Is Putin getting outflanked on the right?

When FP spoke with analyst Paul Goble last week about the conflict in Georgia, he made the following interesting point:

I believe that one of the reasons the fighting stopped was not because there weren’t people in the defense ministry who thought it should go on for a bit longer, but because in the first two working days of the war, there was a total of some $8 billion net capital outflow from Russia. You’re talking about serious consequences for wealthy Russians […] Polls tell us that for many Russians, the single most important right they acquired after 1991 was the right to travel. If getting a visa becomes more difficult, Russians are going to have a harder time moving about. It’s going to be harder to get their children into elite international schools. There’s going to be less money around. So, there’s probably a constituency, and a pretty large one among an influential group of people, who are going to go to the Russian government and say, "You’re hitting us where it matters most: in our pocketbooks." And that’s a source of influence that should not be discounted at all.

Today, Andrei Piontkovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow reads some tea leaves in the Kremlin and warns of the opposite effect: that hardline nationalists could be the ones who gain the upper hand.

Piontkovsky sees a split between "global and national kleptocrats." For now, he puts President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the global camp with Goble’s wealthy Russians, and agrees that the two men restrained generals who were eager to roll the tanks into Tbilisi.

But the national kleptocrats, who "seem to believe that they can live without overseas assets, or without educating their children and maintaining residences in the West," present a growing threat, Piontkovsky argues. "They are content to own properties in elite residential areas around Moscow and in Russia, such as Rublyovka, Valday, and Krasnaya Polyana," and care little for the fruits of globalization.

While no one yet knows the national plutocrats’ names, I believe that they are new, influential players in or associated with the Kremlin, and that they have now become bold enough to challenge both Putin and Medvedev. Russia’s military chiefs, for whom it is psychologically difficult to be ordered by politicians to abruptly end a large-scale and successful military operation, are their natural allies.

I cannot predict who will win this growing confrontation. But even if the global kleptocrats sustain their more "moderate" position on Georgia, theirs could be a Pyrrhic victory. Every day and every hour, by means of their own propaganda, these globally minded kleptocrats, are setting the path to power for the nationalists.

Piontkovsky ends with an ominous premonition:

Putin once said that "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union." The national kleptocrats may soon start calling for its reversal, and they are in an increasingly strong position to do so.