The Russian secret services have a prominence and influence unparalleled in democratic countries. They have acquired such importance because they remained upright when the rest of the communist edifice crumpled. Before 1991 the KGB had itself suffered a collapse in its morale and organizational effectiveness, many of its ablest officers leaving when the USSR disintegrated. But the new FSB showed remarkable resilience, and the Kremlin’s leaders have come to rely on it to enforce their will in Russia and, for as long as the country fails to command international respect and achieve economic dynamism, to make the world tremble. Internal repression and external espionage and subversion mirror one another. The West has to be exposed as a plague on the house of Russia. ‘Colour revolutions’ in nearby countries must be cauterized so that no such revolution might spread to Moscow. American influence must be eradicated in Moscow and America’s own political system attacked.
The FSB is integral to the anatomy of governance, penetrating every important institution and exercising authority with few restraints except those the president himself imposes. Legislation has been passed to permit the security organizations to pursue the national interest without parliamentary interference. Vladimir Putin’s vision of them as a bastion of defence against internal subversion and external assault had always been the FSB’s own attitude: its house journal Sluzhba bezopasnosti (Security Service) even called for monuments to be built in honour of Felix Dzerzhinski, the founder of the communist secret police in 1917. Taking it for granted that ‘democracy’ had discredited itself in Russia, it urged the necessity of continuing to operate elsewhere in the former USSR. It was encouraging its officers to take pride in the heritage of the Soviet secret services even before Putin’s year as FSB director.1 The books page in the journal was coyly named ‘The Andropov Library’, in honour of the man who headed the KGB for fifteen years from 1967.2 As prime minister in 1999, Putin restored Andropov’s plaque on the Lubyanka building. He was going with the flow.3
On becoming president, nevertheless, Putin needed to give a public expression of regret for the wrongs committed in the Soviet past. In 2017 he designated 30 October as the annual Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions. He unveiled a monument, the Wall of Sorrow, at the end of Sakharov Prospekt in central Moscow, made from stones taken from the camps of the Stalinist Gulag. Standing with Patriarch Alexei II, he asked permission from Natalya Solzhenitsyna, widow of the distinguished ex-prisoner and writer of The Gulag Archipelago, to quote her words: ‘To know, to remember and to judge. And only after that to forgive.’ In the darkening hours of the day he placed a wreath at the base of the monument after making a speech about the tragedy suffered by the whole people. Not a word about Stalin, communism or the NKVD and other forces that organized wave after wave of terror. No use of the word ‘terror’. Instead, the emphasis fell on maintaining solemn decorum. On the platform, as in the crowd on Sakharov Prospekt, all heads were bowed.4
Opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had recently been the victim of a suspicious attempt at poisoning, wrote of the hypocrisy of a president who commemorated the foul brutalities of the 1930s while continuing to detain 117 political prisoners in the gaols and camps of the Russian Federation. Mikhail Khodorkovski’s former security leader Alexei Pichugin, added Kara-Murza, was still languishing in confinement.5
Putin revealed his true interest by publicizing his annual attendance at FSB board meetings.6 The FSB’s virtues were a standard theme in his public statements, the presidential website reporting on the regularity with which he chaired the Security Council, and the still more frequent occasions when he called in its leading members for consultation. He treats such leaders as crucial for the development of policy outside the parameters of normal security questions. In November 2017, for example, Putin gathered this informal group round him to plan how to handle proceedings at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit he was about to attend in Vietnam.7 No minister with economic responsibility was present, even though Russia’s trading opportunities and difficulties were the item for discussion.
Early in his first term as president Putin had given a passionate speech to an audience of FSB generals in celebration of Chekist Day (Den chekista). His then prime minister, Kasyanov, had tried to pass off Putin’s fulsome praise of the security agencies as a joke, even when Putin stated that the FSB had, through him, at last achieved the objective of taking absolute power. There were shouts of hurrah in the hall. It was some hours later that Kasyanov fell to worrying about the kind of president Putin was likely to become.8
Putin gave orders for FSB officers to receive improvements in salary, pensions and social entitlements; more housing was made available for them. Welfare provision was improved for the families of security personnel who died on active service.9 None of this was a secret. The secret services enjoyed increased official acclaim. In 1991 Felix Dzerzhinski’s statue on the square outside the Lubyanka building had been pulled down, to public acclaim, but in September 2017 the Kirov City Council unveiled a new bronze monument to his memory.10 This and other provincial initiatives have yet to be copied in Moscow, and Putin has so far held back from a formal political rehabilitation, probably seeking to avoid the likely mass demonstrations any such measure would prompt. His way of dealing with the question is to say that it is up to the Moscow city authorities to decide whether to restore the statue to the Lubyanka square. But nobody can be in doubt about his respect for the feared Dzerzhinski.11
Elected political institutions carry out little scrutiny of the Russian secret services. Neither the Federation Council nor the State Duma imposes accountability through its internal committees. Whereas the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee scrutinizes the entire range of Russia’s diplomatic activity, albeit rarely with critical intent, there is no parliamentary body to supervise the FSB and the other intelligence bodies. Control is left in the hands of the president and the Security Council: the foxes have charge of the hen house. Putin himself had a long career in the KGB and spent a year as the FSB’s director, and the Security Council is composed almost entirely of officials from the secret services. Some idea of the Security Council’s objectives comes from its orders to its own ‘scientific council’ of prominent scholars, who are ordered to conduct ‘the scientific-methodological evaluation and prognostication of internal and external threats bearing on the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation’. Preventing the kind of revolution that took place in Georgia and Ukraine is a cherished objective.12 Few of the scholars were likely to say anything Putin would find objectionable. Their function is to legitimize the Kremlin’s official line.
Such accountability as is demanded from the intelligence agencies is exercised by the president. While this bestows huge authority, it also lays an immense burden of responsibility upon Putin in a working routine involving countless other demands on his time. Even though he presumably requires to be consulted about plans for the biggest covert operations, he necessarily leaves the details up to the leaders of the secret services. In 2000 he told Kasyanov he would not tolerate prime-ministerial interference in security affairs: the president alone has overarching control. This is far from meaning he has simply left the secret services to their own devices. In his first presidential term he ordered some drastic reforms, among them a purge of FSB personnel deemed inadequate, and entrusted the task to friends and associates from his time in the KGB or in the St Petersburg mayor’s office. He is aware that the men – they are all men – who head the secret services have the logistical capacity to do him harm. By strengthening the licence for the secret services to act as the ultimate instrument of state power, he had provided them with a chance to act on and even beyond his orders.
This accentuates his requirement for personal reliability. Recently he has taken the precaution of reshuffling the leading personnel, leaving him the solitary element of state power not to have been replaced. He also finds it convenient for the many security services to compete with each other, something assured by the overlapping boundaries of their operations. Rivalry below presidential level makes the president rest easy.
In 2006 a flurry of legal enactments authorized the security forces to take more action against subversion. The legislation was cast in characteristically vague or opaque language, but the intention was obvious. On 6 March Putin signed a law ‘on counteracting terrorism’ that came to him from both houses of the Federal Assembly, which defined the ‘basic concepts’ of terrorism very broadly, and empowered action against all who carried out, organized or ordered acts of terror as well as those who propagated ideas calling for or justifying such activity. Enforcement would not be confined to Russian territory: the lawmakers required the armed forces, including the secret services, to carry out ‘the suppression of international terrorist activity beyond the frontiers of the territory of the Russian Federation’. The president was given explicit authority to order anti-terrorist operations, Article 15 laying down that the forces used for such operations could include those of the security agencies.13 Although the FSB was not expressly mentioned, its expanded role was an essential element of the new law.
Parallel legislative work was done to amend legislation on ‘extremism’. The impetus came from events abroad. On 3 June 2006 Russian diplomat Valeri Titov was fatally wounded in a terrorist attack in Baghdad. Four of his colleagues were abducted. The terrorist group responsible issued an ultimatum that unless Russia’s government withdrew from Chechnya and released all Muslim prisoners, the kidnapped diplomats would be killed. A videotape was released showing one of them being beheaded. The other three were soon also confirmed as having perished.
On 28 June Putin issued a public order to Russian ‘special services’ to hunt down and ‘annihilate’ the killers.14 Patrushev, head of the FSB at the time, pledged that no terrorist would be able to ‘evade responsibility’ for crimes committed.15 TV and radio stations endorsed his declaration. The FSB, meanwhile, achieved a notable success in its antiterrorism campaign. On 10 July 2006 Shamil Basaev, one of the leading Chechen terrorists operating on the territory of the Russian Federation, was killed in an explosion in Ingushetia, close to the North Ossetian border. There is still no conclusive evidence that Russian special services were responsible for Basaev’s death, and it is quite possible that the explosion was an accident while he was inspecting a land mine,16 but the fact remains that Basaev had long been the FSB’s quarry and that the Russian authorities celebrated his elimination, or – in Putin’s terminology – annihilation.17
This created a propitious atmosphere in July for the Federal Assembly to pass by an overwhelming majority an amendment of the legislation on extremism and for Putin to sign it into law. Extremism was defined as anything from violent attempts to change Russia’s constitutional order and territorial integrity to the stirring up of racist, national or religious strife. Even ‘obstructing the legal activity of organs of state power’ and slandering holders of state power were classified as extremist acts.18 The amendment was a mere listing of categories rather than a careful legislative definition – again a deliberate vagueness, giving the authorities a field day for unfettered repressive activity and unlocking the door for a large swathe of opponents to be branded as extremists who had to be eliminated. Putin was reserving the right to move heavily against anyone who made strident criticism of his rule.
Russia was delivering a warning that fire would be met with fire but, as United Russia spokesmen indicated, the new laws only ratified what was already happening. In its repressive activities the FSB had never stopped at Russian frontiers,19 but this was the first time that Russians were told what they could expect from the foreign operations of their secret services.
The precise motives for Alexander Litvinenko’s murder remain unclear, and there are many possibilities: Litvinenko had besmirched Putin’s personal reputation; he had acted as Boris Berezovski’s helpmate; he had revealed Russian state secrets and become employed by a foreign intelligence service, MI6; he had divulged details of money laundering by Russia’s richest entrepreneurs. Any of these was likely to provoke a violent reaction from Moscow.20 In November 2006, after a sequence of unsuccessful attempts on his life, he was rushed to University College Hospital in London where he died a lingering death after drinking tea laced with the radioactive poison polonium-210. The British authorities quickly blamed the Russian state and expelled four diplomats from the London embassy. Relations remained frozen for some months, but the Labour government decided to avoid further trouble for fear of damaging British economic interests. The Conservative–LibDem coalition government took the same line until after the Crimean annexation. In 2015 a judicial inquiry was at last approved.21
The Russian political establishment took little notice. In July that year the Constitutional Court ruled that Russia’s courts could ignore international judicial bodies when their rulings contradicted the Russian constitution. Judges in Russia became free to conduct proceedings without fear of verdicts in courts anywhere abroad.22
The judge in charge of the inquiry, Sir Robert Owen, had been calling for such an investigation in the long intervening years when prime ministers Blair, Brown and Cameron had preferred a policy of encouraging trade and not annoying the Kremlin, but it would have no immediate consequences for Russian individuals or agencies, because it was an inquiry into events rather than a trial with defendants. In London months of testimony now followed, both openly and in camera. At the end, in January 2016, Owen issued his verdict. He had no doubt that FSB agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun had administered the poison, noting their carelessness or lack of training in leaving traces in other parts of London and on the airliner they had flown on. On the political side, Owen concluded that Putin had ‘probably’ been responsible for ordering the murder. His verbal caution left unexplained the nature of the information suggestive of Putin’s culpability. He did not even say whether it was the evidence of a spy or an electronic intercept. Presumably this was on advice from the UK authorities.
Russian TV channels and newspapers laid stress on Owen’s less than definite conclusion about Putin, ignoring the compelling evidence of Lugovoi and Kovtun’s guilt and their FSB connection. Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov commented on the high number of deaths among Russians residents in London in the previous ten years, and complained that the British authorities declined to seek Moscow’s assistance in their investigations.23 Lavrov’s tasteless levity became the pattern for Kremlin spokespersons and newscasters.
It was repeated in March 2018 after the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Skripal was a former double agent working for the United Kingdom while serving as a colonel in the GRU (in 2010 Russia’s military intelligence organization was renamed as the GU but was still known by its old acronym). Arrested by the Russian authorities, Skripal had been freed in a spy swap involving the FSB sleeper ‘Anna Chapman’, who was in prison in America. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a park bench in Salisbury, where he had made his home. They were victims of a nerve agent poison called Novichok, a compound toxin developed in Russia that attacks the nervous system. A policeman who went to their rescue became gravely ill. Weeks passed before all three of them could be discharged from hospital.
During that time two further people became victims. These were civilians living in or near Salisbury who came into contact with the discarded container of the Novichok. One of them, Dawn Sturgess, failed to respond to intensive medical care and died. Her partner, Charlie Rowley, was reported as suffering heart attacks after being discharged from hospital.
The British authorities blamed the Kremlin as soon as the toxin was detected. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson named Putin directly as having given the order for the attempted murder. Details of what London discovered about the outrage were confidentially passed to the NATO allies, who found them convincing. In Moscow there was an official fit of anger at the UK’s government’s speed in attributing blame. This gave way to sarcasm as the Rossiya-1 TV channel advised émigré Russians to reconsider whether ‘Albion’ was a secure place of refuge. A bout of mutual diplomatic expulsions followed. In September 2018 the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that the police investigation had identified two Russian suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who were GRU officers. As had happened after the Litvinenko murder, there was no chance of dragging them back to face justice in a British court. The real identities of Petrov and Boshirov were quickly revealed, and their preposterous story about going to Salisbury not once but twice to satisfy their passion for the architectural magnificence of its cathedral fell apart. Even Moscow newspapers mocked the GRU’s ineptitude.
Putin brushed the adverse publicity aside, speaking at a press conference in June 2018 of the ‘shaky ground’ of the British allegations, which he dismissed as ‘“creative” chatter’.24 In October he exclaimed that Skripal was nothing but a spy and a traitor: ‘He’s simply scum. That’s all there is to it. And a whole information campaign has been blown up around this. I sometimes look at what’s happening around this affair, and I’m simply astonished. Some fellows made a trip and started to poison homeless persons in your country, in Great Britain. What sort of madness is this?’25
It had always been Putin’s habit to commend the work of Russian security organs, and on 26 March 2015 he congratulated his ‘respected comrades’ on achieving a drastic decrease in ‘crimes of a terrorist orientation’. In 2013 there had been 2.6 times more cases than in 2014, and nine times more in the 2009–14 period. Putin took this as proof that the situation had been brought ‘almost to order’.26 But there was no room for complacency. He expressed concern about the possibility that jihadists who had left the Russian Federation to fight in the ranks of Islamic State ‘could be used against Russia and our neighbours’, and called for them to be prevented from returning, especially to Crimea.27 Security Council Secretary Patrushev divulged that the Russian authorities were hunting down the returnees from active combat for Islamic State in the Middle East, and by mid-2017 had put 151 of them on trial and apprehended a further 29.28 At an FSB Board meeting on 26 February 2016 Putin thanked its officers for breaking up many terrorist groups before they could become active.29
Further counter-intelligence work was now required, he said, to prevent foreign security forces from gaining a toehold in Russia, expressing thanks for the interception of 400 such agents – 23 had been handed over to the judicial authorities.30 In 2016, he announced, the FSB had put a halt to the work of 53 foreign intelligence officers and 386 agents.31
Before the Sochi Winter Olympics there were rumours that the FSB took some unusual steps to prevent a terrorist outrage. Apparently intelligence agents travelled to villages in the North Caucasus and let it be known that armed militants would be allowed to go to the Middle East and join Islamic State. An investigation by the opposition newspaper Novaya gazeta concluded that a ‘green corridor’ was established for them to fly to Turkey and then make their way into Syrian territory. Though the Russian leadership valued the alliance with Syria’s President Assad, its priority was security in the Russian Federation. There was little concern about where the jihadis operated, so long as it was not on Russia’s territory. In the village of Novosasitli in Dagestan’s Khasavurt district, according to the newspaper, 1 per cent of the population left for Syria from 2011 onward. The departure of militants was endorsed by Akhyad Abdullaev, who headed the Novosasitli administration:
I know someone who has been at war for fifteen years. He fought in Chechnya, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and now in Syria. He is surely incapable of living peacefully. If such people go off to war, it’s no loss. In our village there is an individual, a negotiator. He, together with the FSB, drew several leaders out of the underground and redirected them abroad on jihad. The underground has been weakened here, and this is good for us. If they want to fight, let them fight, only not here.32
The FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov, usually one of the more reticent of the Kremlin rulers, disclosed that 2,900 citizens had left to join Middle Eastern jihadi organizations by December 2015. But not once has he responded to requests for details from the media: the government and the secret services have acted on the principle that if they stay quiet, perhaps the story will fade from view; and indeed the story has since struggled to attract public attention either in Russia or abroad.
In 2016 Reuters news agency did track down a Dagestani jihadi, Saadu Sharapudinov, however, and several others who confirmed the Novaya gazeta allegations personally. By his own account Sharapudinov took up the FSB’s offer as a way of joining jihadis across the Turkish frontier in Syria.33 In February 2017 Putin announced that about four thousand citizens of the Russian Federation (and another five thousand from the rest of the former USSR) were fighting for ISIS in Syria, and thanked Russia’s armed forces for their efforts to kill all of them. Not for him the kind of euphemisms that Western leaders employ on such occasions: he wanted those ISIS fighters slaughtered. The Syrian civil war, he noted, could become a breeding ground for terrorists who might leave Syria and take advantage of the absence of visa requirements between Russia and ex-Soviet republics to cause havoc on Russian soil.34
The priority the Kremlin gave to Russia’s internal security was manifest too in the pressure laid upon Western IT companies working inside the country, as the FSB began to insist on their complying with ‘source code’ checks as a condition for continuing their operations. This affected several large American firms, including Cisco, Hewlett Packard, IBM, McAfee, SAP and Symantec. The official rationale was to prevent firewalls, anti-virus programmes and general software from being exploited by the West’s secret services in order to penetrate Russian defences. Symantec decided the demands were excessively intrusive and would compromise its independence from governments, while US officials expressed anxiety that any companies acceding to Moscow’s requirements might inadvertently supply the FSB with the technical knowledge to pierce America’s defences.35
Meanwhile, in January 2017 there was upheaval at the top of the Russian intelligence agencies. Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief of the FSB’s Centre for Information Security, was taken into custody, and arrested along with him were one of his leading officials, Dmitri Dokuchaev, and Ruslan Stoyanov, who headed the Kaspersky Lab, a multinational private firm that collaborates with the FSB in matters of internet security.
All were charged with treason. It was said that Mikhailov was apprehended in the middle of a meeting of FSB leaders and hooded with a black bag before being hauled off to the infamous Lefortovo prison. The story was leaked to the opposition press that the detainees were suspected of passing information to Western sources about Russian cyber-attacks in the West. Mikhailov was charged with treason on the grounds that he had cooperated with the CIA against Russia’s security interests.36 Exactly what caused the arrests is obscure. One possibility is that Mikhailov was indeed in league with American intelligence operatives, another that he was being punished for failing to keep Russian secret activities properly secret. Or perhaps this was just one dastardly stage in the tug-of-war between Russia’s several ‘special services’. Whatever the truth, there has never been a time in East–West relations when Russian and American secret services have been so enmeshed in each other’s business.
The affair became stranger still in April 2017 when the US Senate Intelligence Committee began to query the US Defense Department’s contract with Kaspersky Lab for the supply of protection for its electronic communications. It was pointed out that the company had its origins in Moscow, and unease was expressed that some of its early employees had worked for the Soviet and Russian secret services.37 Senator Joe Manchin, one of many leading Democrats calling on the Trump administration to take a harder policy line on Russia, raised the alarm. The Intelligence Committee sent its grim warning to National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.38 On 27 June the Senate Armed Services Committee belatedly entered the game when Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen amended a defence spending bill by demanding a suspension of the Pentagon’s contract with Kaspersky.
The competition between the Russian and American intelligence agencies only occasionally broke surface to public notice. As in the Cold War, it was a murky, brutal struggle. Much less secret was a success that Russia’s authorities had achieved in July 2013 without lifting a finger. Sensationally, Edward Snowden, an IT consultant who had worked on a contract basis for the US State Department, fetched up at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport, having become a fugitive after leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including diplomatic cables, out of a zeal to expose what he saw as the deceitfulness of successive American administrations. Snowden also had piles of evidence to show how America’s authorities snooped on enemies and allies abroad as well as on its own citizens. With his libertarian passion for transparency of governance, he had contacted the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers, which released the data to the worldwide web, causing real damage to the Obama administration’s reputation. When a warrant was issued for Snowden’s arrest, and having failed to obtain political asylum elsewhere in the world, Snowden put himself at the mercy of the Russian authorities.
A delighted Kremlin ignored American requests to hand him over. After forty tiring days and nights at Sheremetevo airport, he was granted political asylum in Moscow. Russian spokesmen boasted that it was Russia, not America, that gave succour to those who shone light on evil practices. Putin himself enjoyed Obama’s embarrassment: for once, in discussions of human rights, the boot seemed to be on the other foot. The terms of Snowden’s asylum were not publicized, particularly as to whether he had to share his cache of data as the price. He and the Kremlin authorities kept his public appearances to a minimum and he wrote only rarely for the media. Meanwhile Obama had to apologize to Angela Merkel after the revelation that the Americans had bugged her private mobile phone. WikiLeaks also published material about debates inside the State Department that contained devastating critiques of the policies and practices of America’s leading allies. Stories that might have sounded like propaganda if issued by the Russian intelligence agencies acquired credibility, and Kremlin leaders made the most of their opportunity.
In April 2014, in his annual ‘Direct Line’ TV phone-in, Putin affected surprise when told that Snowden was calling in with a query. Snowden was introduced as a ‘former agent of the American special services’. In an obvious set-up, he asked Putin whether Russia stored, intercepted or analysed the communications of millions of members of society. Putin answered in tones of unctuous courtesy:
Respected Mr Snowden! You are a former agent. I used to have a relationship with intelligence work, so we’ll both talk a professional language. To start with, we have strict legislative regulation of the use of special methods by the security services, including both the tapping of private conversations and the surveillance of online communications and so on. This regulation is linked to the need for a court’s warrant in relation to a concrete individual citizen. And so we have no indiscriminate mass [operations] and can have none according to the law.39
Snowden, living under the constraints of Russian keepership, obediently played the role assigned to him.40
In later comments, Putin defended Snowden against the charge of treason while suggesting that Snowden should have done the right thing by resigning his job with a company working on a State Department contract. In Putin’s judgement, Snowden was wrong to leak governmental secrets:41 taking a high moral stance, he was assuming the role of an ex-Soviet security officer taught to keep a lid on confidential information. This was mere display: he really only wanted silence about Russian secrets, and was delighted by Snowden’s breaking of the rules and by Obama’s discomfort. On another occasion he teased the American administration by saying it could have avoided its problem over Snowden by agreeing to the Russian proposal for a criminal extradition treaty.42 So much for any illusion Snowden might have had about the beneficence of his Moscow protectors! – he is a useful pawn who may be traded for other pieces on the chess board of world politics. He went to Moscow as an act of desperation, knowing the Russians would use him if and however they could.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s own activities abroad were anything but innocent. In 2007 Russian secret services were identified as having hired hackers to put Estonia’s entire internet out of action for days. Though the Kremlin denied involvement, the circumstantial evidence was compelling. It proved to Western powers that Russia’s secret services were capable of undertaking a comprehensive attack on Western cyber-defences, and they warned that any repetition could constitute an act of war. Other hacking initiatives were reported in advance of the 2017 French presidential election, when thousands of email messages from Emmanuel Macron’s team were leaked on the internet – the Russians preferred other candidates who were friendlier to Russia. And during the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, it later transpired, Russian companies employed devious methods to use Facebook data to discover the identity of voters hostile to the European Union, and then target them with ‘fake news’ designed to stiffen their will to vote ‘leave’.
Moscow’s secret services are proud of their achievements in Russia and abroad: when Patrushev was FSB director, he gave an interview to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper and in one purple passage stated:
I don’t want to use high-flown words but our best colleagues, the honour and pride of the FSB, aren’t doing their work for the money. When I have to hand over government awards to our people, I look them carefully in the eye. There are high-browed intellectual analysts, broad-shouldered, weather-beaten special forces fighters, taciturn explosives specialists, exacting investigators and reserved counter-espionage operational officers . . . In appearance they are very different, but they have one important quality that unites them: it is that they are people with a commitment to the idea of service. They are, if you like, our ‘neo-nobility (neodvoryane)’.43
Under the tsars the dvoryanstvo had originally been a social group awarded landed property and authority over their peasants in return for military service to crown and state, and the nobility or gentry were the essential component of the army, administration, courts and diplomacy. Patrushev, in setting out the case for the FSB’s unrivalled capacity to look after the Russian people’s security at home and abroad, saw its officials as possessed of the same selflessness in protecting the country as supposedly the dvoryanstvo of old.
Though the FSB describes itself as an enforcer of honest economic practice, there are many indications that some of its agents have been involved with the criminal underworld. In 1998 Alexander Litvinenko contacted Putin personally about a gang of Uzbek criminals who he alleged were running a huge illicit drugs trade with the Afghan warlord and politician Abdul Rashid Dostum.44 He also revealed that FSB officials had colluded in a plot to kill Boris Berezovski. He went even further, accusing Russian political leaders and their secret services of profiting from the very activity that they were meant to prevent,45 in particular charging Putin specifically with lending protection to Semën Mogilevich and the so-called Tambov gang in St Petersburg, which Litvinenko described as Russia’s ‘bandit capital’.46 Litvinenko also suggested that in the 1990s Mogilevich had links with both Al-Qaida and Putin.47 Independent evidence about Mogilevich and Putin emerged from the leak of a taped conversation in July 2000 between Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Derkach, head of the Ukrainian security services. Kuchma and Derkach were speaking about the crisis of Russo-Ukrainian relations over the status of the RusUkrEnergo enterprise, which played an important role in the gas exports to Ukraine. Derkach talked of Semën Mogilevich’s expected arrival in Kyiv for negotiations to resolve the various disputes: ‘He’s on good terms with Putin,’ Derkach remarked. ‘He and Putin have been in contact since Putin was still in Leningrad.’48
Other tapes have Kuchma and Derkach discussing whether to acquaint Putin in person with Ukrainian intelligence material from the early 1990s – by which time Putin had left the KGB but was yet to head the FSB – that could be seen as pointing to his part in a St Petersburg deal involving money laundering in Germany.49
The testimony against him is patchy at best, and frequently unsubstantiated. The Kremlin has not commented on the allegation. What can be said with confidence is that if Putin really did get involved in illicit business activities, he was not the only one among the former or current intelligence community. ‘Security’ questions are pervasive in top-level international commercial negotiations for Russia. Entrepreneurs and lawyers working there testify that large commercial deals cannot come to a conclusion unless and until authorized by the FSB,50 and many intelligence officers have the opportunity to demand bribes as the price of giving contracts the go-ahead. It is an environment that entices one secret agency to denounce another, and Putin has difficulty holding the ring.51