There was a further category of KGB employees – those men and women whose ideological outlook had been formed by the organisation, and who were devoted to bringing it back from the dead. Even as the jubilant crowd was celebrating the end of terror in August 1991, a small group of officers had slipped out of the Lubyanka, staying in the shadows as they discreetly unscrewed the iron plaque commemorating Yuri Andropov, saving it from the crowd’s wrath. Andropov had been a revered KGB chairman, serving for over 15 years at the height of the organisation’s power in the 1960s and 1970s, before succeeding Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982. His early death had truncated his reign as Soviet leader, but Andropov’s reputation in KGB circles remained high. As the 1990s turned to political disappointment and economic collapse, his name would be invoked by secret policemen hankering for their glory days – if only Andropov had lived, they told each other, he would have saved communism, averted the chaos of gangster capitalism and instituted something akin to the Chinese state model. Their nostalgia for the past was redoubled by the trouble they had finding a role in the Russia of the present; they did what they needed to do to survive while biding their time, dreaming of regaining their place at the top table. Most significantly, as we were to learn to our cost, it was to this category of disenchanted apparatchiks that Vladimir Putin belonged.
Many Russians do not share the view that today’s FSB are villains, trampling on people’s rights at home and murdering innocent victims in the UK. Even in the 1990s, our nation’s time of greatest openness, there was a feeling that disbanding the KGB had deprived Russia of a powerful force for law and order, in whose absence the country might spiral out of control.4 Without the levers of oversight and coercion provided by a strong security apparatus, Boris Yeltsin’s government had few means of combating an unprecedented surge in organised crime that swept the nation. Alternative arrangements needed to be found. Of necessity – or perhaps through choice – the FSB looked for accommodation with the criminal world. In most of Russia’s major cities, the FSB took on the role of mediator between gangsters, businessmen and city bureaucrats, often with the assistance of former KGB men working in all three camps. The aim was to broker a compromise, an informal truce under which the criminals would moderate their behaviour, allowing the authorities to maintain a semblance of order on the streets, while turning a blind eye to their criminal activities.
In St Petersburg, the arrangement became institutionalised. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, instructed Putin, who was then the first deputy chairman of the St Petersburg city government, to work with the city’s underworld. Putin’s role was to co-opt organised crime bosses to ensure that outbreaks of violence and disruption were minimised. In return, everyone got a share of the profits from the rampant extortion rackets, prostitution and the transport of drugs. The security officials who policed the Faustian bargain between authorities and criminals were still following orders, but they were viewed as a relic of a past era – men who would be dispensable once the situation in Russia settled down. For a once proud organisation, it was belittling.
The humiliation experienced in the 1990s, and the resentment arising from it, do much to explain Putin’s subsequent behaviour. After all, Putin is the man who recalled with pride that, as a child, he had only one poster on his bedroom wall – a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky. When Yeltsin appointed him head of the FSB in 1998, his first move was to summon the members of his old St Petersburg crew. These included former KGB men, many of whom had spent a decade in the wilderness or collaborating with the criminal world and were burning for a return to the corridors of power. Putin promoted them to influential positions within the agency and, after his assumption of the presidency, facilitated their appointment to senior posts in government and commercial organisations with state connections.
The longer the Putin era endured, the more Russia’s political and business elites became populated by his former colleagues from the security services. A 2006 report by the Moscow-based Centre for the Study of Elites concluded that while ‘in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB were mainly involved in security issues, now half of them operate in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture. They have started to make use of all political institutions.’ The Centre’s analysis of 1,016 leading political figures – including departmental heads of the presidential administration, all members of the government, all deputies of both houses of parliament, the heads of federal units and the heads of regional executive and legislative branches – indicated that the careers of 78 per cent of them involved past service in or affiliation to the KGB or its successor agencies. Looking back, Putin’s boast in 1999 that the FSB had taken control of the government appears to be less of a humorous aside than a declaration of what he was planning for his time in power.
Exactly a year after Putin’s Lubyanka speech, Nikolai Patrushev, the man who succeeded him as director of the FSB, celebrated the dramatic turnaround in the agency’s standing. ‘Our best colleagues, the honour and pride of the FSB,’ Patrushev proclaimed, ‘are, if you like, Russia’s new nobility.’ From outcasts one minute to running the country the next, the secret police were back. Putin knew his old comrades and knew he could rely on them. By reinstating their lost prestige and returning to them the power that Yeltsin had taken away, he created a corpus of grateful, dependent people who owed him everything – and would repay him with their willingness to commit any illegal act they were instructed to enact. In the first decade of Putin’s rule, the FSB became a favoured elite, with massively increased funding and recruitment, expanded responsibilities and almost total immunity from any official control. Putin’s Praetorian Guard, which includes the leadership and the special forces of all the law enforcement agencies, acquired the nickname of Siloviki, literally ‘those who exercise force’. Like the tsarist nobles with whom Peter the Great populated the Table of Ranks of his civil service, the Siloviki would gain influence in every sector of the state, ousting the Yeltsinite liberals who once dominated the government and instilling Vladimir Putin’s increasingly hardline values.
Under Putin, the FSB enjoys more power than even the KGB in its heyday, exercising effective control over other law enforcement agencies, including the courts, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Investigative Committee, the Interior Ministry, the Customs Agency, Border Control and the Federal Protection Service. It has been empowered to play an active role in removing politicians who pose a threat to the leadership, to control the media and repress business figures who challenge the commercial dominance of the Kremlin oligarchs. Its brief covers intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, economic crime, electronic espionage, social monitoring and control of the country’s computerised election system. It is charged with monitoring non-governmental organisations, specifically those with foreign funding, and has the legal right to hunt down and kill suspected enemies overseas.
In the Soviet Union, the KGB was subordinated to the Communist Party, which exercised political control over its activities; but that is not the case with the FSB. Journalists and others who attempt to monitor the security services’ activities are met with hostility. When the investigative writer Andrei Soldatov questioned the lack of safeguards against FSB abuse, he himself was taken to the Lubyanka for repeated bouts of questioning. The extent of the FSB’s powers and its exemption from the traditional system of oversight mean there is little prospect for anyone from outside the ‘brotherhood of agents’ to curb its mission creep.