Deception (10 page)

Greed is a defining characteristic of this new elite, but not the only one. Despite its good fortune (and great fortunes) the regime's world view is harsh and pessimistic. The prison-yard mentality has spread to those who run the state: show weakness, and you suffer. What counts is intense loyalty to friends, ruthless rivalry with everyone else, and vengeance on those who betray you. Andrei Illarionov, a former top Kremlin aide in the early years of the Putin era, when the Russian leader was still championing economic reform, has now fallen out with the regime and criticises it in the harshest terms. He is now a fellow at the free-market Cato Institute in Washington, DC and has written a powerful denunciation of the twenty-two agencies that he estimates make up the ruling power structure.

 

The members of ‘
Siloviki
Incorporated' (SI) share a strong sense of allegiance to the group; an attitude of relative flexibility regarding short- and medium-term goals; and rather strict codes of conduct and honour, including the ideas of ‘always taking care of one's own' and not violating the custom of
omertà
(silence). As one might expect in a group with roots in the secret-police and intelligence services, members place great emphasis on obeying superiors, showing strong loyalty to one another, and preserving strict discipline. There are both formal and informal means of enforcing these norms. Those who violate the code are subject to the harshest forms of punishment, including death . . . Their training instils in them a feeling of being superior to the rest of the populace, of being the rightful ‘bosses' of everyone else. For those who remain on active duty, their perquisites of office include two items that confer real power in today's Russia: the right to carry and use weapons, and an FSB credential (known as a
vezdekhod
) that acts as a carte blanche giving its owner the right to enter any place, office, building, or territory whatsoever, public or private.
¹⁷

 

He continues:

 

Speaking at the Lubyanka – the Moscow headquarters building that the FSB inherited from the KGB – on ‘Security Organs Day' (known as ‘Chekist Day') in December
1999
, Putin said that ‘the mission of the group of FSB officers sent undercover to work in the government is being accomplished successfully'. With the state as their base, the
Siloviki
have taken over key business and media organisations as well. There are now few areas of Russian life where the SI's long arm fails to reach.

 

It is important not to glamorise the result. As Mr Inozemtsev points out, the prime characteristic of Russia's rulers is ‘ignorance, intricately if poorly disguised beneath a veneer of scientific degrees'. But incompetent thuggishness is no more pleasant than the competent kind. And as the economist Mr Inozemtsev himself admits, the security and (mislabelled) ‘law enforcement' organs have mushroomed:

More than
200
,
000
professional military officers in the country [are] on active duty. Around
1
.
1
m soldiers serve on the staff of the Interior Ministry; more than
300
,
000
serve inside the FSB; around
200
,
000
work in prosecutors' offices; and another
150
,
000
in different investigative committees. Close to the same number work for the tax police; and more than
100
,
000
serve in the Customs Committee and in the Federal Migration Service. We won't mention smaller organisations like the Anti-Drug Administration and many others. In total, more than
3
.
4
m people – close to
12
per cent of the active male workforce – are employed in organisations that hew to the principles of vertical organisation, unquestioning obedience and deeply rooted corruption.
¹⁸

 

The FSB in particular is under no kind of constitutional, legal or democratic oversight. It is a state within a state; a law unto itself. Its counterparts in Western countries make mistakes, exceed their power and on occasion misuse their privileges for self-enrichment or to serve domestic political ends. But they are ultimately under legal and political control. Some such agencies even have internal ombudsmen and offer protection for whistle-blowers. In Russia the parliamentary committees that are meant to supervise the spooks are ciphers. The FSB is responsible only to its director – a close ally of Mr Putin.

Mr Putin's arrival in power in
1999
, say Soldatov and Borogan, gave the secret services the right, for the first time in Russia's history, to ‘define their own political agenda'.
¹⁹
Top of that agenda is stability, drawing on both the KGB's repression of dissidents and the Tsarist secret-police punishment of political extremism. Both the old and new secret police are based on the quasi-mystical regard for the interests of the state, coupled with a mixture of contempt and fear for its individual subjects. Both used, or use, a similar palette of tactics – ranging from crude intimidation to subtle deception. They were and are legalistic yet unconstrained by any concern for justice. In the FSB's own eyes, their role is to ‘serve and protect'. But the idea of public service in this context is very different from the Western concept, where the voters' wishes, channelled by politicians and constrained by the rule of law, provide the framework in which public officials operate. In Russia, ‘service' is first and foremost self-service: helping oneself to the fruits of office, be they bureaucratic rents from corruption or the spoils of the country's mineral wealth. Only after that comes public service. This is not service to the rules or processes of the state, but to a more abstract and transcendental idea of the national interest. Russia must be strong – in its use of military, financial and diplomatic power. If it cannot be strong it must be feared, or at least respected. The task of the public servant is to make that so.

A further component of the FSB mind-set is religiosity, in some cases with an admixture of mysticism. As Soldatov and Borogan note, the FSB has strengthened its ties with the Russian Orthodox Church – once the chief target of KGB persecution. In
2002
the then Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksei II, blessed the reopening of the restored Cathedral of St Sophia of God's Wisdom on Lubyanka Square, near the FSB headquarters. The then FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev attended the ceremony. This reflects the increasing search among Russia's new leaders for old roots. Ideas of Russian uniqueness fit well with the rejection of foreign ideas such as political competition. They also chime with the notion – deeply held if bizarre to outsiders – that following the fall of ancient Rome and Constantinople, Moscow is the ‘Third Rome', besieged by enemies who must be resisted at all costs. Indeed, the seemingly arcane subject of Byzantine history has become oddly popular among the FSB and in like-minded political circles. In January
2008
Russian state television broadcast a remarkable documentary called ‘The Fall of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium'.
²⁰
Echoing the regime's view of the
1990
s, it blamed the end of the Byzantine empire on the intrigues of local ‘oligarchs' and Western crusaders. The idea of a global conspiracy against Russia is central to the curriculum of the FSB Academy, which is fostering a new generation of
Siloviki
.

Unfortunately these ideas fall on fertile ground. Though Soviet-era education in the hard sciences was excellent, the tradition of study in the humanities was repressed and distorted. A real discussion of history and philosophy would have been corrosive for Marxism–Leninism. Only carefully vetted academics were allowed to teach and study such sensitive subjects. This legacy weakens Russia's resistance to batty and paranoid theories. And the surviving cadres of Soviet-trained academics have in many cases found it easy to switch from the intricacies of dialectical materialism to exploring hidden international machinations against Russia. A truly startling example of the overlap between paranoia and mysticism is the theory of
Mertvaya voda
or ‘dead water', a miraculous substance that (in Russian folklore) can revive the dead and heal wounds. To see it cropping up in the FSB academy syllabus and in the mainstream discussion of geopolitics is surprising: rather as if the FBI training camp at Quantico instructed its special agents in Hopi chanting or astral projection.
²¹

Soviet-style fanaticism and ideology has for the most part given way to mere prejudice and paranoia. But the surplus nervous energy goes into personal self-interest. At least in their own eyes, the ‘Chekists' were selfless public servants, devoted to the cause of communism and the greater glory of the state, and among them corruption was severely constrained and usually ruthlessly punished. Their successors' capacity for self-enrichment is colossal. Soldatov and Borogan lift just one corner of the carpet. They highlight senior FSB officers' abuse of power to build millionaires' mansions on plots of land, gained at knock-down prices, in Moscow's most desirable suburb, the area around the Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway to the west of the city.

That looks like petty corruption compared with the colossal sums that can be earned by diverting financial flows in energy and other businesses. Under the new system, the men who run Russia, by and large, also own it. The dividing line between public and private interests is hopelessly blurred. People who are government ministers or senior public officials in the morning are the chairmen or chief executive officers of commercial enterprises in the afternoon. Although these entities have products, managers, audited accounts, respectable bankers, shareholders and even listings on reputable foreign stock exchanges, they are not real companies in a Western sense: their managers' aim is not to add value, raise profitability, reward shareholders and invest for the future. Instead their role is to siphon off money to insiders' private schemes and to promote Russia's foreign-policy agenda. The clearest example of this is in energy, where Gazprom and other natural resource companies trample on their shareholders' interests as they pursue dubious and grandiose schemes. These companies have hugely inflated costs; they sell their oil and gas through murky intermediaries; they loot their subsidiaries (the treatment of the Gazprom pension fund is a particular scandal
²²
). A few brave campaigners such as Aleksei Navalny, a blogger, and the former government ministers Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, try to keep track of the looting and raise public concern against it.
²³
But they face intimidating lawsuits and other threats; the public seems to accept that though its interests (both Rosneft and Gazprom are partly state-owned) are being abused by the country's elite, nothing much can be done about it.

In some respects, this landscape of power does not differ greatly from that of other corrupt, autocratically run, resentful countries with big intelligence services such as China or Iran. But in these countries the spooks are the servants of the state. In Russia, they have for the past ten years largely run it. Mr Putin, the country's undisputed leader, spent his formative years in the KGB. His right-hand man, Igor Sechin, a deputy prime minister and tycoon in the oil and shipbuilding industries, worked in military intelligence. Another ex-spook is the head of Russian railways, Vladimir Yakunin (who is also a string-puller in intrigues involving the Baltic states). So is the head of the Defence-Industrial Commission, which oversees Russia's arms industry, Sergei Ivanov. So is Viktor Ivanov (no relation), who heads the powerful anti-drug agency. So are numerous others at the heights of political and economic life in Russia.

In numerical terms the
Siloviki
are a diminishing force. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who specialises in monitoring their role, reckons that they comprised nearly half the top
1
,
000
people in the country when Mr Medvedev came to power but fell to just under a quarter by late
2010
.
²⁴
Nor are they monolithic. Fights between
Siloviki
clans are formidable and sometimes public. In one instance a senior ex-KGB man, Viktor Cherkesov, publicly appealed in a newspaper article for a truce in a fight with a rival clan.
²⁵
In another rumble in the same row, a financier called Oleg Shvartsman gave lurid details of the way in which his fund-management company handled the $
3
.
2
bn assets of senior officials in the SVR foreign-intelligence service and FSB.
²⁶
He explained that this gave him political clout in enabling a kind of corporate raiding, in which owners could be persuaded to sell their firms for knock-down prices – these are also the tactics used to punish Mr Browder. Corruption hits the effectiveness of the security and intelligence agencies, as it does every other bit of Russian officialdom. Junior officers detest the fact that their bosses' snouts are bigger, and deeper in the trough. Yet to focus on numbers, positions and squabbles misses the point. As Russia decays under the crushing weight of economic and social failure, the ideas the FSB stands for are becoming more powerful, not less.