Former KGB strongman Vladimir Putin is methodically placing former state security operatives in droves at every level of Russia's government. Putin seems to have earned the favor of certain world leaders, including Israel's Ariel Sharon and President Bush, for reasons that aren't really clear. We can only hope that GWB's stated aspirations for the spread of democracy include backward Russia as well as the Middle East.
Over the past few years literally thousands of such men have followed the road to power forged in 2000 by former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin. In every region of Russia, at every level of government, former secret-police agents are grabbing power, digging in and recruiting old KGB friends. More and more, they are stepping in to “manage” Russia’s fledgling democracy—most recently (but by no means exclusively) with their legal assault on the giant Yukos Oil Co. and the arrest of its biggest shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A whiff of repression rides the air. Liberals worry that the Russian police state is being reborn. Nonsense, say conservatives. Russia needs more law and order, even at the sacrifice of a bit of freedom. Whatever the Yukos case portends, it is clear that the old secret police will play an ever larger role in Russia’s future. Well-disciplined, smart and loyal, these men of power, the siloviki, are back.Posted by Alan at November 22, 2003 01:20 PMRussian politics are notoriously opaque, but a leading sociologist in Moscow, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, has dedicated her career to tracking such men and their activities. Unsurprisingly, she’s not particularly popular at the Kremlin these days. Rumors of a “creeping KGB coup,” she says, are borne out by the numbers.
A full 25 percent of senior Russian officials in Moscow come from the siloviki, according to her figures, up from 3 percent under the last head of the Soviet police state, Mikhail Gorbachev. (Most other analysts accept Kryshtanovskaya’s numbers, and the Kremlin doesn’t dispute them.) Outside government, tens of thousands of former KGB men now working for private security companies function effectively as “sleeper cells,” she adds, which spring to life at critical moments—such as the current election campaign, where they contribute everything from legwork to kompromat, or “compromising materials,” on candidates opposing the Kremlin’s United Russia Party. “In the past,” she says, “we had a socialist totalitarian state. Now we will have a capitalist totalitarian state.”
via Newsweek