The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The rivalry between SVR and foreign ministry during Yeltsin’s first five years as president ended in decisive victory for the SVR with Primakov’s appointment as foreign minister to replace the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev in December 1996. Probably to the dismay of many Russian diplomats, Primakov took with him to the foreign ministry a number of SVR officers. Both as foreign minister and later as prime minister, Primakov remained in close touch with his former deputy, Trubnikov, who succeeded him as head of the SVR.⁶⁵

The SVR is also more assertive behind the scenes than the FCD dared to be. The FCD regularly swore slavish obedience to the Party leadership—as, for example, in the typically ponderous preamble to its “work plan” for 1984:

The work of residencies abroad must be planned and organized in 1984 in strict accord with the decisions of the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, the November (1982) and June (1983) plenary sessions of the CPSU Central Committee, and the program directives and fundamental conclusions contained in the speeches of the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee, Comrade Yu. V. Andropov, as well as the requirements of the May (1981) All-Union Conference of the leadership of the [FCD].⁶⁶

Today’s SVR has abandoned such bureaucratic sycophancy. It reports direct to the president and sends him daily digests of foreign intelligence somewhat akin to the President’s Daily Brief produced by the CIA in the United States. Unlike the CIA, however, the SVR lists policy options and does not hesitate to recommend those which it prefers.⁶⁷

How many SVR reports the ailing Yeltsin bothered to read during the final years of his presidency is uncertain. By the mid-1990s, when presented with his paperwork, he was already said to be frequently telling his long-suffering chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, not to bother him with “all that shit.”⁶⁸ Like Primakov before him, however, Trubnikov had direct personal access to Yeltsin. In 1998 he helped to shape Russian policy during the dispute over UN weapons inspection in Iraq. Soon afterwards he was present at the Moscow talks on Kosovo between Yeltsin and Slobodan Milošević.⁶⁹ Unnoticed by the media, Trubnikov also accompanied Primakov on a visit to Belgrade in March 1999 for further discussions with Milošević. Trough the SVR is not a supporter of Saddam Hussein or Milošević, it does not wish either to be defeated by the West.

By the mid-1990s, the internal security service (then the FSK, now the FSB) had recovered some of its former influence, though only a fraction of its previous authority. Sergei Stepashin, who became its chief in 1994, was one of Yeltsin’s closest advisers. A centrist politician with reformist credentials, he had declared in 1991, “The KGB must be liquidated.” Once head of the FSK, however, he complained that his service had been “castrated” and was demanding greater powers. His influence was clearly evident in the crisis over Chechnya. In the late summer of 1994 Stepashin persuaded Yeltsin that an attack on Grozny, the Chechen capital, would overthrow its rebellious president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, almost overnight and bring Chechnya back under direct control from Moscow. The attack was to be mounted by Dudayev’s Chechen opponents, armed and financed by the FSK. When most of the Chechen opposition pulled out of the operation at the last moment in November, however, the FSK went ahead using Russian troops instead—with (as Stepashin later acknowledged) disastrous consequences. Dudayev repulsed the initial attack and paraded captured Russian soldiers before the world’s television cameras. Though Grozny later fell to Russian forces, the Chechens mounted a determined resistance from the countryside in a brutal war which, over the next two years, cost 25,000 lives. Yeltsin’s reputation never recovered. Stepashin was sacked in June 1995 in an attempt to appease critics of the war in the Duma, but remained close to Yeltsin and was brought back into the government two years later, first as minister of justice, then in March 1998 as minister of the interior. In May 1999 Yeltsin chose him to succeed Primakov as prime minister.⁷⁰