The Russia Conundrum

At the time, it may have seemed a harmless joke – if somewhat tasteless, given the brutality and suffering dished out in the basements of the Lubyanka over the years – but in retrospect, the story has acquired distinctly sinister overtones. Putin’s braggadocio at the secret policemen’s ball needs to be seen in the context of the time. By 1999, the Soviet Union had been dead for nearly a decade and its brutal enforcers, the once dreaded KGB, were no more. The collapse of the USSR had left all Russians dazed and confused, but for members of the security services the upheaval had been even more painful. The event that signified the downfall of the USSR and the end of seven decades of communist rule was the shambolic attempted coup of August 1991 to halt Gorbachev’s liberalising reforms and return Russia to socialist orthodoxy. When the hardline communists’ putsch was defeated, the plotters were vilified and sent to jail. Prominent among them were the leaders of the KGB, including its then chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. For the secret police, the consequences were immediate and ultimately catastrophic. The KGB, already held in dubious regard by many Soviet citizens, was now identified in the minds of millions as the malevolent force behind an attempt to seize control of their country’s future and deprive its people of the freedom and prosperity that Gorbachev’s reformers were promising.

On 22 August 1991, as it became clear that the coup had failed, thousands of people gathered in front of the Lubyanka. Demonstrations, long banned in the USSR, had been tolerated under Gorbachev, so it wasn’t surprising to see people on the streets. But the events of the hours that followed were so iconoclastic, in their most literal sense, that I will never forget them.

In the centre of Lubyanka Square, the lowering statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, was a very visible symbol of KGB repression. The crowd daubed its pedestal with slogans – ‘murderer’, ‘tsar-killer’, ‘antichrist’ – while chanting ‘Freedom!’ and ‘Down with the KGB!’ Someone managed to wrap a rope around Dzerzhinsky’s neck, like a hangman’s noose, and attempt – unsuccessfully – to topple him with the help of a bus. Dusk began to fall. From somewhere – at the time, no one knew from where – three mobile cranes rumbled into the square, led by a group of construction workers who ushered them through the crowd. One of the men was hoisted high in the basket of a cherry-picker, until he came face to face with ‘Iron Felix’. The rope was replaced with a metal hawser attached to the jib of a crane. Shortly before midnight, the 15-tonne statue rose uncertainly into the air, swaying like a hanged man. Fireworks exploded. The crowd cheered. People kicked and spat on the toppled statue. In the Lubyanka itself, not a single light burned in any of the windows. The once-untouchable KGB had been humbled, its fearsome reputation for omnipotence destroyed. It felt like a seminal moment.

Protesters celebrate after toppling the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanka Square, 23 August 1991

A view of the Lubyanka, and the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky before it was toppled

In the climate of freedom that came with the collapse of the USSR, the new Russian leadership strove to ensure that the country could never return to the police state of the past. A reformist chairman, Vadim Bakatin, was appointed to dismantle the KGB monolith, declaring, ‘The traditions of Chekism must be eradicated.’ Bakatin introduced measures to curtail the security services’ extrajudicial control over society: the KGB would be broken up and replaced by independent agencies, competing with one another as equals; they would be transparent, subject to the rule of law and respect for human rights; and their focus would henceforth be the fight against crime, not the policing of political opinion.