Clearly, such powers are superfluous under current conditions. They make sense only in the event of a new wave of mobilization.
Unlike in 2022, when many men and their families often had little idea what was happening at the front, there are few such uninformed people now. This is evident from the protests by relatives of men who were coerced into signing military contracts, and from the self-organization of residents in Penza Oblast, where a wave of coercion to sign contracts took place. A new approach to mass mobilization will require new forms of control and of countering public discontent, and the Defense Ministry is clearly preparing for that scenario. The drafting of legislation expanding the military police’s powers shows that, for the generals, another wave of mobilization remains on the agenda.
