When it comes to containing coronavirus, the Kremlin has a solid plan: Russia’s president Vladimir Putin promises everyone a month-long holiday; regional governors have to come up with painful restriction measures to then keep people in their homes. “I have decided to prolong the official non-work period until the end of the month,” Mr Putin said in a brief speech on Thursday. “Let me stress that wages will be retained. Regional heads … will have to plan out a set of specific preventive measures that are the most rational for their regions.”
As the coronavirus pandemic presents Mr. Putin with arguably the greatest challenge of his 20-year rule, the typically hands-on president has been conspicuous by his absence. As Mr Putin distances himself from lockdown measures that look set to plunge the country into a sharp recession, regional governors and local officials have been thrust into the leadership vacuum.
None more so than Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who has emerged as the public figurehead of Russia’s initiatives against COVID-19, overshadowing other officials and shaking up the country’s well-established system of top-down government. In a televised meeting last week, Mr Sobyanin warned Mr Putin that government figures showing low numbers of infections underestimated the true scale of the outbreak. And last weekend he announced that Moscow would be placed under near-total lockdown. These moves have left other parts of the Russian power structure scrambling to follow the mayor’s lead.
“It’s a strange situation for the Russian government that it has to, in fact, follow Sobyanin’s measures, and it creates some uncomfortable positions,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, a Russia-focused political analysis firm. The result has been a muddled approach in which some branches of government have taken Russia’s response to the extreme, while others have done next to nothing.