Vladimir
Putin resurrects the KGB
The
new agency revives the name of Stalin’s secret police and will be
larger and more powerful than today’s FSB.
By OWEN MATTHEWS
9/28/16, 5:30 AM CET
MOSCOW — Soon
after he was first appointed prime minister back in 1999, Vladimir
Putin joked to an audience of top intelligence officers that a group
of undercover spies, dispatched to infiltrate the government, was
“successfully fulfilling its task.”
It turns out Putin
doesn’t do jokes. Over Putin’s years in power, not just the
Kremlin but almost every branch of the Russian state has been taken
over by old KGB men like himself.
Last week news broke
that their resurgence is soon to be topped off with a final triumph —
the resurrection of the old KGB itself. According to the Russian
daily Kommersant, a major new reshuffle of Russia’s security
agencies is under way that will unite the FSB (the main successor
agency to the KGB) with Russia’s foreign intelligence service into
a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report
that, significantly, wasn’t denied by the Kremlin or the FSB
itself.
The new agency,
which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and
1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing
as many as 250,000 people.
The creation of the
new Ministry of State Security represents a “victory for the party
of the Chekists,” said Moscow security analyst Tatyana Stanovaya,
referring to the first Bolshevik secret police. The important
difference is that, at its core, the reshuffle marks Putin’s
asserting his own personal authority over Russia’s security
apparatus.
Putin, who in 2004
said that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man,” has
always had a complicated relationship with the FSB.
On the one hand,
Putin has allowed the FSB to absorb pieces of the old KGB, chopped
off when Boris Yeltsin tried to dismantle the once all-powerful
Soviet security apparatus in the early 1990s. Under Putin, the FSB
regained control over Russia’s borders, border troops, and
electronic intelligence gathering. At the same time, former KGB men
began their takeover of every institution of state, as well as
Russian businesses.
But at the same
time, Putin has made several attempts to reform and control the FSB.
In 2007 he put his close ally Viktor Cherkesov in charge of the
Federal Anti-Drug Agency and tasked it with investigating the murky
business dealings of top FSB officers. When Cherkesov’s clean-up
failed, Putin built up another rival security agency, the
Investigative Committee, and tasked it, rather than the FSB, with
investigating high-profile political murders like those of journalist
Anna Politkovskaya and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
The aim in all cases
seems to be to replace old-guard Putin allies with younger, more
loyal and less independent figures.
Now, however, Putin
seems to have put that divide-and-rule policy into reverse and is
instead consolidating power into a pair of super-agencies: the
National Guard — created in July, that united internal security
troops under the Kremlin’s control — and now the new Ministry of
State Security. Putin will personally control these super-agencies.
“On the night of
September 18 to 19 … the country went from authoritarian to
totalitarian,” wrote former liberal Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov on
his Facebook page.
Further evidence of
Putin’s gathering of power into his own hands is an ongoing purge
launched over the summer that has already claimed the heads of the
Federal Narcotics Service, Federal Protection Service (Putin’s
bodyguard), the Federal Migration Service and Russian Railways, as
well as the president’s Chief of Staff and personal confidant
Sergei Ivanov.
The aim in all cases
seems to be to replace old-guard Putin allies with younger, more
loyal and less independent figures. The same pattern has been
repeated among regional governors — four of whom have recently been
sacked, and two replaced by Putin’s personal bodyguards.
Protect the regime
The creation of the
Ministry of State Security is part of a “project aimed at replacing
old allies with new ones,” said independent Moscow-based analyst
Stanislav Belkovsky. Putin “dislikes being surrounded by people who
feel untouchable because of their personal closeness to him. He
doesn’t want to have anything to do with his old friends, he wants
people who can execute his will.”
Russian President
Vladimir Putin said that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton
"are setting the best example" with their presidential
campaigns
He’s even selected
a hatchet man — Sergei Korolev, head of the FSB’s economic
security department — to prosecute and eliminate any independent
voices in the new Security Ministry, said Belkovsky.
The deeper
significance of all these purges and reshuffles goes beyond just
Kremlinology. They are clear signs of a regime bracing for trouble.
Ever since oil prices began to tumble in 2013, the Kremlin has been
preparing for unrest and discontent — primarily with the help of
distractions such as annexing Crimea and the campaign in Syria. But
Putin is preparing an iron fist too.
“I can’t
remember a time when so many security service guys ascended to power
at once” — Dmitry Gudkov, State Duma deputy
“The KGB, it
should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the
Western sense — that is, an agency charged with protecting the
interests of a country and its citizens,” wrote security analyst
Andrei Soldatov, founder of the Agentura.Ru website. “Its primary
task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down
spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the
church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country but, in
both spheres, the main task was always to protect the interests of
whoever currently resided in the Kremlin.”
That’s precisely
what the Kremlin needs today as inflation remains in double digits
and Russian business remains cut off from international financial
markets and investment by Western sanctions over Ukraine.
“I can’t
remember a time when so many security service guys ascended to power
at once,” Dmitry Gudkov, an independent State Duma deputy, wrote of
the summer’s purges on his Facebook page. “We don’t know
anything about these people’s management expertise. Preparing the
guns for battle, closing ranks — this is what these appointments
are all about. [The Kremlin] can’t trust anyone but those in
uniform.”
‘Terminator 2’
And there’s a
final, more personal reason for Putin’s purge and revival of the
Ministry of State Security.
“In some ways,
this is a sign of Putin’s strength, because he feels confident
enough to full, personal, authoritarian rule,” said Belkovsky, who
advised the Kremlin in the mid-2000s. “It’s also a sign of
weakness because the reason behind it is to defuse the possibility of
a palace coup.” Putin is a “man of systems and institutions”
according to Belkovsky and, as such, knows his allies are also the
greatest threats to his rule.
In creating the
super ministry, Putin is completing a full 25-year circle. When Boris
Yeltsin came to power in 1991 in the wake of a hardline coup against
Mikhail Gorbachev largely sponsored by the KGB and its boss, Vladimir
Kryuchkov, Russia’s new leader attempted to create a security
agency that would not meddle in politics or society and confine
itself strictly to law enforcement.
Yeltsin failed.
According to Soldatov, by the mid-1990s “various component parts
and functions of the old KGB had begun to make their way back to the
FSK, like the liquid metal of the killer T-1000 android in
“Terminator 2” … slowly reconstituting itself after having been
blown to bits.”
Now those bits have
finally coalesced into a full-fledged replica of the original — but
with one important difference. The new Ministry of State Security has
been designed specifically as a guarantor of Putin’s rule.
Whoever heads the
new ministry will certainly be an important political player — but
it’s clear that the true head of both the Russian state and its
new, consolidated security organs will be Putin himself.
That hasn’t
happened since the rule of Yuri Andropov, KGB head-turned general
secretary between 1982-84. He presided over a collapse in oil prices,
a war in Afghanistan designed to boost the regime’s popularity that
quickly turned disastrous, and finally an accelerating economic
crisis that no amount of repression or propaganda could prevent from
snowballing into collapse and revolution.
Putin is hoping that
this time round, harsher repression and smarter propaganda will save
him from the same fate.
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