Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  In February 2015, Bortnikov visited Washington, D.C. to attend a world summit on violent extremism, and while there he stressed the need for cooperation with the American special services in the fight against terrorism. His visit came as a surprise to some, given that, as the Washington Post pointed out at the time, the FSB’s human-rights abuses in the North Caucasus were fueling the problem of extremism: “Having Bortnikov attend the summit is like inviting the fox into the chicken coop.”22 Indeed, Bortnikov, as one of Putin’s top advisers and a very hawkish one at that, should have been on the U.S. sanctions list because of the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and whistleblower who died in a Russian prison in 2009, and for the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014.23 A clear purpose of Bortnikov’s visit was to convince the West that Russia faces its own Muslim terrorist threat from the North Caucasus and ISIS, and thus to draw attention away from the FSB’s human-rights abuses in Chechnya and elsewhere.

  The MVD

  The Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministertsvo vnutrennykh del, MVD) is another key security agency, responsible for regular policing, organized crime, and counterterrorism. It is authorized to conduct criminal investigations and had, until recently, around 1,200,000 employees, including 200,000 internal troops, which played a key role, along with the FSB, in subduing Chechnya and other areas of the North Caucasus.24 From 2003 to 2012, the MVD was headed by Rashid Nurgaliev, a Putin–Patrushev protégé who had served in the KGB/FSB in Karelia and was considered a Piterskii.

  Nurgaliev became extremely unpopular because of his failure to stem rampant corruption and the brutal methods of his police. According to the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets, during Nurgaliev’s tenure as MVD chief corruption within the agency itself reached shocking proportions and involved all ranks of police officers. Nurgaliev even acknowledged this, saying “behind my very back there was bribery, abuse of authority, corruption.”25 In 2012 he was finally dismissed from his post. But, of course, as a Putin favorite, he did not go away. (Nurgaliev was sanctioned by the EU and Canada, in 2014, but not by the U.S.) Instead, he became a deputy to Patrushev in the Security Council. After Nurgaliev’s departure from the MVD, Forbes Russia observed: “In all fairness, the chances of success for any Minister of Internal Affairs have been small.… The level of corruption, the practice of violence and impunity in the system is so high that national level scandals involving police have been a feature of the times.”26

  Nurgaliev’s replacement, former Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev, is not a Piterskii. Born in 1961 in the city of Perm, Kolokoltsev is a career police official, having worked mainly in the Moscow city and district offices, where he specialized in criminal investigations, including murder. Once he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, Kolokoltsev started an immediate purge in the upper levels of the MVD bureaucracy, firing three deputy ministers and others with connections to Nurgaliev and the FSB. But given the sheer level of corruption in the government and within the MVD itself, Kolokoltsev has not made much of an impact.

  In May 2014, Putin appointed his former long-time bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov, who had moved to the MVD a year earlier, first deputy of the MVD in charge of internal troops. This assignment was a crucial one, especially because within these troops is an elite special division that is stationed in Moscow. Putin clearly wants men he trusts in place in the event of popular unrest. But then Putin upped the ante: as part of a sweeping new reform, he appointed Zolotov head of a powerful new National Guard, established in April 2016. (See below.)

  The Procuracy and the Investigative Committee

  The Procuracy, or Procurator-General’s office, was, until 2007, a law enforcement body that rivaled the FSB. Its main responsibility was to ensure observance of the law within the government bureaucracy and to initiate and direct criminal investigations. Apparently, partly, as a result of the conflict between Pastrushev and Cherkesov, in which the then Procurator-General, Vladimir Ustinov, took sides with Cherkesov, President Putin decided that the Procuracy was too powerful. In the words of political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin: “It was too large a center of influence. It had judicial authority, police authority, and most importantly it had the ability to reveal compromising information about the most important officials in the Russian Federation.”27 So in 2007 Putin stripped the Procuracy of its investigative function and created a separate investigative committee that was attached to the Procuracy but operated independently.

  The new committee took under its control sixty thousand criminal cases, including investigations of high-profile murders like those of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko. In early 2011, the Investigative Committee (Sledstvennyi komitet, or SK) was officially made an independent agency, no longer even nominally attached to the Procuracy and reporting directly to the Russian president.28 It has branches in districts throughout the country. The creation of this powerful committee was a stark and ominous reminder that Vladimir Putin wanted direct control over key criminal investigations. Most recently, the SK has overseen the investigation of the murder of Boris Nemtsov. The case has not been resolved to this date, according to many observers, including the lawyer for the Nemtsov family, because the SK is deliberately obstructing the process.

  Aleksandr Bastrykin

  At the head of the Investigative Committee staff of over twenty thousand is Aleksandr Bastrykin, who had run the earlier committee. Bastrykin was a fellow law student with Putin at Leningrad State University in the 1970s, as well as having been a local leader of the Komsomol, the Communist youth league. He is a protégé of both Putin and his éminence grise, Igor Sechin. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bastrykin served first as rector of the St. Petersburg Law Institute and later in various posts in the Ministry of Justice and the MVD. In 2006, he became a deputy under the new procurator-general, Yuri Chaika, and was instrumental in getting the president to put him in full charge of criminal investigations, thus wresting this powerful tool from Chaika.

  In July 2008, not long after he became head of the Investigative Committee, Bastrykin was the subject of a report by Duma deputy and journalist Aleksandr Khinshtein in Moskovskii komsomolets claiming that he owned a private business in the Czech Republic, which is a member of NATO—this despite a law that prohibits senior Russian officials from engaging in commercial activity.29 Bastrykin called the report a crude lie. Fours years later, Aleksei Navalny posted another damning report, based on documents from the Czech interior ministry, which confirmed that Bastrykin and his wife not only had had a business in the Czech Republic until 2009, but also a Czech residence permit.30 Navalny suggested that this made Bastrykin vulnerable to blackmail by Western agents: “What do you think, the special services of NATO countries would not be aware that the deputy prosecutor general of Russia, a man with access to state secrets, applied to the Czech police for a residence permit?”31

  Bastrykin showed himself to be a loose cannon when, just a month before the Navalny revelations, in June 2012, he became involved in an unseemly conflict with a reporter from Novaia gazeta who had written unfavorable comments about him. Bastrykin had the reporter picked up by his bodyguards and taken into a distant forest, where Bastrykin threatened him with murder and then joked that he would investigate the murder personally. When the story broke, Bastrykin was forced to apologize publicly, saying he had suffered an “emotional breakdown.” Undeterred by threats, in September 2012 Novaia gazeta published a story showing, with documentation, that Bastrykin’s wife, Olga, had owned a five-room apartment on the Spanish Riviera from 2007 to 2011. Contrary to regulations for government officials, Bastrykin had not declared the apartment in any of his statements to the authorities.32

  All these events gave rise to speculation that Putin would have Bastrykin fired. But that did not happen. Bastrykin is privy to all information on corruption and other criminal activities—including murder—that high-level Russian officials are engaged in. It would have been risky indeed for Putin to dismiss him from his post, especially since he
has the support of men like the powerful Igor Sechin.33

  It might be added that Bastrykin is an author. In 2004, he published for a popular audience a book about the history of detective work. As it turns out, most of Bastrykin’s chef d’oeuvre was reproduced word for word from a German book, The Age of the Detectives, published in Russian in 1974, and a book by American author Anthony Summers, Empire of the FBI: the Myths, Mysteries, Intrigue.34 So much for the creative efforts of Putin’s siloviki.

  Yuri Chaika

  Procurator-General Chaika, who has taken charge of the various criminal cases instigated against Putin’s critics, graduated from the Sverdlovsk Institute of Law (now the Urals State Law Academy) in 1976 and then embarked on a career as a prosecutor. From 1999 to 2006, he served as Russia’s Minister of Justice; then he was appointed by Putin to lead the Procuracy. Like Bastrykin, Chaika has been tainted by scandal. But it has not, thus far, damaged his career.

  In December 2015, Navalny’s Fund Against Corruption released a sensational 45-minute video exposing massive fraud on the part of Chaika’s family, in particular his son Artem, who has vast business enterprises all over Russia as well as abroad. The video showed that Artem Chaika, together with the wife of one of Chaika’s deputies, was involved in financial ventures that were linked to a Russian mafia. But the only response from the president’s office was that Chaika’s family was not the Kremlin’s concern. The Kremlin apparently clings to the illusion that most Russians do not consult the Internet for news. In fact, Navalny’s video was watched by over four million viewers in the first month after it appeared.35

  The FSO

  The FSO, Federal’naia sluzhba okhrany (Federal Protection Service), emerged from what was the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, the so-called guards directorate. The Ninth Directorate’s role went far beyond ensuring the safety of government leaders and premises, which in itself was crucial, given that the Soviet regime was a totalitarian dictatorship. If ever there was a coup attempt against the leadership, employees of the Ninth Directorate would have been its praetorian guard. The Ninth Directorate also was responsible for the security of nuclear installations. After the KGB was disbanded in 1991, this directorate became the Main Guard Directorate (Glavnoe upravlenie okhrany), a separate entity numbering around eight thousand men and including an autonomous subdivision, the Presidential Security Service, headed by the infamous Aleksandr Korzhakov, who became the eyes and ears of President Yeltsin, wielding considerable political power. In 1996, Yeltsin and Korzhakov had a falling-out and Korzhakov was sacked, while at the same time the Presidential Security Service was incorporated with the GUO into what is now the FSO.

  The FSO, which has twenty thousand men on its payroll, is more than just a bodyguard service. It reportedly keeps Putin informed about the other security agencies. In the words of security expert Mark Galeotti: “it has acquired a role as something of a silovik fact-checker, called on to stop the president from being manipulated by his briefers from the other security agencies. In information as well as physical security terms, it has become the answer to the age-old question of who watches the watchers.”36 According to journalist Yekaterina Sinelschikova: “The FSO is a powerful, multi-purpose and extremely secretive agency. There is hardly a more closed Russian security force.… The FSO as a special service is almost omnipotent—indeed, its people have the right to carry out operational and investigative activities, conduct wiretapping and open correspondence, detain citizens, search homes and confiscate cars.”37

  The FSO was run from early 2000 until May 2016 by a firm Putin loyalist, Evgenii Murov. His early career was in the First Directorate of the KGB, foreign intelligence, followed by work in the St. Petersburg branch of the security services from 1992 to 1998, when he moved to the FSB in Moscow. Murov and the FSO have repeatedly been linked by Russian journalists to kickbacks and bribes related to procurements in connection with the administration of the FSO’s property. (Before Murov’s retirement, supposedly at his own request, it was reported that he and his wife owned property in Russia that was worth over two billion rubles.38) In 2014, Murov was put on the U.S. sanctions list. His son Andrei is chairman of the board of directors of the state-owned Federal Grid Company, which is the main source of electricity for Russia and is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

  Murov’s replacement as head of the FSO is Dmitry Kochnev, who was a deputy director there and briefly head of the Presidential Security Service.39 According to Sinelschikova: “Very little is known about the new appointee. Kochnev is a man without a biography; there is not a word about him on the Kremlin’s and the FSO’s websites.”40 We do know that Kochnev’s entire career, since 1984, has been with the Russian security agencies, and that he has worked in the FSO since 1992. So he doubtless knows many Kremlin secrets, including that of the Nemtsov murder, which took place under the watchful eye of the FSO. He can be counted on by Putin to be loyal.

  The Presidential Security Service, (Sluzhba bezopasnosti presidenta, or SBP), which is part of the FSO, was headed from 2000 to 2013 by Viktor Zolotov, a veteran of the security services, who met Putin when he was serving as a bodyguard for St. Petersburg mayor Sobchak. In 2013, Zolotov, as mentioned, became head of the MVD internal troops, whose job included keeping protesters against the Putin regime in check. Zolotov, reportedly a long-time judo partner of Putin’s, had worked in the St. Petersburg FSB in the 1990s and had been close to Murov since the Soviet period. When Putin created his new National Guard in April 2016, Zolotov was named chief of this agency. (The SBP, which has roughly two to three thousand personnel, has been headed since June 2016 by Major General Aleksei Rubezhnoi, about whom little is known.)

  Zolotov himself has an interesting background. Together with former MVD officer Roman Tsepov, Zolotov founded a private security firm, Baltik-Eskort, in St. Petersburg in 1992. The firm provided protection to family members of Putin and Sobchak, but also allegedly served as a liaison between the city government and members of the mafia, including Vladimir Kumarin, alleged head of the notorious Tambov gang. Tsepov died suddenly in 2004 from what is said to have been poisoning by a radioactive substance.41

  According to a former SVR (foreign intelligence) officer in New York, Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the U.S. in 2000 and who met Murov and Zolotov before his defection, they were both murderers: “[They] decided to make a list of politicians and other influential Muscovites whom they would need to assassinate to give Putin unchecked power. After the two men finished their list, Zolotov announced, ‘There are too many. It’s too many to kill—even for us.’”42

  The Russian National Guard

  In April 2016, President Putin issued an executive order creating a Russian National Guard (Natsional’naia gvardiia rossii) directly subordinate to him. With his long-time ally Zolotov at the helm, this new agency will gain jurisdiction over the MVD Internal Troops, the riot police (OMON) and Special Rapid Deployment Units (SOBR). Once the reorganization is complete, the National Guard will have an estimated 350,000 troops. The main duties of the new guard agency are stated to be fighting terrorism, extremism, and organized crime; but clearly public order will be a main component of its operations. As analyst Mark Galeotti put it:

  There is no real reason for creating the NG [National Guard] out of the Interior Troops (VV) and other forces unless you have a serious worry about public unrest. Let’s be clear, whatever Putin says, the militarized security forces of the VV and now NG have little real role fighting crime or terrorism; they are public security forces, riot and insurrection control and deterrence assets.… With Zolotov at its head, then it is even more clearly a personal, presidential Praetorian force, under a maximalist loyalist. This may not only be a force to keep the masses in check, but also the elite.43

  The MVD, of course, comes out the big loser, since it is now deprived of its own very substantial troops.

  The FSKN

  The FSKN (Federal’naia sluzhba po kontroliu za oborotom narkotikov, or Federal Drug Control Servic
e) was a powerful law-enforcement agency before it was disbanded by Putin in 2016. Formed in 2004, it had a staff of over forty thousand and the authority to initiate and carry out criminal investigations.44 Viktor Cherkesov, as noted, was the first chief of FSKN, followed in 2008 by another former St. Petersburg KGB colleague of Putin, Viktor Ivanov. Ivanov had previously served as Putin’s deputy chief of staff, in charge of presidential appointments and head of the board of state-owned Almaz-Antey Air Defense Concern, producers of air-defense technologies. He has been implicated by numerous Russian sources, including the murdered former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, in money laundering scandals.

  Ivanov was put on the U.S. sanctions list in 2014. In an interview with the Russian television station RT the next year, Ivanov noted about being sanctioned: “The only ones to benefit from this were international drug traffickers, and I believe drug lords were dancing with joy at seeing the demise of such a robust counterdrug partnership.”45 Ivanov had obviously been following closely the hearings in London surrounding the Litvinenko murder, where his name was coming up a lot, because in this same interview he went to great lengths to defend himself against the allegations.

  As of April 2016, FSKN was disbanded and its functions transferred to the MVD, so this meant that Ivanov would have been subordinated to Minister of Internal Affairs Kolokoltsev. He chose retirement instead. It is possible that the publicity over Ivanov’s alleged corruption had something to do with what was a clear demotion for him. But also, on March 31, 2016, a Spanish court issued an arrest warrant (in absentia) for General Nikolai Aulov, a deputy director of FSKN, on charges of drug trafficking and links to an organized-crime group in Spain.46 For his part, Ivanov was clearly caught off guard. As late as February 2016, Ivanov dismissed suggestions from the press that his agency would be disbanded: “I would like to rephrase Mark Twain: rumors about the death of my agency are greatly exaggerated.”47