As a result of a series of centralization reforms, initiated in 2000, a great number of studies have discussed that the center entrenched its control over regional subjects in Russia. Yet, several regional unrests observed in the recent years demonstrates an urgent need for an overhaul of the Russian center-periphery relationship, to which only limited attention has been paid yet. This study explains this instability by the increase of outsider governor deployments. Exploiting an original dataset of all governors from 1991 to 2019, patterns of outsider deployments and the effect of such deployments on the regional political processes are examined. Although President Boris Yel’tsin initially held the right to appoint and dismiss most governors in the first half of the 1990s, he did not try to dispatch outsider governors not firmly embedded in the regional societies. Whereas governors began to be elected through the popular gubernatorial elections in almost all of the regions since 1995, outsider candidates rarely won the posts of governors. In Vladimir Putin’s first and second terms (2000-2008), the power balance between the center and regions radically changed in favor of the center. In addition, scholars have argued that the center’s dominance over regional elites increased rapidly due to the de facto appointment system of governors was introduced in 2004. Nevertheless, even then, outsider governor deployments remained exceptional cases. Since the influence of United Russia as a dominant party was limited at that time, federal elites had to receive the endorsement of governors, as regional bosses, to secure the stability of the regime. However, after the triumph of United Russia in the 2007 parliamentary election and the advent of President Dmitrii Medvedev, the Presidential Administration embarked on active replacements of regional bosses with outsider governors loyal to the center. Consequently, while the center got capable of controlling regional political processes more tightly, these radical cadre reorganizations caused dissatisfaction and protests of regional elites, as a result of which electoral performances in the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections declined in the eyes of the center. As a compromise to massive protest movements brought about by the immense size of electoral frauds, popular gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012. However, the influence of the center over the recruitment of governors continues to be remarkable and the number of outsider governors is still growing. Yet, in the late 2010s, the decline of the regime’s popularity caused instability at the regional level, as demonstrated by the fact that several candidates backed by the federal government lost in gubernatorial elections. While outsider deployments have merits for the federal elites to control regional political processes through them as loyal agents of the federal government, their lack of embeddedness in local elite communities has detrimental effects on regional unrests. To test this argument, this study investigates the relationship between outsider deployments and regional electoral performances. The OLS estimate and Inverse Probability Weighted estimate demonstrate that outsider governors deliver fewer votes than local governors. Those findings imply that the center-periphery relationship in Russia is still in flux even though the rules of the game have changed since the 1990s.