by Amy Knight
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had the KGB dismantled and created several separate agencies to replace it, with the idea that the powers of the security police would be diminished and democratic freedoms protected. But that is far from how things worked out. Early on in his tenure as president, Yeltsin, an impulsive, erratic leader, whose commitment to democracy was half-hearted, faced popular opposition and thus needed the police and security organs to keep him in power. So he systemically rebuilt these agencies and gave them more and more authority and resources.3 By the time Vladimir Putin became Russian president in 2000, the security services had become every bit as powerful as the former KGB.
The Siloviki
Putin’s so-called siloviki, the men who run the “power ministries,” in particular the police and security agencies, share core beliefs and values. They are no longer motivated by Communist ideology, although most are former members of the Communist Party. But they believe in economic nationalism, a centralized, authoritarian government, and the restoration of the supposed greatness of the Soviet Union. They share a common nostalgia, with Putin, for the Soviet era, when the Russian empire encompassed the republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Baltics, and Moscow had firm control over the countries of Eastern Europe. Like Putin, the siloviki have a deep fear of democratic movements near their borders, such as in Ukraine, where they see events there as inspired by the West in order to undermine the Russian government. And they are wary of the Internet, which is now accessible to over seventy percent of the adult Russian population. Putin said famously at a media forum in April 2014: “You do know that it all began initially, when the Internet first appeared, as a special CIA project. And this is the way it is developing.”4
But the siloviki are not immune to the attractions of Western capitalism, even though, unlike the high-profile Russian oligarchs, they are civil servants. They all engage in business on the side—timber, steel, gas and oil, airlines, or banking—enriching themselves bountifully from privileged, non-competitive state contracts, and using family members as repositories for illicit income that often comes from government coffers. (The security services also make vast sums of money offering protection—a so-called krysha, or “cover”—on the side, to Russian businesses.)
Before Western sanctions against many of the siloviki went into place in 2014, they skied in Switzerland, sunbathed on the Spanish and French Rivieras, and built lavish villas in Greece. They sent their children to exclusive schools in the West for their education. (The current Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, not a siloviki per se but part of its cult, and a virulent critic of Western values, sent his daughter to study at the London School of Economics.)5 Sanctions imposed since the invasion of Crimea have made a dent in the lifestyles of the siloviki, but they still have their mansions in the Moscow suburbs. And, although they can no longer enjoy cheeses from the European continent (banned by Russia), they can still savor their cherished French wines, albeit at very high prices, given the huge decline in the value of the ruble.
The siloviki play by their own rules, which include lying about their academic credentials. Aside from loyalty to Putin, a key to success in gaining a high government post in the Russian legal and security field is to obtain a doctorate, as Putin did. In the words of Russian blogger Sergei Parkhomenko, “there is a general rule: if you want to be the head of something—get a candidate or doctors’ [degree].” Parkhomenko, part of a group of online activists called “dissernet,” did a painstaking study of dissertations of the chieftains of Russian law enforcement and found that most had been, like Putin’s, blatantly plagiarized. In the case of MVD chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev and former drug czar Viktor Ivanov, there was even “cross-dissemination”: the two copied extensively from each others’ dissertations, which were already plagiarized!6
To be sure, there has been infighting among the siloviki, with clans emerging, as so often happens in mafia-style politics. The factions center around the different security and intelligence services, state-owned corporations, and family ties. (There is a remarkable amount of intermarriage among adult children of the siloviki, reminiscent of the Stalin era.) But for the most part the siloviki present a united front to the public. They cannot afford to do otherwise, if they want to maintain their wealth and their powerful positions. They are all complicit in the unsavory business of political murder, either as perpetrators of these crimes on Putin’s behalf, or as the ostensible investigators. Who are these men and what are the institutions they represent?
The FSB
The Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service), the most powerful of Russia’s security agencies, was established in 1995, after various reorganizations of the old KGB. Although the foreign intelligence service and the government guard agency are not under the FSB, as was the case with the KGB, the FSB is by law authorized to conduct its own intelligence operations both at home and abroad, which has opened up a whole range of opportunities. It is a formidable organization, numbering an estimated 350,000 employees. Its functions include counterintelligence, counterterrorism, combating economic crimes, guarding the borders, protecting government communications, and ensuring the security of nuclear materials and installations. In the words of Russian security experts Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan: “Rather than a revival of the Soviet KGB, the FSB had evolved into something more powerful and more frightening, an agency whose scope, under the aegis of a veteran KGB officer, extended well beyond the bounds of its predecessor.”7 In Soviet days, the KGB was controlled by the Politburo and did not take important initiatives without the concurrence of this Communist Party leadership body. Now there are no formal mechanisms of control over the FSB, except Putin and his closest allies.
The FSB has extensive powers of surveillance, including that of the Internet, that far surpass those of similar agencies in the West. According to Soldatov and Borogan, the FSB, through a special system called SORM, monitors “emails, Internet usage, Skype, cell phone calls, text messages and social networks. It [SORM] is one of the world’s most intrusive listening devices.”8 In 2014, the Russian parliament passed a law requiring social media websites to keep their servers in Russia and hold data on users for six months. Security authorities also use a broad interpretation of the “anti-extremism” laws to block websites at their will. This became especially noticeable after democratic opposition protests erupted in Russia in 2011–12.
More recently, in November 2016, Russian authorities blocked the professional networking site Linkedin, because it did not transfer user data to servers in Russia. And in April 2017, apparently partly in response to the widespread street protests at this time, the Kremlin shut down Zello, an app with 400,000 followers that has been instrumental in organizing Russia’s truckers. The FSB is also proposing changes to the Russian Criminal Code that would introduce harsh sentences for “causing damage to or threatening the critical information infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” i.e. the internet. This new law would be another weapon in the FSB’s arsenal as it tries to rein in the internet.9
Nikolai Patrushev
A prominent member of Putin’s patronage network is Nikolai Patrushev, the president’s closest ally, aside perhaps from Igor Sechin—who is a former deputy prime minister and now the CEO of Rosneft, the Russian state petroleum company—and Viktor Zolotov, the head of the recently created National Guard. Patrushev was FSB chief from 1999 to 2008 and since then has been head of the president’s Security Council. Putin consults him on all key issues, and Patrushev has a loyal deputy, Aleksandr Bortnikov, in charge of the FSB, so we can assume he still has considerable control over the agency.
The ties between Patrushev and Putin go back to their days together in the St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) KGB during the 1970s. Putin himself acknowledged their deep friendship in his autobiographical book, First Person, noting that “Kolya” [diminutive for Nikolai] was one of the people whom he especially trusted. On D
ecember 31, 1999, just after Yeltsin announced his resignation and the appointment of Putin to be temporary president, Putin and Patrushev, who had replaced Putin as FSB chief in August of that year, flew by helicopter with their wives on a surprise visit to Chechnya, where a war against the republic was being waged. Putin’s now ex-wife, Lyudmila, recalled that they celebrated together en route by drinking champagne straight from the bottle.10 It was a defining moment, marking the beginning of Putin’s and Patrushev’s collaborative effort to make Putin the undisputed leader of Russia for years to come. There would be obstacles along the way, but they would be surmounted.
Patrushev was born in Leningrad in 1951, the son of a captain in the Russian navy. He graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute in 1974 and worked briefly as an engineer before joining the Leningrad branch of the KGB that same year, working in counterintelligence along with Putin. Patrushev’s immediate KGB boss during the 1980s was Oleg Kalugin, who in 1995 would defect to the United States. Kalugin described Patrushev as “energetic, purposeful, and ambitious,” and they got on well. The two went hunting together, and Kalugin was impressed that Patrushev was a “modern kind of guy” who liked to read and enjoyed music. But Patrushev was ruthless when it came to dissidents, coming up with schemes for the KGB to entrap them and put them behind bars for speaking out about the failings of the Soviet regime.11
In 1990, after Kalugin himself started to become a “dissident” and criticized the Communist party leadership, Patrushev, as his protégé of sorts, was shunted off to the KGB in the republic of Karelia, which borders the Leningrad District. He managed to become head of the security organs there in 1992, and in the meantime promoted commercial interests between Karelia and private St. Petersburg firms owned by members of the security services. (As stated, the involvement of the KGB and its successors in business ventures, usually corrupt, has been a constant theme in post-Soviet Russia.) At some point, prosecutors in Karelia reportedly opened an investigation of Patrushev for illegal commerce involving rare Karelian birch trees, but the case was later dropped.12
After his stint in Karelia, Patrushev moved to Moscow in 1994, where he worked in various departments of the KGB’s successor agencies (the FSK and then the FSB). He followed in the footsteps of his friend Putin, succeeding Putin as head of the Main Control Administration of President Yeltsin in May 1998 and then becoming Putin’s deputy in the FSB before taking his place as FSB chief.13 From the moment he became FSB chief, Patrushev voiced publicly, like Putin, a deep distrust of the West, repeatedly accusing Western governments of plans to undermine Russia’s political stability.
Patrushev and Terrorism
Patrushev’s nine-year tenure as head of the FSB was marked by continued devastating terrorist attacks in Russia. First and foremost were the September 1999 apartment bombings. These were followed by the October 2002 attack at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater, in which 130 hostages perished; the September 2004 siege at a school in Beslan, North Ossestia, where 331 victims died, many of them children; and several other incidents. As Soldatov and Borogan observed in regard to the Dubrovka tragedy: “the operation illustrated the security services’ frightening lack of preparedness for a grave hostage situation.… Even when armed to handle the threat of terrorism, the FSB had mounted an ill-coordinated operation and managed to bungle it.”14 Yet Patrushev was never held accountable. He received award after award from the Russian state, including, after Dubrovka, the country’s highest honor—Hero of the Russian Federation.
In early 2006, when Putin ordered the creation of a new counterterrorism committee [Natsional’nyi antiterroristicheskii komitet, or NAK] to coordinate all federal-level antiterrorism policies and operations, he appointed Patrushev to be its chief. The committee was given sweeping powers to combat terrorism, and the FSB would run the show. Viktor Ilyukhin, a Duma deputy from the Communist Party, was among those critical of the new committee, complaining that it conferred so much power on the FSB that the security agency would become “a state within a state and a substitute for state functions and prerogatives.”15 These words were prophetic. “Terrorism” would become the Kremlin’s label for many forms of political opposition.
As part of the Kremlin’s effort to strengthen anti-terrorist capabilities, a new piece of legislation was passed by the Russian parliament in February 2006 and signed into law by Putin that March. The law on anti-terrorism was a milestone in the Kremlin’s efforts to fight its enemies because it authorized the FSB to hunt down and kill alleged terrorists on foreign soil. Then, in July 2006, an amendment to the existing law on “extremism” was passed, expanding the list of crimes that would fall into this category, which included acts of terrorism. As British Professor Robert Service observed: “The door was left open to brand a large swathe of opponents of Putin and his administration as extremists who needed to be eliminated. And terrorism and extremism were frequently mentioned in the same breath by Putin and his ministers. There was little attempt to make an official distinction between the two phenomena that the legislation was directed against. To that extent, there was an implicit licensing package for FSB operations abroad, as well as in Russia.”16
Patrushev Moves On
Meanwhile, there was a slight glitch in Patrushev’s otherwise successful career when he became embroiled in a conflict with another Putin crony from the St. Petersburg KGB, Viktor Cherkesov. Cherkesov had served as a first deputy director of the FSB and since 2003 had been chief of the Federal Anti-Drug Agency, known by the acronym FSNK. He was reportedly encouraging an investigation by the Procurator’s office into corruption and money laundering within the upper echelons of the FSB (the so-called Three Whales scandal), which resulted in several arrests in the summer of 2006, while Patrushev was on vacation. Patrushev was later able to retaliate and have the investigation dropped, but the conflict spilled out publicly when Cherkesov, after his right-hand man in FSNK was arrested by the FSB, published an impassioned article in the Russian daily Kommersant in October 2007, warning that internal conflict within the security services could undermine the entire political system.17 Cherkesov lost his job a few months later.
Perhaps because of the conflict with Cherkesov, Patrushev was transferred from his FSB post in 2008 to that of secretary of the Security Council, where he remains to this day and plays a key role in formulating both Russia’s foreign and domestic policies. He also has become a very rich man, despite the fact that his income is officially that of a civil servant. The Fund Against Corruption, run by democratic activist Aleksei Navalny, reported in 2014 that the mansion owned by Patrushev and his wife in an exclusive area outside Moscow was valued at over a billion rubles.18
In today’s Russia, children of those in political power are ensured upward career paths. Thus, in 2010, Patrushev’s older son, Dmitrii, a graduate of the FSB Academy, became, at age thirty-three, the head of the state-owned Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank), the third largest bank in Russia. According to the daily Kommersant, the net loss for the Russian Agricultural Bank in 2015 alone was a staggering 72.6 billion rubles. The bank has had to ask for constant replenishments of its capital from the coffers of Russian reserve funds. Critics have claimed that the bank is financing loans to firms owned by members of the Patrushev family, including the senior Patrushev’s nephew Aleksei.19
Patrushev’s younger son, Andrei, after also graduating from the FSB Academy and serving in the economic security division of the FSB, became in 2006, at age twenty-five, a full-time adviser to Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin. The next year, President Putin awarded Andrei Patrushev the Order of Honor for “achievements and many years of conscientious work,” although it is not clear what exactly the young Patrushev had done to earn such accolades. By 2013, Andrei’s career had reached astounding heights: he became a deputy general director of the state monopoly Gazprom.20 His father’s long-time alliance with Putin has clearly paid off.
Aleksandr Bortnikov
Aleksandr Bortnikov, the current FSB chief, is an
other Piterskii (from Putin’s St. Petersburg KGB clan). A year older than Putin, he joined the KGB in 1975, after graduating from the Leningrad Institute of Railway Engineers. Bortnikov is a direct protégé of Putin and Patrushev and part of the clique that includes Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, a former KGB officer who until 2016 headed the anti-drug agency. When the above-mentioned corruption scandal hit the FSB in 2006, there was a sweeping purge of officials working with Bortnikov, but he managed to emerge unscathed and replace his boss, Patrushev, two years later.
Bortnikov also escaped repercussions from another scandal. When he was head of the FSB’s Department for Economic Security, he was being investigated in 2006 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) for his part in overseeing the flow of billions of dollars that were being laundered by people close to the Kremlin’s oil and gas companies through the bank MKB Diskont and sent abroad. As will be discussed later, Andrei Kozlov, first deputy chief at Russia’s Central Bank, was assisting in the investigation when he was shot dead in Moscow in September 2006. The Procuracy shortly afterwards closed the investigation.21 Meanwhile, Bortnikov maintains his connections with the banking community. His son Denis is chairman of the board of the bank VTB Severo-Zapad (VTB Bank North-West.).