The Russia Conundrum

The humiliation experienced in the 1990s, and the resentment arising from it, do much to explain Putin’s subsequent behaviour. After all, Putin is the man who recalled with pride that, as a child, he had only one poster on his bedroom wall – a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky. When Yeltsin appointed him head of the FSB in 1998, his first move was to summon the members of his old St Petersburg crew. These included former KGB men, many of whom had spent a decade in the wilderness or collaborating with the criminal world and were burning for a return to the corridors of power. Putin promoted them to influential positions within the agency and, after his assumption of the presidency, facilitated their appointment to senior posts in government and commercial organisations with state connections.

The longer the Putin era endured, the more Russia’s political and business elites became populated by his former colleagues from the security services. A 2006 report by the Moscow-based Centre for the Study of Elites concluded that while ‘in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB were mainly involved in security issues, now half of them operate in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture. They have started to make use of all political institutions.’ The Centre’s analysis of 1,016 leading political figures – including departmental heads of the presidential administration, all members of the government, all deputies of both houses of parliament, the heads of federal units and the heads of regional executive and legislative branches – indicated that the careers of 78 per cent of them involved past service in or affiliation to the KGB or its successor agencies. Looking back, Putin’s boast in 1999 that the FSB had taken control of the government appears to be less of a humorous aside than a declaration of what he was planning for his time in power.

Exactly a year after Putin’s Lubyanka speech, Nikolai Patrushev, the man who succeeded him as director of the FSB, celebrated the dramatic turnaround in the agency’s standing. ‘Our best colleagues, the honour and pride of the FSB,’ Patrushev proclaimed, ‘are, if you like, Russia’s new nobility.’ From outcasts one minute to running the country the next, the secret police were back. Putin knew his old comrades and knew he could rely on them. By reinstating their lost prestige and returning to them the power that Yeltsin had taken away, he created a corpus of grateful, dependent people who owed him everything – and would repay him with their willingness to commit any illegal act they were instructed to enact. In the first decade of Putin’s rule, the FSB became a favoured elite, with massively increased funding and recruitment, expanded responsibilities and almost total immunity from any official control. Putin’s Praetorian Guard, which includes the leadership and the special forces of all the law enforcement agencies, acquired the nickname of Siloviki, literally ‘those who exercise force’. Like the tsarist nobles with whom Peter the Great populated the Table of Ranks of his civil service, the Siloviki would gain influence in every sector of the state, ousting the Yeltsinite liberals who once dominated the government and instilling Vladimir Putin’s increasingly hardline values.

Under Putin, the FSB enjoys more power than even the KGB in its heyday, exercising effective control over other law enforcement agencies, including the courts, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Investigative Committee, the Interior Ministry, the Customs Agency, Border Control and the Federal Protection Service. It has been empowered to play an active role in removing politicians who pose a threat to the leadership, to control the media and repress business figures who challenge the commercial dominance of the Kremlin oligarchs. Its brief covers intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, economic crime, electronic espionage, social monitoring and control of the country’s computerised election system. It is charged with monitoring non-governmental organisations, specifically those with foreign funding, and has the legal right to hunt down and kill suspected enemies overseas.

In the Soviet Union, the KGB was subordinated to the Communist Party, which exercised political control over its activities; but that is not the case with the FSB. Journalists and others who attempt to monitor the security services’ activities are met with hostility. When the investigative writer Andrei Soldatov questioned the lack of safeguards against FSB abuse, he himself was taken to the Lubyanka for repeated bouts of questioning. The extent of the FSB’s powers and its exemption from the traditional system of oversight mean there is little prospect for anyone from outside the ‘brotherhood of agents’ to curb its mission creep.