St. Petersburg

After 1990, St. Petersburg had 6 governors in all, a relatively rare case of regular turnover in the Russian context. If one takes 4–5 years as a standard term, then over 30 years a normal sequence would produce 6–7 governors. The tenure of St. Petersburg’s governors also shows almost no extremes: there were few exceptionally long-serving or exceptionally short-serving incumbents, nor were there sharp peaks or troughs in tenure length. Most tenures clustered close to the average. In numerical terms, St. Petersburg looks like a standard case, but the conditions needed to produce such a standard pattern were not easy to achieve. More importantly, after 1996, the city’s next three governors all served terms close to 90 months, or 7.5 years. On the one hand, this shows that the governorship was relatively stable and that governors could generally secure reelection. On the other hand, it also shows that the Russian state’s elite policy operated in St. Petersburg with particular effect. Each governor was transferred before the end of a full term, leaving a substantial buffer for observing, selecting, and handing over to the successor.