#15
Moscow Times
April 25, 2003
Putin Appoints New Arms Tsar
By Lyuba Pronina and Simon Saradzhyan
Staff Writers

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday revived the post of deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry and arms exports, and named a veteran defense electronics guru to fill it.

The appointment of Boris Alyoshin adds yet another layer to the military industrial complex, following the appointment last Saturday of Major General Alexander Burutin to be Putin's adviser on the defense industry and arms procurement.

And both appointments show how far the star of Ilya Klebanov, the minister of industry, science and technology, has fallen as Putin turns his attention to the problems of the defense industry.

Alyoshin -- who spent decades researching and developing software for warplanes' avionics before becoming a federal bureaucrat -- is expected to oversee industrial production and exports, stimulation of entrepreneurship and investments as well as research and development in Russia's defense industry, according to the government's press service.

His prime responsibility, however, is expected to be to steer Russia's more than 1,600 defense industry enterprises, which exported a post-Soviet record of $4.5 billion in arms last year.

"Coordination of Russia's military-technical cooperation activities will benefit from this appointment," Putin told a meeting of his arms exports commission at the Kremlin.

Alyoshin, 48, becomes the fifth deputy prime minister in the Cabinet. Also Thursday, Putin named Galina Karelova to replace Valentina Matviyenko as deputy prime minister in charge of social issues.

Paradoxically, while announcing the appointment of yet another supervisor of an industry already steered by half a dozen bureaucrats, Putin praised efforts to streamline the existing system of weapons sales to foreign countries.

The defense industry is already supervised by Klebanov. Before Putin stripped him of his rank of deputy prime minister in February 2002, he set up four agencies -- dealing with ammunition, shipbuilding, control systems and conventional weaponry -- which still operate under the auspices of his ministry.

There also is the independent Russian Aviation and Space Agency, which reports to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

Alyoshin will have enough power to control Klebanov's ministry, although there is a plan floating around the government to disband the ministry and its four agencies and replace them with a defense industry ministry.

What remains unclear is how much jurisdiction the new deputy prime minister will have over arms exports, which are currently overseen by the Defense Ministry, whose head, Sergei Ivanov, reports directly to the president.

In addition to a committee that supervises arms exports, the Defense Ministry has a separate committee that Putin set up last month to procure conventional weapons for the armed forces and also a directorate that has been traditionally responsible for both armament and procurement since Soviet times, now headed by Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Moskovsky.

All these appointments make the system of control over the defense industry and arms exports sector even more bloated and complicated than what Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin had in place, according to independent experts and industry insiders.

At any given time, Yeltsin had either an adviser or a deputy prime minister responsible for the military-industrial complex, while the Defense Ministry had only one commander to supervise both armament and procurement.

"The system is very burdened and looks strange in that it does not show a clearly outlined strategy," said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. "There are too many participants. On the contrary it should be simplified."

A defense industry official, however, said Putin's reason for appointing Alyoshin is clear.

"The defense industry and arms exports are complicated spheres that involve a lot of politics and a lot of various interests, and Alyoshin is a concrete man appointed for the concrete job -- to rule them," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

While lamenting the mushrooming bureaucracy, experts and industry insiders said they hope Alyoshin will fare better than his predecessor and former boss, Klebanov.

Vadim Solovyov, deputy editor of Russia's leading defense weekly, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, said, "This is a second Klebanov, only Klebanov did not cope with his job and Alyoshin will now take his mistakes into account and should do better."

While optimistic about Alyoshin's appointment, defense industry experts expressed hope that the existing bureaucracy will be streamlined when Putin finally decides to revamp the federal government's structure.

Alyoshin studied at the elite Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in the 1970s.

From 1978 until 1982, he worked at the State Scientific Research Institute of Aviation Systems, or GosNIIAS, where he developed avionics software for MiG-29 and Su-27 fighter jets.

From 1984 to 1989, Alyoshin headed the Center of Microelectronics of the Aviation Industry under GosNIIAS.

In 2000, he was appointed first deputy minister of industry, science and technology, and in November 2001 became chairman of the State Committee on Standardization and Metrology.

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