Heirs to the KGB and czars’ police

Washington Times ^ | March 22, 2011 | Joseph C. Goulden

[Tailgunner Joe]

THE NEW NOBILITY: THE RESTORATION OF RUSSIA'S SECURITY STATE AND THE ENDURING LEGACY OF THE KGB
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
PublicAffairs, $26.95, 299 pages

No one familiar with the security system of the old USSR expected the KGB to dry up and blow away when communism collapsed in 1991. Further, many of us doubted whatever government replaced the Soviet state would make any changes of substance in its intelligence agencies.

Skepticism is proving well-founded. Indeed, the newly constituted security services are more shadowy and powerful than was the KGB at its prime. The Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB) has flourished under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin - first as president, now prime minister - and the government is top-heavy with his onetime intelligence colleagues.

The main change concerns control. As the brave Russian journalists Adrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan write, "The Soviet KGB was all-powerful, but it was also under the control of the political structure. The Communist Party presided over every KGB section, department and division." By contrast, the FSB "is free of party control and parliamentary oversight." FSB officers consider themselves "as heirs not only to the KGB, but also to the secret police that the [czars] employed to battle political terrorism."

High FSB officers work hand in glove with the mega-rich oligarchs that seized control of key portions of the Soviet economy, including oil and other mineral enterprises and the media. Indeed, an FSB officer serves as deputy director general of the state-owned Russian Television and Radio Co., which owns several radio and TV stations, including the Second Channel, considered the country's main official station. He orders news staff how to cover situations with the potential to embarrass the Putin regime.

[goldstategop]

The FSB is charged with the protection of the Russian state and the constitutional order. It oversees fighting terrorism, corruption, currency speculation and protecting the borders. Its the largest armed force in the world after the Russian army.

It has had notable successes in eliminating dangerous Chechen terrorists. But its far short of meeting the goal to fight corruption because the political masters it answers to are complicit in it. I think the book overstates its influence. Its not as totalitarian as the old KGB it succeeded but its not entirely bound by the norms of Western security services simply because Russia is far from being a Western democracy even if Soviet Communism disappeared.