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On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) at its headquarters in Lubyanka near Moscow’s Red Square.
The 47-year-old prime minister recently appointed by President Yelstin, who held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting his colleagues to mark the feast of Russian security services.
“Our mission to penetrate the highest levels of government has been fulfilled,” Putin said. His former colleagues laughed. In fact the joke was about Russia. Putin became interim president less than 2 weeks later. Since the beginning of his rule, he has worked to strengthen the state with the aim of countering the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unstable democratization.
To achieve this goal, he saw the need to strengthen the security services and place former security officials at the helm of the most important government bodies.
But Putin’s approach has changed in recent years. The bureaucracy has increasingly removed the high-profile personalities who previously dominated.
And as the Russian president began to rely on these bureaucratic institutions to further consolidate his power, their power has also greatly increased compared to other state bodies. But this became apparent only in February this year, when Putin gave orders initially to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine, and a few days later, to send Russian troops to Ukraine.
In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed distorted by Putin’s determination to invade Ukraine. Some prominent officials even questioned that decision, albeit with some apprehension. But in the weeks that followed, the Russian government and society alike sided with the Kremlin.
Today, anti-war thinking is a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power – albeit limited – have found themselves hostage to institutions whose sole purpose is security and control. In fact what has happened is a coup within the FSB.
Russia was once a state dominated by security forces. But now the state has become a security bureaucracy with Putin at the helm. Today’s FSB dates back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, also known as CHEKA, pursued the enemies of the new Soviet state under the brutal leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Its later variants, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB), were developed under the leadership of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and headed by Genrikh Yagoda in the 1930s and Lavrenty Beria in the 1940s. 1950. The KGB became the main security agency of the Soviet Union in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor.
Over the next decade, he expanded the Communist Party’s oversight of the Soviet state’s controlling institutions, limiting their influence. But after the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964, Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB, restored the organization’s authority, marking the peak of its power during the 1970s.
Andropov led the Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1982-1984. He was ruthless in establishing ideological control. Any “diversion” was a trigger for prosecution. Some opponents were imprisoned or placed in psychiatric wards for “re-education”, while others were forced to emigrate.
By the late 1980s, reforms by the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, eased control of the security forces. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Eastern European satellite states withdrew from Moscow’s sphere of influence, the KGB turned against Gorbachev two years later, carrying out a failed coup that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. .
The security apparatus was humiliated but not dismantled. Boris Yelstin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, considered communism, and not the KGB, to be the greatest evil. He thought that just changing the name of the KGB in the FSB would change the organization as well, allowing it to become more benevolent and less controlling.
But this was a wishful thinking. The Russian security services have their origins in the secret police of Ivan the Terrible, Oprichniki, in the 16th century and the Secret Chancellery of Peter the Great in the 18th century. Russia has been a state dominated by security forces, but now the security bureaucracy has become a state.
In fact, KGB officers were relatively prepared to face the fall of communism and the transition to capitalism. As Leonid Shebarshi, a former high-ranking KGB operative, explained, it was natural that those trained under Andropov’s leadership in a covert war against external and internal enemies – NATO, CIA, dissidents and the political opposition – to become the new bourgeoisie of Russia.
They can cope with irregular work schedules, succeed in hostile environments, and use questioning and manipulation tactics when asked. One of them, Putin was hailed as a pragmatist by Western diplomats when he emerged from the darkness to become president of Russia in 2000.
From the outset, he made no secret of his intention to establish absolute authority in Andropov’s style, rapidly limiting the power of the “capitalist barons” who had flourished in the 1990s under the frantic Yeltsin presidency. In Putin’s mind, an independent oligarchy in control of strategic industries such as oil and gas threatened the stability of the state.
He ensured that business decisions related to the national interest were made by a handful of trusted people, the so-called “siloviki”, or members of the military and state security agencies.
In fact these individuals became managers or custodians of state-controlled assets. Most were from Leningrad, Putin’s hometown (St. Petersburg today), and had served with him in the KGB. On the corporate side, their ranks include Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Sergey Chemezov (Rostec) and Alexey Miller (Gazprom), while state defense issues are handled by Nikolai Patrushev (Secretary of the Security Council), Alexander Bortnikov (director of FSB), Sergei Naryshkin (director of the Foreign Intelligence Service), and Alexander Bastrykin (head of the Investigative Committee).
A source in the Kremlin told me that many officials now predict a catastrophe similar to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which ended in an embarrassing retreat and helped disintegrate the Soviet empire. But in a government that has become increasingly technocratic, institutionalized rather than personal, such opinions are no longer permissible.
As the conflict continues into the third month and evidence of war crimes increases, most officials and politicians continue to support Putin. Big business stays mostly silent. Economic elites, detached from the West, have gathered around the Russian flag. Although some may complain quietly, very few are vocal in public.
Journalist and writer Masha Gessen once called Putin a “faceless man.” Yet today his face is the only one at the head of an anonymous security bureaucracy that meets his demands. Another coup, whether in the Kremlin corridors or on the streets of Moscow, is unlikely. The only group that can oust the president is the FSB, which is still run by nationalist idiots, who understand that some foreign policy flexibility is needed for domestic development.
But such officials are no longer the future of the FSB. The vague body of security technocrats now at the helm is obsessed with total control, regardless of national or international consequences. With this bureaucracy held firmly behind power, Moscow’s foreign adventurism can be diminished. But as long as the structure is stable, Russia will remain oppressed, isolated and not free.
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