On February 26, 2023, political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky died after a long illness. He is called one of the creators of modern Russia. He planned Yeltsin’s 1996 and Putin’s 2000 election campaigns, worked for the Kremlin for a long time, and after 2011 became a critic of the authorities. Mikhail Karpov, head of the “Opinions” section, remembers Gleb Pavlovsky.
The headlines with which telegram channels and news feeds were filled today usually began with the words “deceased political strategist” – then the name and surname: Gleb Pavlovsky. Now he won’t be able to ask, but he would hardly have liked such a description, especially supplemented with the words “chief political strategist of the Kremlin.” On the other hand, it certainly wouldn’t come as a surprise to him.
Statesman
Pavlovsky was born in 1951 in Odessa and, as he himself admitted, it was “stuffy” for him in this “bourgeois, philistine” and at the same time “beautiful” city in terms of atmosphere. Of course, it is easy to do this in the absence of the person himself, but nevertheless, it can be assumed that all subsequent events and turns in his life were caused precisely by this: the fight against “congestion” and the desire to choose the courage with which it would not be dull to go through life.
This concept fits well with his dissident activities, which he described as “a period of activism, continuous, or something, movement”. In the process of “movement”, he managed to go into exile for participating in samizdat and, on the other hand, to be accused by his comrades of collaborating with the KGB. In the second half of the 1980s, he supported Gorbachev and developed his own Postfactum press agency.
Lyudmila Pakhomova / TASS
The collapse of the USSR became a personal tragedy for him, and, as he himself admitted, for the next five years he searched for “how to get revenge on Belovezhye.” During these years he took a tough anti-Yeltsin stance, not unreasonably viewing Yeltsin as guilty of weakening the state. And this was very important for Pavlovsky – after all, even in the days of dissent, he still held state posts and considered the salvation of his country his main goal. It doesn’t matter what its name is, the USSR or the Russian Federation.
The Fund for Effective Policy (FEP), a political technology organization founded by Pavlovsky in 1995, aimed to strengthen existing institutions of power, not wait for new ones to emerge and take shape. And it is not surprising that the main customer of FEP very quickly became essentially the Kremlin.
Later, Pavlovsky explained his desire to work with Yeltsin, with whom he had already been in a difficult confrontation, with the fact that otherwise Zyuganov would have won the presidential election in 1996, which he could not even imagine. However, the political strategist immediately expressed the opinion that it was necessary to support Yeltsin as well because otherwise Dudayev, the leader of self-proclaimed Ichkeria, would have “won” him. It is difficult to judge which of these statements is truer, but in any case, the support of the current government fits perfectly into the concept of the need for a strong state to save Russia from collapse.
It was the FEP that developed the scenario for Yeltsin’s election campaign in 1996, commissioned by the presidential administration. It has been accepted and put into practice. Pavlovsky himself said that, first of all, the money of the millionaires led by Berezovsky played a role, without which nothing would have happened. But money without ideas is just pieces of paper.
Operation Successor
The scenario of Operation “Successor” was also developed by the Pavlovsky Foundation by order of the presidential administration. Moreover, the choice of a successor depended entirely on Yeltsin. At some point, Boris Nemtsov, promoted by the FEP, could become one, but the oligarchs Berezovsky and Gusinsky, who controlled television, quickly drowned his rating. Things did not go well with Kirienko either – the economy was at an impasse and it was simply impossible to “decompress” the young prime minister.
But Pavlovsky himself, it seems, was no longer at all important who would become the successor – the media electoral machine he created was ready to work for the election of the candidate nominated by Yeltsin. The process was purely technical and the first president of Russia had only to decide.
That’s what happened shortly after. Alongside the young and energetic Vladimir Putin, in whom voters proved very easy to believe, the EFF also brought into the Duma the pro-government bloc Unity, led by Sergei Shoigu. Unity came second thanks to Putin’s carefully calculated support for the bloc. Thus, a loyal State Duma was prepared for the new president.
The future is ashes, the past is darkness
After that, the FEP continued to do what it did best: provide information support to the authorities. Pavlovsky had his own program on NTV, Real Politics, which he himself did not like, in his own words. Subsequently, he developed the concept of the pro-government Nashi youth movement and provided informational support to Yanukovych during the presidential elections in Ukraine in 2004.
Valery Sharifulin / TASS
But the courage is gone. The work did not bring satisfaction, and the “movement” that Pavlovsky so loved disappeared. The monotony bored the well-known political strategist, especially as the usual tools of the pre-election struggle had taken a back seat – such crude tricks as removing candidates from the pre-election race were increasingly used . “Scenarios and ideologems are no longer needed here, but lawyers and prosecutors are needed,” Pavlovsky recalled.
In 2011, he opposed Putin’s third term, and already in April of the same year, the Kremlin terminated his contract. Pavlovsky began to appear more and more often in the opposition press and, albeit quietly, but with some confidence, criticizes the authorities. He admitted that he himself had largely contributed to the fact that the situation in the country developed in this way and not otherwise, although towards the end of his life he reacted to the following accusations with undisguised irritation .
In March 2022, Pavlovsky launched his own Telegram channel, in which he shared his observations of what was happening until late autumn. He did not express any brilliant and unambiguous opinions, even though the emotions he felt were absolutely clear.
One of the last posts on her channel went something like this: “So the doctor aunt asked me how I wanted to die, cancer or a heart attack? You know, I thought!
Soon after, the channel fell silent, and Pavlovsky himself stopped commenting on the press. He only broke his silence on February 27, 2023. The message, published post factum, reported the death of historian and political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky at the first Moscow hospice named after Vera Millionshchikova after a serious and prolonged illness.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.
