by Edward Lucas
Our best colleagues, the honour and pride of the FSB, don’t do their work for the money. When I give government awards to our people, I scrutinise their faces. There are the highbrow intellectual analysts, the broad-shouldered, weather-beaten Special Forces men, the taciturn explosives specialists, exacting investigators and the discreet counter-espionage operational officers. They all look different, but there is one very special characteristic that unites all these people, and it is a very important quality. It is their sense of service. They are, if you like, our new nobility.14
That is true in one sense: the old nobility in Russia were mostly capricious, extravagant, incompetent and cruel. They set the scene for the Bolshevik revolution that brought them exile, death, destitution and imprisonment. But presumably Mr Patrushev did not have that in mind.
It would be wrong to term the FSB and its sister agencies simply as rebranded versions of the old KGB. Despite a narrower scope, they enjoy a far freer rein. The tactics are less brutal, certainly compared to the years of totalitarian terror under Stalin. They do not practise mass murder (and resort to assassination only on rare occasions). Russia is not a police state, in which the KGB, acting on behalf of (and tightly controlled by) the Communist Party, exercises rigid control over everything from foreign travel to people’s sex lives. Nor is Russia a closed society, in which every foreigner is suspect, and every trip abroad a potential security risk. The old KGB spent a lot of time worrying about currency speculation (the rouble’s official exchange rate was grotesquely overvalued). It vetted every application for foreign travel, and devoted vast resources to monitoring mail. The new regime is different, and not only because the Party is over. Instead of steaming open letters, the FSB uses powerful computers to scan emails. Instead of forcing all foreign visitors to stay in a handful of closely monitored hotels under the watchful eyes of Intourist guides, it focuses only on outsiders acting suspiciously.
To say that the regime in Moscow is suffused with the unpleasant ideology, values, habits, attitudes and behaviour of the Soviet era does not mean that it harbours communist or collectivist sympathies. Even its most diehard figures do not hanker after the planned economy or the one-party state, or for the costly and brittle apparatus of bureaucracy and control that went with them. They mourn the Soviet Union’s power, not its politics. They recall growing up in a great country – a superpower – defined by the size of its nuclear arsenal, its global reach, and its wartime sacrifice. In their lifetime, all that disappeared. The Soviet system became the butt of jokes – for the senility of its gerontocratic leadership, for the poor quality of its consumer goods and for the omnipresent shortages. What came next was worse: the humiliating retreat from the old empire, the acceptance of German reunification on the West’s terms, and playing second fiddle to America in global politics.
All of these things are associated in Russian minds with the 1990s. But what they disliked about that era was the weakness and chaos, not the capitalism. Many in Russia think, wrongly, that outsiders exploited the political disintegration to push through NATO expansion (of which more later) and to buy up Russia’s natural resources cheaply. Their driving concern now is to restore Russia’s standing in the world, and to prevent the West from ever again exploiting its weakness. The agenda is of stark competition for resources, status and power, against a background of perceived injustice and humiliation.
Opinions about the past are not monolithic. Few if any would defend Stalin outright. Some, particularly in the human-rights council set up by Mr Medvedev, actively argued for a radical break with the whole murderous and criminal system that the dictator inherited, developed and bequeathed.15 They want memorials to his victims, and to rename streets called after communist heroes, paving the way to reconciliation with the European Union and a strategic alliance against China. Such nuances are a welcome contrast to the early Putin years, when any criticism of Stalin or Soviet power brought a knee-jerk and allergic response. But it would be premature to say that any real shift is under way. Polls show that the majority of Russians do not want ‘de-Stalinisation’.16 Mr Putin, set for twelve years more as Russian president, dislikes the whole idea. Unknotting the threads of pride and shame will take many years. The regime remains ready to use the pomp of the Soviet past when it suits it, even if some privately find the associated jargon, ideology and priorities anachronistic and perhaps outright distasteful. What does define it unambiguously is an enthusiastic adoption of the crudest forms of private enterprise. Russia’s spookocrats like the new system not out of any close reading of Friedrich von Hayek or Adam Smith, but because it works for them. Whereas in the Soviet era the rewards of leadership were at best access to foreign goods and a luxurious dacha, the spoils of office now are colossal. No longer cloistered in the pretend austerity of Party discipline, they can enjoy the best the world has to offer, when, how and where they want it.
Greed is a defining characteristic of this new elite, but not the only one. Despite its good fortune (and great fortunes) the regime’s world view is harsh and pessimistic. The prison-yard mentality has spread to those who run the state: show weakness, and you suffer. What counts is intense loyalty to friends, ruthless rivalry with everyone else, and vengeance on those who betray you. Andrei Illarionov, a former top Kremlin aide in the early years of the Putin era, when the Russian leader was still championing economic reform, has now fallen out with the regime and criticises it in the harshest terms. He is now a fellow at the free-market Cato Institute in Washington, DC and has written a powerful denunciation of the twenty-two agencies that he estimates make up the ruling power structure.
The members of ‘Siloviki Incorporated’ (SI) share a strong sense of allegiance to the group; an attitude of relative flexibility regarding short- and medium-term goals; and rather strict codes of conduct and honour, including the ideas of ‘always taking care of one’s own’ and not violating the custom of omertà (silence). As one might expect in a group with roots in the secret-police and intelligence services, members place great emphasis on obeying superiors, showing strong loyalty to one another, and preserving strict discipline. There are both formal and informal means of enforcing these norms. Those who violate the code are subject to the harshest forms of punishment, including death . . . Their training instils in them a feeling of being superior to the rest of the populace, of being the rightful ‘bosses’ of everyone else. For those who remain on active duty, their perquisites of office include two items that confer real power in today’s Russia: the right to carry and use weapons, and an FSB credential (known as a vezdekhod) that acts as a carte blanche giving its owner the right to enter any place, office, building, or territory whatsoever, public or private.17
He continues:
Speaking at the Lubyanka – the Moscow headquarters building that the FSB inherited from the KGB – on ‘Security Organs Day’ (known as ‘Chekist Day’) in December 1999, Putin said that ‘the mission of the group of FSB officers sent undercover to work in the government is being accomplished successfully’. With the state as their base, the Siloviki have taken over key business and media organisations as well. There are now few areas of Russian life where the SI’s long arm fails to reach.
It is important not to glamorise the result. As Mr Inozemtsev points out, the prime characteristic of Russia’s rulers is ‘ignorance, intricately if poorly disguised beneath a veneer of scientific degrees’. But incompetent thuggishness is no more pleasant than the competent kind. And as the economist Mr Inozemtsev himself admits, the security and (mislabelled) ‘law enforcement’ organs have mushroomed:
More than 200,000 professional military officers in the country [are] on active duty. Around 1.1m soldiers serve on the staff of the Interior Ministry; more than 300,000 serve inside the FSB; around 200,000 work in prosecutors’ offices; and another 150,000 in different investigative committees. Close to the same number work for the tax police; and more than 100,000 serve in the Customs Committee and in the Federal Migration Service. We won’t men
tion smaller organisations like the Anti-Drug Administration and many others. In total, more than 3.4m people – close to 12 per cent of the active male workforce – are employed in organisations that hew to the principles of vertical organisation, unquestioning obedience and deeply rooted corruption.18
The FSB in particular is under no kind of constitutional, legal or democratic oversight. It is a state within a state; a law unto itself. Its counterparts in Western countries make mistakes, exceed their power and on occasion misuse their privileges for self-enrichment or to serve domestic political ends. But they are ultimately under legal and political control. Some such agencies even have internal ombudsmen and offer protection for whistle-blowers. In Russia the parliamentary committees that are meant to supervise the spooks are ciphers. The FSB is responsible only to its director – a close ally of Mr Putin.
Mr Putin’s arrival in power in 1999, say Soldatov and Borogan, gave the secret services the right, for the first time in Russia’s history, to ‘define their own political agenda’.19 Top of that agenda is stability, drawing on both the KGB’s repression of dissidents and the Tsarist secret-police punishment of political extremism. Both the old and new secret police are based on the quasi-mystical regard for the interests of the state, coupled with a mixture of contempt and fear for its individual subjects. Both used, or use, a similar palette of tactics – ranging from crude intimidation to subtle deception. They were and are legalistic yet unconstrained by any concern for justice. In the FSB’s own eyes, their role is to ‘serve and protect’. But the idea of public service in this context is very different from the Western concept, where the voters’ wishes, channelled by politicians and constrained by the rule of law, provide the framework in which public officials operate. In Russia, ‘service’ is first and foremost self-service: helping oneself to the fruits of office, be they bureaucratic rents from corruption or the spoils of the country’s mineral wealth. Only after that comes public service. This is not service to the rules or processes of the state, but to a more abstract and transcendental idea of the national interest. Russia must be strong – in its use of military, financial and diplomatic power. If it cannot be strong it must be feared, or at least respected. The task of the public servant is to make that so.
A further component of the FSB mind-set is religiosity, in some cases with an admixture of mysticism. As Soldatov and Borogan note, the FSB has strengthened its ties with the Russian Orthodox Church – once the chief target of KGB persecution. In 2002 the then Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksei II, blessed the reopening of the restored Cathedral of St Sophia of God’s Wisdom on Lubyanka Square, near the FSB headquarters. The then FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev attended the ceremony. This reflects the increasing search among Russia’s new leaders for old roots. Ideas of Russian uniqueness fit well with the rejection of foreign ideas such as political competition. They also chime with the notion – deeply held if bizarre to outsiders – that following the fall of ancient Rome and Constantinople, Moscow is the ‘Third Rome’, besieged by enemies who must be resisted at all costs. Indeed, the seemingly arcane subject of Byzantine history has become oddly popular among the FSB and in like-minded political circles. In January 2008 Russian state television broadcast a remarkable documentary called ‘The Fall of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium’.20 Echoing the regime’s view of the 1990s, it blamed the end of the Byzantine empire on the intrigues of local ‘oligarchs’ and Western crusaders. The idea of a global conspiracy against Russia is central to the curriculum of the FSB Academy, which is fostering a new generation of Siloviki.
Unfortunately these ideas fall on fertile ground. Though Soviet-era education in the hard sciences was excellent, the tradition of study in the humanities was repressed and distorted. A real discussion of history and philosophy would have been corrosive for Marxism–Leninism. Only carefully vetted academics were allowed to teach and study such sensitive subjects. This legacy weakens Russia’s resistance to batty and paranoid theories. And the surviving cadres of Soviet-trained academics have in many cases found it easy to switch from the intricacies of dialectical materialism to exploring hidden international machinations against Russia. A truly startling example of the overlap between paranoia and mysticism is the theory of Mertvaya voda or ‘dead water’, a miraculous substance that (in Russian folklore) can revive the dead and heal wounds. To see it cropping up in the FSB academy syllabus and in the mainstream discussion of geopolitics is surprising: rather as if the FBI training camp at Quantico instructed its special agents in Hopi chanting or astral projection.21
Soviet-style fanaticism and ideology has for the most part given way to mere prejudice and paranoia. But the surplus nervous energy goes into personal self-interest. At least in their own eyes, the ‘Chekists’ were selfless public servants, devoted to the cause of communism and the greater glory of the state, and among them corruption was severely constrained and usually ruthlessly punished. Their successors’ capacity for self-enrichment is colossal. Soldatov and Borogan lift just one corner of the carpet. They highlight senior FSB officers’ abuse of power to build millionaires’ mansions on plots of land, gained at knock-down prices, in Moscow’s most desirable suburb, the area around the Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway to the west of the city.
That looks like petty corruption compared with the colossal sums that can be earned by diverting financial flows in energy and other businesses. Under the new system, the men who run Russia, by and large, also own it. The dividing line between public and private interests is hopelessly blurred. People who are government ministers or senior public officials in the morning are the chairmen or chief executive officers of commercial enterprises in the afternoon. Although these entities have products, managers, audited accounts, respectable bankers, shareholders and even listings on reputable foreign stock exchanges, they are not real companies in a Western sense: their managers’ aim is not to add value, raise profitability, reward shareholders and invest for the future. Instead their role is to siphon off money to insiders’ private schemes and to promote Russia’s foreign-policy agenda. The clearest example of this is in energy, where Gazprom and other natural resource companies trample on their shareholders’ interests as they pursue dubious and grandiose schemes. These companies have hugely inflated costs; they sell their oil and gas through murky intermediaries; they loot their subsidiaries (the treatment of the Gazprom pension fund is a particular scandal22). A few brave campaigners such as Aleksei Navalny, a blogger, and the former government ministers Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, try to keep track of the looting and raise public concern against it.23 But they face intimidating lawsuits and other threats; the public seems to accept that though its interests (both Rosneft and Gazprom are partly state-owned) are being abused by the country’s elite, nothing much can be done about it.
In some respects, this landscape of power does not differ greatly from that of other corrupt, autocratically run, resentful countries with big intelligence services such as China or Iran. But in these countries the spooks are the servants of the state. In Russia, they have for the past ten years largely run it. Mr Putin, the country’s undisputed leader, spent his formative years in the KGB. His right-hand man, Igor Sechin, a deputy prime minister and tycoon in the oil and shipbuilding industries, worked in military intelligence. Another ex-spook is the head of Russian railways, Vladimir Yakunin (who is also a string-puller in intrigues involving the Baltic states). So is the head of the Defence-Industrial Commission, which oversees Russia’s arms industry, Sergei Ivanov. So is Viktor Ivanov (no relation), who heads the powerful anti-drug agency. So are numerous others at the heights of political and economic life in Russia.
In numerical terms the Siloviki are a diminishing force. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who specialises in monitoring their role, reckons that they comprised nearly half the top 1,000 people in the country when Mr Medvedev came to power but fell to just under a quarter by late 2010.24 Nor are they monolithic. Fights between Siloviki clans are formidable
and sometimes public. In one instance a senior ex-KGB man, Viktor Cherkesov, publicly appealed in a newspaper article for a truce in a fight with a rival clan.25 In another rumble in the same row, a financier called Oleg Shvartsman gave lurid details of the way in which his fund-management company handled the $3.2bn assets of senior officials in the SVR foreign-intelligence service and FSB.26 He explained that this gave him political clout in enabling a kind of corporate raiding, in which owners could be persuaded to sell their firms for knock-down prices – these are also the tactics used to punish Mr Browder. Corruption hits the effectiveness of the security and intelligence agencies, as it does every other bit of Russian officialdom. Junior officers detest the fact that their bosses’ snouts are bigger, and deeper in the trough. Yet to focus on numbers, positions and squabbles misses the point. As Russia decays under the crushing weight of economic and social failure, the ideas the FSB stands for are becoming more powerful, not less.