Putin’s banker
Elvira Nabiullina is the top technocrat keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine humming. During the decade she’s sat at the helm of Russia’s central bank, Nabiullina’s hawkish monetary policies have repeatedly saved the ruble and kept the country’s economy afloat. In the process, Putin’s banker, once considered a moderating influence and now his silent enabler, has managed to stave off the effects of unprecedented Western sanctions designed to drain the Kremlin’s coffers, prolonging the war on Ukraine.
Nabiullina’s rise was an unlikely one — she is the daughter of blue-collar ethnic Tatars from Ufa, a city in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan, more than 1,000 kilometers from Moscow. But from humble beginnings, she became the first woman to run a central bank of a G8 country. She famously saved the Russian economy back in 2014, after Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, deftly hiking interest rates and introducing reforms. With the ruble tanking and inflation soaring, Nabiullina’s interventions, which also saw Russia develop its own payments system, shut down hundreds of wobbly banks and eventually build up huge reserves, earned her the admiration of her international counterparts. She was honored as the central bank governor of the year by Euromoney in 2015 and The Banker in 2017. And in 2018, Christine Lagarde, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, lauded Nabiullina as the woman who could make “central banking sing” (after waxing lyrical about their shared love of opera).
Inspired perhaps by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who throughout her diplomatic career famously wore brooches and pins to express her views and moods, Nabiullina took to conveying coded messages to the world through her own outfit choices. Many a pundit read her funereal all-black outfit in the wake of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a subtle hint of her inner dissatisfaction. Her supposed disapproval ended there.
Where there was once admiration internationally for the 60-year-old, there’s now frustration at her role in facilitating mass death and destruction. As the West has tried to cut Russia out of the world’s financial markets and choke off its access to the cash and tech it needs for its brutal invasion, Nabiullina has managed to parry, opening the spending taps and steadying the economy. For now, those tactics are working: The IMF recently predicted Russia’s economy will grow by 2.2 percent this year; in February, the forecast was a much more modest 0.7 percent. Those sorts of results have seen critics compare Nabiullina to Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, and Adolf Eichmann, who perfected the railway system that transported Jews to their deaths.
Next year will bring fresh challenges to Nabiullina, as Russia continues to face the rising cost of its enduring war: tightening sanctions, a brain drain, volatility in commodities markets, a wobbly ruble and spiraling inflation. As Putin’s loyal foot soldier, she’ll need to keep the economy in the black, the banking system shored up and the Kremlin’s coffers full. But there are signs of friction about Nabiullina’s policies: She has attracted increasing criticism from some in Putin’s inner circle and in the Russian commentariat, with commentators already lobbing potshots in her direction over her supposed failure to keep inflation down and the ruble up. The question is whether that’s a move designed to deflect blame for Russia’s woes onto someone other than Putin, or a sign that Nabiullina’s days are actually numbered.
Check out the full POLITICO 28: Class of 2024, and read the Letter from the Editors for an explanation of the thinking behind the ranking.
