After government and President’s Administration it’s turn now of the Security Council to become subject to reshuffling. However, the number of appointments is even less there compared to the Kremlin or White House. The changes are related to usual bureaucratic rotations accompanying any change of supreme power, though, some of them are made with having in mind future prospects.      

The first kind of reshuffling was about the permanent SC members. According to the existing legal norms, these are people present in the SC due to their positions held – that’s President, Prime Minister, head of the President’s Administration, SC Secretary, chairs of the both Chambers of the Parliament, defense, interior and foreign ministers, also heads of special services. In this group the new officials just got a membership in the SC as an addition to their new appointments.   

The second group is appointed by President SC members who only have advisory vote. It is this group where the most significant changes happened. The main sensation is that today’s deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov was not included in the SC where he has been a permanent member due to his former position. He began there as a Secretary in 1999 at Yeltsin. Then he was working there as a defense minister since 2001-2007. When he was shifted to fill the post of the first deputy prime minister, his formal status in the SC got lessened. But that was the time of big political hopes, as he was considered to be one of the main candidates for becoming successor to Vladimir Putin. Summer last year all the political Moscow called Sergei Ivanov to be the most probable candidate for the top post in the country. This is why his continued membership at the SC seemed logical. Today Sergei Ivanov belongs to the set too. But now he is only deputy prime minister, not even the first deputy. And he doesn’t seem to have good political prospects. With such a state of things his presence in the SC was not considered to be necessary.    

In the meanwhile, Viktor Ivanov, the head of Drug Traffic Control, was included to the SC with advisory vote. That’s a surprise again, as his predecessor at this post Viktor Cherkesov was not a SC member in that capacity, though he was a SC member while he held the position of the Authorized Representative of the President in the North-West Federal District.   

Is this new appointment of Viktor Ivanov related to giving more importance to struggle against drugs by the state and reinforcing the position of his agency, or to strengthening of his personal position? The former conjecture is not likely to be true, as after Viktor Cherkesov left the rumors put it that the agency itself may be affiliated to some other structure. The latter conjecture is dubious too. The position of Viktor Ivanov was not considered to be too strong during the period of “interregnum”. His prospects did not seem to be better than those by other enforcers. It means this appointment to the SC was done with a “team” purpose of concentrating bigger quantity of enforcers in one of the main, though advisory, body in the country, and the enforcers with whom the toughest line of the Russian policy has been associated in recent years.

What’s it for? Probably, it was done just for counter-balancing to the president, as the SC is a presidential body. Probably, it is done just in case of the new head of state to want to begin realization of the ideas voiced by him during the election campaign, the ideas of necessity of getting over the “legal nihilism”, or the thesis “freedom is better than unfreedom”, or intention to restrict the role of the state in the economic life and decrease the administrative regulation of national economy. In that case there would be a ground prepared for competent objecting to the president. The next months will show how effectively such a construction can work.