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 mention 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.