Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Putin May Be Tiring of His Cronies

The ouster of the head of Russia's railroad monopoly suggests as much.

August 18, 2015 at 1:36 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Yakunin and Putin: still friends?
Photographer: Maxim Marmur/AFP/Getty Images

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Vladimir Yakunin seemed eternal: Nothing he could do appeared to undermine his standing in the system President Vladimir Putin has built to run Russia. Yet now he is leaving the top job at the national railroad monopoly, after 10 years of mismanaging it.

Putin may be realizing that tough economic times require better managers than his buddies, and that to remain in power he needs to distance himself from the oligarchy he has created.