The Security Organs of the Russian Federation a brief History 1991-2005
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CorruptionThe problems just evoked are part of a much broader pattern. It is probably fair to state that the massive corruption of state officials, or more precisely the extraordinary degree of privatization of bureaucratic powers and of governmental decision-making processes, is the greatest problem now facing Russia and those who seek to rule it. Lennart Dalgren, the Russia director of the Swedish firm “IKEA,” provoked a major scandal in December 2004 by stating out loud what everybody knows: “The problem is that the entire system is based on corruption.” And the Yukos affair, as a major French daily writes, seems to have only intensified the problem, “inciting numerous civil servants, in the depths of Russia’s regions, to adopt an even more predatory behavior.”158 No matter how well intentioned any of the government’s reforms, they are systematically undermined by the private interests of those tasked with executing them; and the refusal to allow any form of external supervision, be it parliamentary oversight, journalistic freedom or a strong civil society, only compounds the crisis. It is a basic axiom of institutional sociology that no bureaucracy can reform itself; but Putin and his close entourage seem, in their drive for the establishment of a “vertical of power,” to have forgotten this fundamental principle. It is not that the Kremlin is unaware of the problem, or does not perceive the danger it poses. The seniormost officials of the government regularly castigate official corruption, and the major administrative reforms spearheaded by Putin’s aide Dmitri Kozak have been presented as a step towards a solution. However, as Elena Panfilova, the head of the Russian branch of Transparency International, argues in a recent interview, “the regime, by emphasizing the restoration of the State and by increasing the number of civil servants and of federal agencies, has worsened corruption. […] The days of valises full of bills is [indeed] more or less over. Now, corruption is organized by firms of ‘consultants’ who work completely openly.”159 Having failed to answer the old question shto dyelat? (“What is to be done?”), the Kremlin, typically, turned to kto vinovat? (“Who’s to blame?”). It seems inevitable that the security elite currently holding power would seek to shift the blame away from a purportedly “clean and professional FSB, staffed by the cream of modern Russia,” onto the shoulders of its traditional rival, the “corrupt MVD” haunted by “werewolves in epaulets.” This was all the easier as hardly a single adult Russian has not been a victim of police corruption, if only at the hands of the traffic police or the ID office, whereas the FSB benefits from its invisibility: few ordinary citizens have ever had direct contact with the institution, and thus have any personal experience of its current practices. And ordinary Russians are not the only ones to buy into the FSB’s self-image; Zbigniew Brzezinski, no friend of the current regime, was not afraid to declare in a recent interview: “The political elite … has its roots in the finest flower of the KGB, the best selected, educated, trained and the most privileged.”160 The special services and especially the FSB are thus presented as the solution to Russia’s woes rather than a part of them, an image that goes back to Andropov – probably Putin’s greatest ideological influence. Yet this image of course is a pure fiction. Several cases leaked to the press over the past few years have hinted at the degree of high-level corruption within the FSB. In the fall of 2001, for instance, the General Procuratura initiated a criminal case against senior customs officials accused of demanding a $5 million bribe from the owner of two furniture importing companies, “Tri Kita” and “Grand.” The Customs service, in retaliation, charged the companies with fraud and non-payment of import duties; and the case then snowballed when the press revealed that the companies involved in the scam were managed and partly owned by the FSB’s senior-most economist, Deputy Director Yuri Zaostrovtsev. No action of course was taken against Zaostrovtsev, who continued to run the FSB’s DEB until the spring of 2004 when he retired to become Vice-President of “Vneshekonombank.” Mikhail Fradkov, the Prime Minister, has also recently alluded publicly to problems with the FSB’s practices in the economic realm. In a January 2005 speech in which he urged senior FSB officials to help improve the country’s investment climate, he “discouraged the FSB from favoring certain companies, saying that some intelligence officers do so to give their private businesses an edge. ‘We are going to fight this just like we fight corruption,’ he said.” Following this speech, a former senior FSB official elaborated on the problem in an interview with Izvestia: “‘The problem is that both the Interior Ministry and the FSB provide turnkey services, since both have investigative and operational branches and thus can ‘close’ a rival and seize his business.’ […] Such broad powers have been used by corrupt officers to open investigations into businesses to extract bribes or to help one business seize another in exchange for a large payoff.”161 It is of course conceivable that Vladimir Putin actually believes the rhetoric deployed by his FSB cronies; possible that he is ill-informed about the true state of things. This would not be so surprising in a man who, in his first major interviews as President, admitted that from his earliest childhood he dreamed of joining the KGB: “I went to work for the agencies with a romantic image of what they did,” an image developed by reading Soviet spy novels and watching films such as The Sword and the Shield.162 The late Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, in his last interview, publicly tried to warn him: concerning Chechnya at least, “Putin has been profoundly misinformed” by the Russian security services, top Russian generals, and his aides. “There is a well-established practice in the army of reporting what your superior wants to hear from you,” Maskhadov said, suggesting “that Russian intelligence probably operates according to a similar practice.”163 Putin, of course, had no interest in such a message; a few days later, Maskhadov was dead, killed either by the FSB or the Kadyrovtsi. Maskhadov, in his statement, was probably being deliberately naïve; for it seems far more likely that Putin is fully aware of the extent of the problems rotting away his cherished services. He openly admitted so during his painful and awkward September 2005 meeting with the mothers of several children killed at Beslan: “‘I must say immediately: I agree with those who believe that the state is not in a condition to provide for the security of its citizens to the extent necessary,’ Putin said. […] He added that the military and intelligence services had been ‘knocked out’ and were ‘in a state of partial paralysis’ after the Soviet collapse and the first war in Chechnya.”164 But Putin is also aware that there is little he can do to remedy this. The dynamics he has set in motion force him more and more to rely on the security organs to guarantee his power, a power that in the past year has shown itself far more fragile than most observers suspected. Yet it is not by tolerating the services’ corruption and abuses, and by fatally weakening every element of society or state not under his direct control that might serve as a check on them, that Putin will achieve his stated ambitions, as limited as these might appear to some. Secret services, by nature, are a tool, considered necessary by the modern State, and they directly reflects the level of that State’s development. The problem of Russia’s security organs are the problems of the development of the Russian State as a whole, problems that have never found an adequate solution, not under tsarism, not under communism, and not under the present “democratic” arrangements. Unless Putin can solve the overall and pressing question of the relations between the Russian State and the Russian people – and there is little indication that he will or even wishes to – he will never have at his disposal special services capable of more than persecuting ecologists, journalists and academics in the name of protecting state secrets, looting the country’s wealth and crippling its potential for economic development in the name of fighting organized crime and corruption, and resorting to death squads and assassinations in order to solve grave and complex social, political and economic problems. 1 Cited in Albats’ groundbreaking KGB: State Within a State, p. 198. This discussion draws mainly from her book (cf. in particular Chap. 4: “Who was behind Perestroika?”, pp. 168-203). The notion that the KGB had “stage-managed” perestroika was put forward in the West by Andrew & Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story. 2 Some authors believe that Gorbachev was little more than a “front man” for the KGB; cf. Albats, op.cit., p. 199-200. The notion was first advanced by Avtorkhanov in his 1986 Ot Andropova k Gorbachëvu. 3 See Albats, op.cit., pp. 246-51. 4 Stratfor, “Russia in 2000” (no author named). Stratfor is a US-based company that describes itself as “the world's leading private intelligence provider.” The report cites no sources but certainly relies on the authors mentioned above. Cf. www.stratfor.com. 5 Albats, op.cit., p. 247. 6 Cited in Belton, Catherine, “Khodorkovsky’s High Stakes Gamble,” The Moscow Times, 16.05.05. 7 See Albats, op.cit., pp. 243-46. 8 Ibid., pp. 332-3. Albats gives precise examples in the pages following. 9 Some sources assert that only the 1st, 2nd, 8th and Border Guards were “Main Directorates” (Glavnoye Upravleniye), and that all others were simple “Directorates” (Upravleniye). See Albats, op.cit., p. 27. 10 Favarel-Garrigues, “La transformation policière en Russie post-soviétique.” 11 Information mainly drawn from Bennett and www.fas.org. 12 Albats extensively discusses the role of the KGB in the coup. Cf. op.cit., Chap. 6: “The Coup,” pp. 268-93. 13 Cf. Bennett, “The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation,” and Mukhin, Putevoditel po Spetssluzhbam Rossii. 14 Cited in Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 6. 15 Ivanenko and Bakatin were summarily sacked. See Albats, op.cit., pp. 305-6. 16 Both positions – Heads of the Moscow and Leningrad/St.-Petersburg Directorates – also held the rank of Deputy Director of AFB, and subsequently of Deputy Security Minister. 17 Felshtinsky & Litvinenko, Blowing up Russia, p. 8. 18 Data in Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, p.131. 19 A department or directorate within an agency, while by definition vedomstvennyi, is called samostoyatelnyi when it reports directly to the leadership (usually to a Deputy Director or Minister) rather than to another higher-level department. 20 Additional formations included, in addition to the Armed Forces, those of the MB/FSK/FSB, the soon-to-be autonomous Border Guards, FSNP, SVR (which has some Spetsnaz units), GUIN (under Ministry of Justice after 1998), the Spetsstroi or Special Building Service, and the Gostamkom or Customs Committee. See Petrov, “The Security Dimension of Federal Reforms,” p. 5, who does not however count the GFS in his list [note: page numbers for Petrov are per a draft version of this forthcoming article]. 21 Some 200,000 staff left the MVD every year between 1991 and 1996, of which one quarter were sacked for violations of the law. For this and the subsequent discussion, cf. Volkov, op.cit., pp.132-135. 22 Volkov, op.cit., pp. 93-94. 23 Ibid., p. 132. 24 Ibid., p. 136. According to data cited by Volkov, the heads of half the existing ChOPs are ex-KGB, a quarter come from MVD and a quarter from GRU and other agencies. By 1998, there were 156,169 licensed private security employees in Russia, of which 22.6% came from MVD and 7.9% came from the KGB-FSB. 25 Cited in Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 10. 26 Ibid. 27 Volkov, op.cit., p. 136. 28 Cf. Bennett, “The FSB,” and Mukhin, op.cit. 29 For this and the following information, cf. Mukhin, op.cit., pp. 63-66. 30 Volkov, op.cit., p. 170. 31 Ibid., p. 171. 32 Cited in Gall & de Waal, A Small Victorious War, p. 153. 33 See, for a different case study, Donald Jensen’s useful article “The Boss: How Yuri Luzhkov Runs Moscow.” 34 Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, p. 285. 35 Volkov, op.cit., p.172. See furthermore pp. 87-96 for a description of the practices of criminal groups, which are also often employed by government agencies. 36 Ibid., p. 173. 37 The subtitle of his book Violent Entrepreneurs. 38 The most important authors, beyond Volkov, are Vadim Radaev, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Frederico Varese, as well as a number of Russian academics. 39 Volkov, op.cit., p. 22. 40 See, for instance, Radaev’s article “Entreprise, protection et violence en Russie à la fin des années 1990,” in Favarel-Garrigues, ed., Le Crime organisé en Russie: nouvelles approches. 41 Cited in Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 13. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p. 14. 44 Gall & de Waal, op.cit., p. 163. 45 Only one minister, the Cherkess Justice Minister Yuri Kalmykov, resigned in protest over the decision, though he too had voted in favor at the SC meeting on November 29, 1994. 46 Gall & de Waal, op.cit., p. 208. 47 Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 14. 48 Rezun has published a number of books under the name Viktor Suvorov. On GRU, see his Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. 49 http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/fbis/IntelligenceGRU.html. 50 Maksim Kalashnikov, “Chelovek, kotoryi verboval Basaeva” (“The Man who Recruited Basaev”), Stringer, 10.07.02, available at http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/basaev.htm. 51 Felgenhauer, “Nukes will not be used,” The Moscow Times, 19.10.04. 52 Gall & de Waal, p. 270. 53 Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 16. 54 Ibid. 55 Felshtinsky & Litvinenko, op.cit., p. 113-114. 56 Ibid., p. 116. 57 Dudaev was assassinated by a Russian missile guided by the signal from his satellite phone. Litvinenko (op.cit., pp. 35-39) claims that the operation was conducted by Yevgeny Khokholkov, who subsequently headed the FSB’s top-secret UPP/URPO. See below. 58 Felshtinsky & Litvinenko (op.cit., pp. 52-58) make very specific accusations about these Moscow bombings, naming several operatives linked to the FSB. 59 FSO had 44,000 staff in 1996, 40,000 in 1998, and 30,000 in 1999. SBP went down to 900 staff by 1999. In comparison, the KGB 9. “Guards” Directorate employed 8,700 people. Data from Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 18. 60 Cf. Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 19. 61 Data from M., Beloï knigi rossiïskikh spetssluzhb, 1996. 62 Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 20. 63 Ibid., p. 22. 64 Discussion and quotes from Volkov, op.cit., p. 131-132. 65 This and following quotation from Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 23. 67 Mukhin, op.cit. 68 Bennett, “The FSB,” p. 23. 69 Ibid., p.29-30. 70 Most information in this section from Bennett, “The Federal Agency of Government Communications & Information.” 71 All quotes ibid., pp. 6-7, 10-12 and 15. 72 For a detailed account see ibid., pp. 17-19. 73 See Izmailov, “Za vykup korrespondentov ORT zaplatili $1,000,000” as well as other articles in Novaya Gazeta published at the start of 2000; some details from personal communications to the author. 74 Bennett, “The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation,” p. 5 75 Thomas, “Anatoliy Sergeevich Kulikov,” p. 7. 76 Thomas, “Restructuring and Reform in Russia's MVD: Good Idea, Bad Timing?,” p. 2. 77 Declaration on NTV 06.01.98, cited in Thomas, “Kulikov,” p. 16. 78 Thomas, “Restructuring and Reform,” p. 2. 79 Bennett, “MVD,” p. 8. 80 See Bennett, “MVD,” pp. 7-14 for a detailed description of each department’s function. 81 For a broad overview of Berezovsky’s career until 2000 and his relations with the Chechens, see the late Paul Klebnikov’s Godfather of the Kremlin, a hostile portrait strongly influenced by Aleksandr Korzhakov, who contributed interesting kompromat such as transcripts of phone conversations between Berezovsky and Udugov. 82 Personal communications to the author. 83 Personal communication to the author. 84 Jensen, “The Boss,” p. 32. 85 For conflicting accounts of URPO, see Bennett, “The FSB,” pp. 25-27, Felshtinsky & Litvinenko, op.cit., pp. 32-35, and the page (in Russian) at http://www.agentura.ru/timeline/1998/urpo/. 86 Felshtinsky & Litvinenko, ibid., p. 32. 87 Cf. http://www.agentura.ru/dossier/russia/people/patrushev. 88 Title of a PhD dissertation by Miriam Lanskoy studying Russian-Chechen relations between the two wars. 89 Klebnikov, op.cit., p. 278. 90 Bykov had sided with Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich in the infamous “aluminium wars,” against Oleg Deripaska and the Chierny brothers. 92 Interview in Le Figaro, 22.09.99, cited in Klebnikov, op.cit., pp.289-291. 93 Lanskoy, op.cit., p. 199. 94 “Dizzy with success,” The Moscow Times 18.01.00, quoted in Lanskoy, op.cit., pp. 199-200. 95 See Klebnikov, op.cit., p. 304. 96 Russia started the first Chechen war with 40,000 troops. 97 See Lanskoy, op.cit., who quotes most of the relevant interviews pp. 212-214. 98 The Russian press at the time reported that Kvashnin had threatened Yeltsin with insubordination if the campaign was held back; Maj.-Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, one of the more notorious “Chechnya generals,” also made loud public comments along the same lines. 99 The only exception is Litvinenko, a hardly surprising fact given his continued proximity to Berezovsky. 100 Most prominently: Litvinenko’s, Satter’s and Klebnikov’s books, Lanskoy’s dissertation, extensive coverage of the subject in Le Monde, an eyewitness account of the Daghestan events by Abdurrashid Saidov, Secrets of the Incursion, and numerous articles from the Russian press, usefully compiled on the website www.compromat.ru. Several documentaries have since been made on the subject, including one (The Assassination of Russia) with funding and support from Berezovsky, who has now turned against Putin. 101 See nonetheless the article and photo at http://www.compromat.ru/main/voloshin/basaev.htm. 102 Personal source. 103 Litvinenko demonstrates in his book how not only Federal law but the most basic internal FSB procedures render this cover story technically impossible, op.cit., pp. 97-104. In subsequent chapters, he and Felshtinsky name specific operatives allegedly responsible for blowing up the Moscow buildings, but their evidence is mostly circumstantial and does not come from direct knowledge. 104 Quoted in Lanskoy, op.cit., p. 201. 105 See on this topic Favarel-Garrigues & Rousselet, La société russe en quête d’ordre. 106 Duparc, “La place des oligarques au centre des interrogations sur le pouvoir Poutine,” Le Monde, 28.03.00 107 Russia sought Berezovsky’s extradition in 2003, but he convinced a British court he would never be allowed a fair trial – a reasonable argument – and was granted political asylum in the U.K. There is reason to believe that Berezovsky had long been planning his back-door in case things went sour, and leveraged his 1998 liberation of two British hostages held for 15 months in Chechnya, for whom he paid one and a half million dollars out of his pocket, to secure guarantees from the British government, in effect buying himself an expensive but secure permanent visa. Berezovsky, in exile, helped found an anti-Putin political party, “Liberal Russia;” publicly accused the FSB of organizing the Moscow terrorist bombings; provides financial support for a number of other exiles such as Litvinenko and Akhmad Zakaev; and in general keeps up his sniping at the Kremlin, while quietly working to secure, protect and even expand the remains of his business empire. 108 The governors were swiftly weakened by losing their place on the Federation Council; in 2004, Putin finally gained full control over them by abolishing gubernatorial elections and granting himself the power to name governors directly. But this question, and the even broader one of Russian federalism, lies beyond the scope of this study. See for ex. 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