by Amy Knight
The SVR and GRU
The Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki (Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR) emerged after 1991 from the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, and it continues to perform the same functions that it exercised as part of the KGB. The SVR’s main responsibility is intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism abroad, along with “cooperating to support other measures necessary for state security.” Those measures would include disinformation (dezinformatsia) and so-called “active measures,” with the purpose of undermining political processes in Western democracies. Recent Russian interference in elections in both the United States and Europe is an example of such SVR operations. In 1998, a special-forces mobile unit, so-called Zaslon, consisting of some three hundred highly trained men, was established within the SVR. Its operations are shrouded in secrecy, but it seems to have been designated for special operations and could be involved with assassinations outside Russia.48
Recently, in September 2016, Putin appointed a new director of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, to replace Mikhail Fradkov, who had headed the agency since 2007 after previously serving as Russian prime minister. Naryshkin is a longtime ally of Putin, having served in the foreign intelligence service of the KGB in the 1970s and working with Putin in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office in the 1990s. He served as the president’s chief of staff before becoming speaker of the Duma in 2011. An economist by training, Naryshkin wrote a dissertation for a doctoral degree in economics that was exposed as fraudulent in 2015 by Dissernet. Researchers for this volunteer organization claimed that more than half of Naryshkin’s text was plagiarized.49 (No matter. Naryshkin’s boss and most of those high up in the Kremlin did the same thing.) Naryshkin is on both the U.S. and European sanctions list.
Around the time of Naryshkin’s appointment, there were rumors in the Russian media that the SVR would be merged with FSB to create a new supra-agency called the Ministry of State Security. But those rumors were denied by persons close to the president, including Sergei Ivanov, a veteran of the foreign intelligence service. Ivanov himself was dismissed from his post as head of the presidential administration in August 2016 but will remain a member of the Security Council. (See chapter 13.)
The Glavnoe razvedyvatel’noe upravlenie (Main Intelligence Administration, or GRU) is subordinate to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and gathers military intelligence through traditional espionage and technical means, including information from military space satellites. Like the SVR, it has residencies in the embassies abroad, and its agents develop their own espionage networks; but the GRU is believed to have a much larger agent network than the SVR. The GRU is also a far more secretive agency than either the SVR or FSB. It has no press office, and its organizational structure is a state secret. It is known, however, that the GRU has its own brigade of elite, highly trained special forces, which it has employed in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and doubtless in Syria. The GRU is also alleged to be the group responsible for carrying out the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in the period leading up to the U.S. presidential conventions in the summer of 2016.
GRU chief Colonel-General Igor Sergun, a career GRU officer, died suddenly at age fifty-eight in January 2016 after having been in his position only three years, raising speculation in Russian media about possible foul play. Sergun was a career military intelligence officer with no obvious connections to the Putin clans. His successor is Lt. Colonel Igor Korobov, formerly a deputy of Sergun.
The Kremlin Cover
The siloviki are bound together—with Putin—in their common knowledge of each other’s crimes. If the mighty edifice of the Kremlin should come crumbling down, as did the Yanukovich regime in Ukraine, they would all fall with it. This is why they maintain a unified front, despite turf wars and other internal conflicts which are kept hidden from the public as much as possible.
The FSB is probably the agency that carries out most covert assassinations, although the SVR and the GRU also engage in such efforts abroad, and Putin’s Federal Protective Service does its part at home. It is crucial, of course that the investigative organs are on board as well. It is their job to make sure that the case in question is handled so that the scenarios are played out according to official plan. Sometimes, as will become clear, things do not go smoothly, particularly when evidence is challenged by journalists and families of the victims, or the law enforcement agencies inadvertently give conflicting accounts. Then, of course, there is the problem of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who is said to be deeply connected to the Chechen criminal world and is believed to have enlisted members of his elite forces to carry out killings on Putin’s orders—the case of Nemtsov being the most recent example. Kadyrov has shown himself to be a loose cannon when speaking out about these murders, even though he declares himself to be Putin’s obedient servant, and he reportedly has aroused the ire of the FSB.
But the Putin regime has thus far met and surmounted the challenges involved in committing political murder, including the outcry from Russian democrats and human-rights advocates. As noted when the British High Court in London reached the conclusion in early 2016 that Putin and Patrushev had “probably” ordered the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, the reaction from Western governments was muted, at best. It might even be the case that these murders are a contributing factor to the resilience of the Putin presidency thus far. They have served as a constant reminder of the consequences that befall those who challenge its rule.
Galina Starovoitova.
(Photograph courtesy of SPUTNIK / Alamy Stock Photo)
3
GALINA STAROVOITOVA: PUTIN’S FIRST VICTIM?
Really, something inexplicable, irrational is happening to the greatest country in the world. I am not referring to our natural resources, but to our intellectual, native talents. One can simply hope—irrationally—that our people will make a miracle … because it cannot be so bad in Russia that today this is what we are really reduced to.
Galina Starovoitova, interview with Ekho Moskvy, September 1998
“Once, our father came home from work tired and was somewhat irritated. He went to the kitchen, where he saw dirty dishes left in the sink.
“Galya, why are the dishes not washed?” He raised his voice and addressed the first person in the family he saw.
“That’s not what I am meant for!” Galina said, keeping her composure.
Olga Starovoitova, sister of Galina Starovoitova
Imagine if there was a violent murder of a leading political figure in the United States, or in any Western democracy, and the case was still unsolved after almost twenty years, with repeated trials and thousands of pages of testimony and evidence, but no conclusion. This is exactly what has happened in the aftermath of the murder of Duma deputy and leader of the party Democratic Russia, Galina Starovoitova. She was gunned down, at age fifty-two, in St. Petersburg on November 20, 1998, and we still don’t know who ordered her murder.
In Russia, the wheels of justice run slowly and sometimes not at all. This is not because Russian law-enforcement officials lack investigative tools: quite the contrary. They have all the sophisticated forensic technology that their counterparts in the West have, with the added advantage of not being bound by the legal constraints on surveillance and searches that exist in Western countries. But the entire Russian legal system operates under what is called telephone justice (telefonnoe pravo), meaning, roughly, a call from someone higher in rank than the judge or the prosecutor giving instructions as to how the case should be resolved. An ordinary Russian may sometimes be able to receive honest treatment at the hands of local law enforcement and judicial organs. But when it comes to political cases, or the many instances of financial malfeasance, telephone justice, accompanied often by monetary bribes, and even threats of violence, prevails.
Why is this so? Quite simply, because Russia has no tradition of a democratic legal process. Yes, the Russian government has an impressive Code of Criminal Procedure, which is a
vailable online in English.1 It was developed after Yeltsin became president and has been revised several times. But the enforcement of these legal norms is left up to those who often have their own agendas. And the Russian parliament, which in theory has oversight over law-enforcement bodies, is completely dominated by people who have pledged their allegiance to the Putin government—thanks to the electoral system, which ensures that democratic challengers are kept out. Then, of course, the security agencies are able to dictate the entire process when they choose to.
For those Russians who greeted the 1991 Soviet collapse with optimism for the future, Galina Starovoitova’s killing seven years later was a devastating blow. It was an ominous sign that sinister forces had thwarted their hopes that Russia would develop into a democracy. Boris Nemtsov, who had just left the Yeltsin government as first deputy prime minister, attended a meeting of Russian democrats on November 22 to honor Starovoitova, along with another former member of Yeltsin’s economic team, Anatolii Chubais, and former prime minister Egor Gaidar. Nemtsov observed afterwards:
This is a very, very big tragedy and disaster for Russia. I knew Galina Vasil’evna [Starovoitova] for eight years and she was a very, very smart, very honest member of the Russian parliament and she was one of the most outstanding politicians in my country. It seems to me that the reason [for her murder] is that St. Petersburg represents bandit capitalism.… Russia needs a very concrete program to overcome crime, including organized crime and political terrorism.
Nemtsov added pointedly that Russia needed “a lot of changes and improvements, including in the KGB [sic], internal affairs [MVD], prosecution services, and others.”2
Nemtsov thus far had been a team player in Kremlin circles. One wonders if Starovoitova’s killing marked the beginning of his awakening to the sinister aspects of what was going on at the highest levels of the government. Gaidar was no less vehement in his words. He called the crime a “political murder” and accused the government of lack of courage in taking steps to stop such killings. (Eight years later, the day after Litvinenko’s death by poisoning in London, Gaidar would come close to death, falling into a coma, from a mysterious poison administered to him while he was attending a conference in Ireland.) The fears and concerns of Russian democrats were justified by all that followed—a former KGB chief as Russian president, appointments of former KGB officials to key posts in the government, and an eroding of the modest civil rights that had been earned under Yeltsin.
Why was Starovoitova singled out for murder? That is a question that has plagued Russian democrats and the independent Russian media for almost two decades. The answer involves rampant, violent corruption in Starovoitova’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Starovoitova’s efforts to expose this corruption, and her campaign to make former KGB officials accountable for their actions in the Soviet period. But above all, it was her charisma as a leader who could have made Russia a democracy.3 For those who did not want Russia’s path to go in that direction, she was a prime target for elimination. Starovoitova apparently did not realize this. Asked not long ago if his mother had felt threatened, her son Platon said she did, but that she had been reassured by three things: “She was very well known, very popular; she was a woman; and she was not involved with business or money. Here they killed [only] for money.”4 Unfortunately, Starovoitova’s assumptions were wrong.
Who Was Starovoitova?
Galina Starovoitova was a remarkable woman in many respects. When I met her in Washington, D.C., in 1994, she was a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she wrote an impressive study of self-determination efforts on the part of former republics of the Soviet Union.5 I was struck by her modesty and quiet determination, combined with a distinct toughness. Born in 1946 in the Russian city of Cheliabinsk in the Ural Mountains, Starovoitova was exceptionally well educated. She was trained in Leningrad initially as an engineer, but then moved on to sociology, eventually earning a doctorate degree in social anthropology specializing in ethnic minorities. Her political awakening came in 1968, when she read Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs of her experience in Soviet prison camps, Into the Whirlwind, and when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, suppressing the Prague Spring. She was one of the few Soviet citizens to sign a letter of protest against the invasion.6
Starovoitova earned a position as a senior researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics in the late 1970s and did field work, as an ethnic psychologist, in the southern republics of the USSR, including Armenia. When the Soviet Union held its first democratic elections in 1989, Starovoitova ran as a delegate from Armenia and was elected, with an overwhelming majority, to the USSR parliament. In 1990 she became a deputy to the Russian Republic parliament and, after the Soviet collapse, was a delegate to the Russian Federation Duma, along with being President Yeltsin’s adviser on inter-ethnic relations. This was an important post, because of the significant numbers of non-Russian minorities within the new Russian Federation, but Starovoitova’s forceful advocacy of their rights put her into conflict with the Yeltsin government and she was dismissed in 1992.7
In 1995, Starovoitova was elected to the Duma from St. Petersburg, as a delegate from a single-member constituency, rather than from a party list. But she had already formed, with Lev Ponomarev and Gleb Yakunin, a bloc called Democratic Russia. Her name was put forward, representing this bloc, as a candidate for the Russian presidency in 1996, but the Russian Central Election Commission denied her the right to be on the ballot on technical grounds. In 1998, Starovoitova became chairperson of Democratic Russia, by then registered as an official party.
During the 1990s, Starovoitova traveled widely, meeting with leading Western politicians, including Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, always impressing her interlocutors with her vast knowledge and her leadership qualities. As a strong advocate for ethnic minorities, she saw democracy through the lens of these persecuted peoples, but also understood the larger picture of how the totalitarian Soviet past affected efforts to create a true civil society in the new Russian state. The crux of the problem, in Starovoitova’s view, was that the officials who had thrived in the Soviet period—in particular, members of the former KGB—were still playing a dominant role in Russian politics.
With this in mind, Starovoitova introduced a bill in the Duma in 1992 proposing “lustration” (cleansing) of individuals from the government who had been responsible in the Soviet period for violating human rights. This included persons who had worked for the Communist Party apparatus as full-time employees and former members of the KGB. The bill failed to pass, and when Starovoitova reintroduced it in 1997, it also was not adopted. Starovoitova’s efforts made her the archenemy of the entrenched former Communists and KGB officers, which of course included Putin. According to Starovoitova’s sister Olga, “If this law had passed, we would be living in a different country.”8 Indeed, Putin would not have become the Russian president. Starovoitova’s advocacy of a complete overhaul of the laws governing the security services, with a view to enhancing civilian control of them, was an additional threat to people like Putin.9
Corruption in St. Petersburg
As a deputy to the Russian Duma from St. Petersburg, Starovoitova began a campaign against corruption in that city, which in the nineties was basically run by criminal gangs. City officials either turned a blind eye in return for kickbacks or actively participated in illegal ventures. We know now that Putin, as a deputy to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, started reaping profits from these criminal operations very early on, as did the mayor. According to an investigation carried out by a commission headed by St. Petersburg politician Marina Sal’ye, Putin, as head of foreign economic relations for the city, was issuing licenses for the export of raw materials, which were to be exchanged for food imports. (St. Petersburg had a severe food shortage.) The commodities, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold abroad, but no food ever appeared and the money disappeared. One of the alleged beneficiaries of this scam, aside from Putin, was Gennadii Ti
mchenko, a founder of the oil trading company Gunvor, and a member of Putin’s clique.10
In his job at the mayor’s office, Putin also supervised the licensing of gambling casinos, which the city had a major investment in. Many of the gambling companies were run by former KGB officers, who were connected with the mafia and collected bribes or “black cash.” As mentioned earlier, one agency that reportedly served as a liaison between the mayor’s office and organized crime was the security firm Baltik-Escort, which was headed by Putin’s crony Zolotov and Roman Tsepov. This firm was said to be closely connected to two notorious criminal groups—the Tambov gang and Malyshev gang, both of which worked with Putin.11
Putin became connected with the boss of the Tambov gang, Vladimir Kumarin (aka Barsukov), through the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (SPAG), where Putin sat on the advisory board. SPAG, it was later reported, was a vehicle for laundering money earned illicitly, including from a drug cartel. Kumarin, who was involved with two subsidiaries of SPAG, was known throughout St. Petersburg as the “night governor” because of his power in the city. Another figure who played an important role in SPAG was Vladimir Smirnov, who worked with Kumarin on several projects and was head of the Ozero Dacha Cooperative, where Putin was a member. Smirnov would later be appointed by Putin to head Tekhsnabeksport, the state company that supplies nuclear products to foreign governments.12
Putin, as we know, left St. Petersburg after the defeat of Sobchak in the 1996 mayoral elections and went to work in Moscow for the Yeltsin administration. But he retained close ties to his native city, particularly to the security services there, through his close friend Viktor Cherkesov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the FSB from 1992 to August 1998 and then Putin’s first deputy at the FSB in Moscow. Cherkesov, whose long-time deputy Aleksandr Grigor’ev replaced him in the St. Petersburg FSB, was coincidentally on the same flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg that Starovoitova flew on the night of her murder, though he had already moved to Moscow to take up his new post.13