The Russia Conundrum

The next decade was a hard time to be a secret policeman. The KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, was a pale shadow of its predecessor, having been restructured and seemingly neutered, operating with greatly reduced budgets and only half its previous staff. It meant that 200,000 former KGB employees, people accustomed to wielding unchecked power over their fellow citizens, were made unemployed. Thousands of them found work in private security, as bodyguards, analysts and enforcers, assisting politicians, businessmen or – in many cases – shady figures from the increasingly prominent world of organised crime. The nexus of KGB and mafia would become a phenomenon of national concern. Even those agents who were retained by the FSB found their wages uncertain and frequently unpaid. As a result, they, too, were vulnerable to recruitment by private business and criminal gangs, using their inside knowledge and authority to make money on the side, learning to serve the state and their own private interests at the same time.

There was a further category of KGB employees – those men and women whose ideological outlook had been formed by the organisation, and who were devoted to bringing it back from the dead. Even as the jubilant crowd was celebrating the end of terror in August 1991, a small group of officers had slipped out of the Lubyanka, staying in the shadows as they discreetly unscrewed the iron plaque commemorating Yuri Andropov, saving it from the crowd’s wrath. Andropov had been a revered KGB chairman, serving for over 15 years at the height of the organisation’s power in the 1960s and 1970s, before succeeding Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982. His early death had truncated his reign as Soviet leader, but Andropov’s reputation in KGB circles remained high. As the 1990s turned to political disappointment and economic collapse, his name would be invoked by secret policemen hankering for their glory days – if only Andropov had lived, they told each other, he would have saved communism, averted the chaos of gangster capitalism and instituted something akin to the Chinese state model. Their nostalgia for the past was redoubled by the trouble they had finding a role in the Russia of the present; they did what they needed to do to survive while biding their time, dreaming of regaining their place at the top table. Most significantly, as we were to learn to our cost, it was to this category of disenchanted apparatchiks that Vladimir Putin belonged.

Many Russians do not share the view that today’s FSB are villains, trampling on people’s rights at home and murdering innocent victims in the UK. Even in the 1990s, our nation’s time of greatest openness, there was a feeling that disbanding the KGB had deprived Russia of a powerful force for law and order, in whose absence the country might spiral out of control.⁴ Without the levers of oversight and coercion provided by a strong security apparatus, Boris Yeltsin’s government had few means of combating an unprecedented surge in organised crime that swept the nation. Alternative arrangements needed to be found. Of necessity – or perhaps through choice – the FSB looked for accommodation with the criminal world. In most of Russia’s major cities, the FSB took on the role of mediator between gangsters, businessmen and city bureaucrats, often with the assistance of former KGB men working in all three camps. The aim was to broker a compromise, an informal truce under which the criminals would moderate their behaviour, allowing the authorities to maintain a semblance of order on the streets, while turning a blind eye to their criminal activities.

In St Petersburg, the arrangement became institutionalised. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, instructed Putin, who was then the first deputy chairman of the St Petersburg city government, to work with the city’s underworld. Putin’s role was to co-opt organised crime bosses to ensure that outbreaks of violence and disruption were minimised. In return, everyone got a share of the profits from the rampant extortion rackets, prostitution and the transport of drugs. The security officials who policed the Faustian bargain between authorities and criminals were still following orders, but they were viewed as a relic of a past era – men who would be dispensable once the situation in Russia settled down. For a once proud organisation, it was belittling.