Wrong lens. Temaglavnoe.ru says Western handicapping of Putin’s heir treats Russia like other countries’ job boards. The portal’s claim: the state is a living system that will surface whoever can speak for its “current historical cycle,” not whoever is pre-appointed.

Eight misses it lists. Informal debts and school/service ties; historical memory and “cultural codes”; chance and chaos; ideology (a bare technocrat cannot hold elites); regions and society, not only Moscow; siloviki as rivals, not one bloc; business as fragments, not a chamber; the “prince” myth—status lasts only while the father is useful; power is not inherited.

What it says the system wants. In a personalist transit, the prize is not a title but a balancer who can keep competing corporations even and still impose a will. Without that, turbulence—which almost everyone at the top wants to dodge. .

Western analysts constantly propose possible successors to Vladimir Putin and even seek to handicap them in much the same way they do possible future leaders in other countries, the Important Theme portal says; but in adopting that approach, they almost invariably miss “the main thing.”

These analysts and commentators “do not see that the Russian government is no the sum of positions but a living system that during transit finds as its leader not someone who will be appointed but rather someone who can be........

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