Vladimir Putin talks to Sergey Kiriyenko during a meeting in Moscow, 26 February 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/ALEXEI DRUZHININ / SPUTNIK / KRE
Vladimir Putin has appointed the Kremlin’s highly influential deputy chief of staff, Sergey Kiriyenko, to head the supervisory board of Russia’s Centre for Historical Memory, Novaya Gazeta reported on Thursday.
The centre, which was established by Putin in 2023, was created to protect “traditional Russian spiritual values” and to “guarantee Russian sovereignty” while “suppressing attempts to devalue the role of Russia in world history”. It is currently run by archivist Yelena Malysheva.
A stalwart of Russian politics, Kiriyenko served as Russian prime minister for six months under Boris Yeltsin in 1998 aged just 35, and knew Putin before his rise to power. Once considered to be a part of a group of liberal politicians known as the “young reformers”, Kiriyenko also worked alongside Boris Nemtsov in the leadership of the liberal Union of Right Forces party.
However, Kiriyenko has aligned himself firmly with Vladimir Putin since his rise to power, and has headed Russia’s atomic energy agency Rosatom, overseen the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in Ukraine, and has recently become more directly involved in policy towards the breakaway Georgian territory of Abkhazia, where he was born.
Putin’s choice of Kiriyenko, who maintains a low profile nationally but is known to be one of the most powerful figures in the Kremlin, is a sign of the importance accorded by Putin to controlling Russia’s historical memory, as the country gears up to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany next month.
