Russia's New Minister of Defense

As a part of his ministerial shakeup, Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that longtime Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu will no longer head the department, instead being replaced by economist Andrey Belousov.

While Shoigu is no longer heading Defense, he has been appointed as the new Secretary of the Russian Security Council, a role previously held by Nikolai Patrushev. Patrushev himself is set to be appointed somewhere else, but the details of which are not currently known.

It is important to note that the changing of the Russian Defense Minister doesn’t really affect how the war is ran. The Defense Ministry is mainly responsible for logistics and economic affairs when it comes to the military. The management of the war comes from the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.

Who is Andrey Belousov?

The new Defense Minister is not somebody with a military background. He is an economist and graduated from the Economics Faculty at Moscow State University in 1981. Most of his work since then has been in the economics field, until 2000, when he entered the government as an advisor to the Prime Minister.

He had served in various ministerial and directorship roles until 2020, when he became the First Deputy Prime Minister.

Belousov is also a practicing Orthodox Christian, who has said that “Russia must become the guardian of the traditions of Christian civilization. The era of globalism is over.”

He has also said that “by preserving traditional values of the West, which are originally the values of Western Christian European civilization, Russia can become a guardian of these values. This may seem like a paradoxical idea, but it is nonetheless true. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that the West is our enemy.”

I assume that he means the West as in the collective peoples of the West, and not the current regimes which control Western countries.

Something else that is interesting about this guy is that he is an expert in something called Cybernetic Economics. From what I have been able to figure out, this field was somewhat related to Chile’s project Cybersyn, which sought to automate economic planning. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this subject, but I thought I would mention it because it sounded interesting.

So now we have this expert economist and cybernetics enthusiast in charge of the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Other notable facts

His father, Rem Belousov, was also an economist. He was an advocate and team member for the reforms of Alexi Kosygin, who was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1964–1980. While in office, Kosygin advocated and enacted certain economic reforms which were meant to fix the stagnating Soviet economy, reforms which were later rescinded.

Essentially, the reforms called for more detailed and scientific central planning that would be heavily reliant on the use of computers and other cybernetic systems. A modernization and fine-tuning of the planning process, you could say.

He also wanted to invite a sort of profit motive for Soviet citizens as incentives. In a way, it is reminiscent (though not entirely the same) with how the Chinese ended up reforming their socialist system, though thought of much earlier.

The Soviet Union had experimented with such reforms before. Vladimir Lenin implemented his New Economic Policy after the Russian Civil War which allowed some market systems to remain in place in order for the Soviet economy to recover. Stalin then reversed this during his Great Turn.

Many people believe that had the USSR embraced and kept Kosygin’s economic reforms, the country would not have collapsed in 1991, and would remain a world power today. Interesting to think about.

Again, I am not an economist, there is a much deeper analysis in how Kosygin sought to restructure the Soviet economy. I am just laying out the basic synopsis. There are entire calculations on how such things will be done.

However, there are patterns here which I find interesting. First, Kosygin wanted to use cybernetics to improve the Soviet economy. Yet here we have Andrey, who has a background in Cybernetic Economics, now heading the Defense Ministry.

I wonder if we could see some form of Kosygin-style management of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It would be interesting to see how such a cybernetic reformatting would take place on a defensive level.

Conclusion

With Belousov’s appointment, it is clear that Putin is thinking long term. New fronts have been opened up by Russia against Kharkov and I am hearing chatter that they may open up another front further north against Sumy.

Should this continue to happen, I do not see Ukraine surviving the end of the year. As such, Russia will have to develop new logistics to support their occupation and win the coming peace.

There is also the issue with continuing tensions with the West. Belousov is a mathematics and numbers man. He will be able to determine what Defense needs and where in a fashion that Shoigu was unable.

Not much is known about his capacities as Defense Minister as of now, so we shall have to sit back and see what this economic wiz can do in a military capacity.