Moscow’s Central Banker Dismantles What She Built
By Alexander Osipovich & Tom Fairless, Apr. 11, 2022, WSJ

“Nabiullina has a combination of qualities that the Kremlin
likes,” said Movchan, the former Russian banking executive.
“She’s very professional, but at the same time she’s ready
to follow directions meticulously.”

Nabiullina has demonstrated an ability to operate under
different ideological regimes. Educated under Communism, she
espoused free-market economics during her government career,
before helping enable Russia’s recent pivot into autarky, the
policy in which a country limits foreign trade and pushes for self-sufficiency. On Friday, the central bank relaxed some
restrictions on foreign-currency trading, a sign she is still
inclined to let markets function despite Russia’s isolation.

Nabiullina was born in Ufa, an industrial city some 700 miles
east of Moscow. Raised in a working-class family from the Tatar
ethnic minority, she studied economics at Moscow State U.—perhaps
the country’s top institution of higher learning—in the late
Soviet era, when Marxist-Leninist ideology still dominated the
curriculum. Nabiullina was among the economics students most
proficient in Karl Marx, according to a former classmate,
Sergei Aleksashenko.

“She learned ‘Das Kapital’ by pages,” recalled Aleksashenko,
who served as a deputy finance minister and deputy central bank
governor during the 90s and now lives in the U.S. where he's a
blogger and vocal critic of Putin. “If she was asked what Marx
said, she could repeat, Marx said this.”

Nabiullina pivoted to free-market economics with the fall of
the U.S.S.R. She spent much of the 1990s working in a big-
business trade group and the Russian economics ministry,
where she was seen as a protégé of Yevgeny Yasin, a prominent
liberal reformer. Nabiullina entered Putin’s circle in 1999,
when she joined a think tank that crafted his economic program.

Putin’s trust
----------------
Over the past two decades she's been a fixture of Putin’s team,
with roles that included leading the economics ministry, advising
the president on policy and—since 2013—running the central bank.

Nabiullina won the Russian leader’s trust because she lacks her
own political ambitions and is a stalwart inflation hawk, said
Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political
Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank. “The president’s views
that the ruble can’t be allowed to fall, and hyperinflation can’t
be allowed, go back to the 1990s,” Makarkin said. “And he listens
to the people who tell him this.”

Nabiullina also nurtured close ties with the West, shuttling
between international political gatherings such as the G-20,
policy conferences across Europe and meetings at the Bank for
International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Euromoney named
her “Central Bank Governor of the Year” in 2015. A former U.S.
Federal Reserve official noted that her English, initially shaky,
improved to the point where she could speak comfortably and give
policy speeches.

Four years ago, Nabiullina addressed a packed hall of IMF officials
in Washington in fluent English. Her host, Christine Lagarde—then
managing director of the IMF and now president of the ECB—praised
her “guts and courage” in taking on crooked Russian bankers and
reminisced about going to the opera with Nabiullina at St. Pete’s
Mariinsky Theater. In a 30-minute question-and-answer session,
Lagarde carefully skirted the topic of the international sanctions
imposed on Russia in 2014 over Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

“This is why you are so special, because you can make central
banking sing while being very sensible indeed,” Lagarde told
Nabiullina. Lagarde declined to comment through a spokesman.

Some early members of Putin’s economic team broke with the
Russian leader during the 2000s and 2010s, upset by his shift
toward authoritarianism. But not Nabiullina, who remained a
team player.

“She demonstrates her loyalty to Putin every minute, every second,”
said Aleksashenko, the former deputy finance minister. “You can't
stay in Putin’s team for 20 years if you’re not loyal or have contradictory ideas, if you say, ‘No Mr. Putin, you are wrong.’
It’s a personal choice—are you ready to stay with the dictator?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-central-banker-nabiullina-putin-ukraine-11649430535

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