Alexei Gordeyev has been promoted to Governor
By proposing the candidacy of Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev for the post of Governor of the Voronezh Region, President Dmitry Medvedev confirmed the rumours about Mr Gordeyev's impending resignation which have been in the air since May 2008. Mr Gordeyev was appointed Minister when Vladimir Putin became President in August 1999, and he is the first Minister of Mr Putin's second Government to be leaving the White House. For almost ten years, Mr Gordeyev was not only a Government member, but also a representative of the agrarian lobby in the White House.
Officially, the Kremlin said only that President Medvedev introduced "the candidacy of Mr Gordeyev for Governor of the Voronezh Region" to the Voronezh Regional Duma. The decree relieving the Minister of his post was not published, but the White House believes that the dismissal had already been decided. Mr Gordeyev was the first Minister in Vladimir Putin's Government set up in May 2008. During the time in office, Mr Gordeyev was ranked first by the number of rumours about his resignation: yesterday, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Vladislav Surkov said that Mr Gordeyev "expressed an intention to leave his post" and "the Government accepted the possibility of his resignation".
Mr Gordeyev was born on February 28, 1955 in Frankfurt-on-Oder. In 1978, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineers. In 1992, he graduated from the Academy of National Economy. After serving in the army, he worked as a chief constructor at Glavmoststroi. In 1981, he transferred to Minplodovoshchkhoz (Soviet Ministry of Agriculture) and the Russian SFSR State Agro-Industrial Committee, where he held the posts of chief mechanic, department head, and deputy directorate head. In 1986, he worked at the Moskva agro-industrial combine. Since 1992, Mr Gordeyev has been the head of The Agriculture Directorate, deputy head of the Moscow Region's Lyubertsy District administration. Since 1997, the head of the Economics Department; and since 1998, First Deputy Agriculture Minister. He was deputy chairman of the Agrarian Party, and joined United Russia in March 2003. Mr Gordeyev has a PhD in Economics, and holds medals and orders. He is married, with a daughter and a son.
Mr Gordeyev's resignation came seven months short of the 10th anniversary of his work as Agriculture Minister. He was appointed Minister of Food and Agriculture in August 1999 by Vladimir Putin's first Government. He began his career with promoting direct state support for agriculture. In 1999, he defended the idea of writing off the agricultural companies' debts, as well as granting subsidies and preserving the concessional lending fund that no one repays loans to. After the agrarians' political misfortunes, Mr Gordeyev has been consistently losing positions, including on issues related to state financing of villages, refusal to enter the WTO, and replacing the village concessional lending fund with Rosselkhozbank. But in the White House, Mr Gordeyev was always considered to be the agrarian lobby. His last success was an unplanned increase in Rosselkhozbank's capital by 45 billion roubles in 2009.
Mr Gordeyev has never abandoned the idea of total state control over agriculture. His major recent initiative was to introduce state regulation of prices on agricultural products and his fight against supermarket chains. Even Viktor Zubkov, who usually supported Mr Gordeyev's ideas, did not vote for this initiative. According to the White House, in the last six months, Mr Gordeyev's activity has decreased. "When someone is being kept in suspense, he gets tired, and people around him get tired, too," a Government official told Kommersant.
Kommersant sources at the White House believe that the resignation of Mr Gordeyev is not just the dismissal of a controversial Minister, but the beginning of the reorganisation of the Government structure that was planned in September 2008 and postponed because of the crisis.
Yesterday, Mr Surkov hinted at new dismissals, saying that "All prescheduled resignations and new appointments should be estimated taking into account new objectives to increase management effectiveness, both at the centre, and at the local level." Perhaps Mr Gordeyev will not be the last Minister in Vladimir Putin's Government who leaves his post in the beginning of 2009.
As for now, only one change has been announced apart from the Governors and Deputy Agriculture Minister Alexander Kozlov, who was also dismissed: Mr Putin dismissed Andrei Zverev, head of the Government analysis centre, and replaced him with Alexei Makushkin, director of the East/West Institute Russia. Mr Makushkin is the first White House official who has recent experience of working in the Russian division of a foreign non-commercial organisation with headquarters in New York. But the institute, founded in 1982, is more of a lobbyist structure: It was one of PepsiCo co-founder Donald Kendall's projects. Under his leadership, the company has been cooperating with the USSR and later with Russia since 1972.
The Prime Minister has not yet proposed the candidacy of new Agriculture Minister to the President. Sources in the White House name the same possible successors to Mr Gordeyev as they did in May 2008: Igor Rudenya, head of the Agro-Industrial Department of the Government Executive Office, and Belgorod Governor Yevgeny Savchenko. According to Kommersant sources, First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who was in charge of agrarian issues earlier, is not considered a candidate for the post.