The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 5

THE HUMBLING

An enduring memory of my childhood was being allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. From my earliest years, I knew that at a few minutes before midnight – in the moments before national television broadcast the Kremlin chimes, signalling the advent of a new year – the country’s leader would address us, the Russian people. The tradition had begun in 1941, in the darkest days of the war, when the titular head of state Mikhail Kalinin took to the radio to rally Soviet spirits in the face of Hitler’s inhuman onslaught against us. In my early memories, it was Leonid Brezhnev who would slur his way through a summary of what had been achieved and what was expected in the year ahead. In 1985, we watched with especial excitement as the new broom in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined his vision for change. Then in 1987 and 1988, there was the extraordinary spectacle of Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan swapping roles, so that Reagan spoke to us and Gorbachev addressed the American people on New Year’s Eve, which brought us tangible proof that the Cold War was thawing.

But it was 1999 that produced the biggest surprise. The millions of viewers switching on their TV sets at midnight, expecting to see the familiar red-nosed, puffy-cheeked face of Boris Yeltsin, champagne glass in hand, were in for a shock. In his place, a small, unfamiliar man in an ill-fitting suit was sitting in front of a decorated Christmas tree, trying to look presidential. Breaking with years of tradition, Yeltsin had already made his New Year speech, and instead of the usual, well-worn expressions of national congratulation, he had startled us. ‘I want to apologise,’ Yeltsin said, ‘for failing to make all our dreams come true, for failing to foresee that what at first seemed easy would turn out to be agonisingly hard. I apologise for betraying the hopes of all of us who believed we would be able to jump in a single leap from the grey, retrograde, totalitarian past to the shining, rich and civilised future.’ Yeltsin announced that he was resigning, in order to hand over the presidency to a new man, ‘a strong person who deserves to become President’, who would ensure that Russia never again regressed to its discredited, authoritarian past. For those who did not know who this ‘strong person’ was – possibly the majority of those watching – a helpful caption appeared, naming him as ‘Acting President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’

To most of us, the first words of the new president seemed reassuring, a categorical reaffirmation that he would continue the open, West-friendly policies of his predecessor so that Russia would remain on the path of liberal, free-market democracy. ‘I assure you there will be no vacuum of power,’ Putin pledged. ‘The Russian state will stand firm in the defence of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the media, private ownership rights and all the fundamental elements of a civilised society. Russia has opted irrevocably for democracy and reform and we will continue to pursue those goals … New Year is a holiday when dreams come true, and that is certainly the case this year. I believe the hopes and dreams that all of us cherish will undoubtedly come true.’

Putin’s promises were comforting; most of us went to bed relieved. But we might not have done so if we had known what had occurred earlier, behind doors. When Yeltsin told Putin on 14 December that he was about to become the leader of a superpower, the ‘strong man’ replied that he ‘wasn’t ready’ (at least, that is what both Yeltsin and Putin wrote in their account of the meeting). But it wasn’t long before the ‘strong man’ allowed himself to be persuaded. A meteoric rise from obscurity had whisked him from an undistinguished career in the lower echelons of the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB, via civil service posts in St Petersburg and then the Kremlin, to a surprise one-year stint as boss of the KGB’s successor organisation, the Federal Security Service (FSB), before three months as interim prime minister and, finally, the commanding heights of power.

Having received the news of his elevation, Putin knew exactly who he must report to; a day or so later, he went straight to his old stamping ground – the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the FSB and formerly that of the KGB. At a gala evening in honour of Lenin’s punitive organ of repression, the Cheka secret police,³ Putin raised a glass to his former FSB colleagues. ‘Comrades,’ he had just declared in a speech of welcome, ‘I wish to inform you that the group of FSB colleagues despatched by you to work undercover in the national government has succeeded in the first phase of its mission!’

At the time, it may have seemed a harmless joke – if somewhat tasteless, given the brutality and suffering dished out in the basements of the Lubyanka over the years – but in retrospect, the story has acquired distinctly sinister overtones. Putin’s braggadocio at the secret policemen’s ball needs to be seen in the context of the time. By 1999, the Soviet Union had been dead for nearly a decade and its brutal enforcers, the once dreaded KGB, were no more. The collapse of the USSR had left all Russians dazed and confused, but for members of the security services the upheaval had been even more painful. The event that signified the downfall of the USSR and the end of seven decades of communist rule was the shambolic attempted coup of August 1991 to halt Gorbachev’s liberalising reforms and return Russia to socialist orthodoxy. When the hardline communists’ putsch was defeated, the plotters were vilified and sent to jail. Prominent among them were the leaders of the KGB, including its then chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. For the secret police, the consequences were immediate and ultimately catastrophic. The KGB, already held in dubious regard by many Soviet citizens, was now identified in the minds of millions as the malevolent force behind an attempt to seize control of their country’s future and deprive its people of the freedom and prosperity that Gorbachev’s reformers were promising.

On 22 August 1991, as it became clear that the coup had failed, thousands of people gathered in front of the Lubyanka. Demonstrations, long banned in the USSR, had been tolerated under Gorbachev, so it wasn’t surprising to see people on the streets. But the events of the hours that followed were so iconoclastic, in their most literal sense, that I will never forget them.

In the centre of Lubyanka Square, the lowering statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, was a very visible symbol of KGB repression. The crowd daubed its pedestal with slogans – ‘murderer’, ‘tsar-killer’, ‘antichrist’ – while chanting ‘Freedom!’ and ‘Down with the KGB!’ Someone managed to wrap a rope around Dzerzhinsky’s neck, like a hangman’s noose, and attempt – unsuccessfully – to topple him with the help of a bus. Dusk began to fall. From somewhere – at the time, no one knew from where – three mobile cranes rumbled into the square, led by a group of construction workers who ushered them through the crowd. One of the men was hoisted high in the basket of a cherry-picker, until he came face to face with ‘Iron Felix’. The rope was replaced with a metal hawser attached to the jib of a crane. Shortly before midnight, the 15-tonne statue rose uncertainly into the air, swaying like a hanged man. Fireworks exploded. The crowd cheered. People kicked and spat on the toppled statue. In the Lubyanka itself, not a single light burned in any of the windows. The once-untouchable KGB had been humbled, its fearsome reputation for omnipotence destroyed. It felt like a seminal moment.

Protesters celebrate after toppling the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanka Square, 23 August 1991

A view of the Lubyanka, and the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky before it was toppled

In the climate of freedom that came with the collapse of the USSR, the new Russian leadership strove to ensure that the country could never return to the police state of the past. A reformist chairman, Vadim Bakatin, was appointed to dismantle the KGB monolith, declaring, ‘The traditions of Chekism must be eradicated.’ Bakatin introduced measures to curtail the security services’ extrajudicial control over society: the KGB would be broken up and replaced by independent agencies, competing with one another as equals; they would be transparent, subject to the rule of law and respect for human rights; and their focus would henceforth be the fight against crime, not the policing of political opinion.

The next decade was a hard time to be a secret policeman. The KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, was a pale shadow of its predecessor, having been restructured and seemingly neutered, operating with greatly reduced budgets and only half its previous staff. It meant that 200,000 former KGB employees, people accustomed to wielding unchecked power over their fellow citizens, were made unemployed. Thousands of them found work in private security, as bodyguards, analysts and enforcers, assisting politicians, businessmen or – in many cases – shady figures from the increasingly prominent world of organised crime. The nexus of KGB and mafia would become a phenomenon of national concern. Even those agents who were retained by the FSB found their wages uncertain and frequently unpaid. As a result, they, too, were vulnerable to recruitment by private business and criminal gangs, using their inside knowledge and authority to make money on the side, learning to serve the state and their own private interests at the same time.

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.

The combination of Vladimir Putin as president and Nikolai Patrushev as FSB director created an echo chamber of self-amplifying paranoia, with each of them reinforcing the fears and prejudices of the other. In his years at the head of the FSB and then as secretary of the State Security Council, Patrushev has displayed a longstanding distrust of the West, opposing integration and cooperation, encouraging Putin to rely on the security services by feeding him lurid ‘intelligence’ of alleged American hostility. In 2014, Patrushev declared that it was ‘the Americans who brought down the Soviet Union’ and that the same CIA operation was still being actively pursued, with the goal now of dismembering Russia. The West had deliberately provoked the war in Chechnya, he reported, with ‘extremists and their adherents being supported by US and British intelligence services, as well as by their allies in Europe’. Meanwhile, in his view, Washington had spent the quarter-century since the collapse of the USSR laying the groundwork for the crisis in Ukraine. ‘A whole generation of Ukrainians,’ Patrushev claimed, ‘has been poisoned by the West with hatred for Russia and with the mythology of so-called “European” values … the calamity in Ukraine is another means for them [the West] to intensify their policy of “containing” our country. They have continued unfailingly to follow this course, with only the forms and tactics of its execution changing.’ Other claims by the FSB chairman included the assertion that ISIS had been created by the policies of the United States, that the governments of the Baltic countries were supporting neo-Nazis and that Madeleine Albright believed that Siberia should not belong to Russia. When evidence was sought for this surprising assertion, FSB General Boris Ratnikov revealed that it was based on the work of his mind-reading agent who had ‘intercepted Albright’s thoughts’ and discovered that she had a ‘pathological hatred of Slavs’.

Joe Biden’s assertion in 2021 that Putin is a ‘killer’ was grist to Patrushev’s anti-Westernism. It was, he said, the signal for another Cold War, just as Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech had signalled the start of the first one. ‘Even Truman and Reagan, the most fanatical opponents of our country, accepted that there were limits on what should be declared in public … no matter how extreme their Russophobia behind closed doors.’

In Soviet times, the KGB would regularly stoke confrontation with the West, but its aggression would be softened by the Foreign Ministry, whose diplomats had direct contact with colleagues in Europe and North America. The unprecedented dominance of today’s FSB, with its exclusive access to the ear of the president, means that the old mediating forces no longer exist. Wild theories of encirclement, danger and Western aggression, propounded by Patrushev and his associates, have become increasingly dominant and influential in the president’s circle. The February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was at least in part the result of the Kremlin’s distorted view of reality, stoked by this echo chamber of self-reinforcing paranoia.

As for the promises of continuing liberty and democracy made by Putin in his New Year address of 1999, few if any have been kept. The political freedoms of the 1990s have disappeared, and have been replaced by the autocratic control of a small group of crony gangsters clustered around the president and the similarly bandit-like Siloviki, supported by the loyal apparatus of the FSB. Alternative centres of power, including opposition parties, prominent individuals who challenged Putin’s divine right to rule, environmental organisations, human rights groups, foreigners, critics and the media have been repressed. The ‘group of FSB men despatched to work undercover in the national government’ in December 1999 has achieved its goal. Few of us back then foresaw the toxic consequences that would unfold as a result.