POLITICS: The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB,by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Public Affairs, 306pp, $26.95
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM in today’s Russia is a dangerous trade. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an advocacy group based in New York, 52 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992 while carrying out their work. Many of the murders remained unresolved, the authorities apparently having little interest in bringing the culprits to justice. So it’s a brave reporter who probes the deepest recesses of Russia’s secret state and the seamless morphing of the KGB, the Soviet-era security service, into today’s all-powerful federal security service, the FSB.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan previously worked at the Novaya Gazetanewspaper, one of Russia's last outposts of critical thinking and investigative journalism. Several of their former colleagues are among those murdered, including Anna Politovskaya, Russia's best-known critic of the war in Chechnya. Soldatov and Borogan now run the website agentura.ru, which is fascinating, even essential reading for those interested in Russia's security state (and which is also available in English). Recent stories include an investigation into the spread of surveillance technology, which sounds chillingly familiar to the spread of the surveillance society under British Labour governments, the return of old KGB-style methods of information and propaganda control and the growth of the "New Nobility", the former KGB and security service officers who now work for the FSB and who control much of Russia's economy, media and politics. Collectively known as the "Siloviki", they are embodied most of all in Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer and president of Russia who is now prime minister.
Putin’s ascent and the rise of Siloviki have led many to believe that Russia has lurched back to the Soviet era and a 21st-century version of the former dictatorship. In fact, as Soldatov and Borogan note, in many respects the Siloviki are far more powerful now than under communism.
The Soviet system at least had some in-built checks and balances, as the KGB was under the control of the Communist Party. But, like nature, dictatorships in transition abhor a vacuum, and when communism collapsed the Siloviki swiftly took over the levers of power. Soldatov and Borogan argue that under Putin’s reign the FSB became Russia’s new elite, with greatly expanded responsibilities and immunity from democratic or parliamentary control. FSB officers now fill numerous positions in state bodies and state-owned corporations. The authors chronicle in detail how the rise of the Siloviki has severely curtailed the brief flowering of civil society and democracy under President Yeltsin, in the early 1990s.
Putin at least is open about this. After Russian police detained more than 150 people at an antigovernment protest in Moscow in August, the prime minister said in an interview that anyone protesting without permission would be hit on the head by batons: “That’s all there is to it.”
In fact, as Soldatov and Borogan argue in this impressively detailed and unsettling book, there is much more. Authoritarianism buttressed by a repressive state and violence does not serve Russia well in today’s complex, globalised world. For example, Moscow neither predicted nor prevented the popular uprisings known as the Colour Revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, all near and strategically important neighbours. The Kremlin viewed these as a direct result of western meddling. The truth was more complex: as with the uprising that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000, western expertise was indeed used by local activists to channel popular discontent by using the internet and modern marketing techniques, such as by branding each revolution with a colour: Rose for Georgia, Orange for Ukraine and Tulip for Kyrgyzstan. Western intelligence services did help topple Milosevic and at the very least closely monitored the Colour Revolutions. But perhaps because of its own unchallenged power and reach the FSB regards its western counterparts as being equally all-powerful manipulators. This is a mistake, as no external agency could actually plan, trigger and execute an uprising in a foreign country. The Colour Revolutions were made not by the CIA or MI6 but by local citizens who wanted to live better and freer lives.
A Colour Revolution in Russia is the Kremlin’s greatest fear, write Soldatov and Borogan. NGOs have been threatened by charges that they are paid agents of foreign states, and Russia’s (very) nascent civil society is cowed and intimidated, although not yet completely crushed. But, as the authors note, the FSB is wasting vast amounts of resources and energy chasing nonexistent threats. There will not be a Colour Revolution in Russia, as there is no appetite for one. The rule of Prime Minister Putin and his Siloviki will continue unchallenged for many years yet, and he remains enormously popular, regarded as a strong leader who will crush Chechen terrorism. Ultimately, the FSB’s greatest weakness is itself, the authors write: “Their excessively suspicious, inward-looking and clannish mentality has translated into weak and ineffective intelligence and counterintelligence operations. In addition, since security agents are everywhere in the government, it also undermines the effectiveness of state governance as a whole.”
Soldatov and Borogan have done an excellent job in shining a light in some of Russia’s darkest corners. But it’s important to note that the Kremlin has no monopoly on repression. The steady stream of reports about CIA rendition of prisoners to be tortured by pliant allies, the growing evidence of collusion in this by British intelligence services, and the massive expansion of Europe’s new security state, which brings enormous riches to those profiting from the non-stop warnings of imminent terror attacks, all show that the West, too, has its ever more powerful Siloviki.
Adam LeBor is an author and journalist based in Budapest. The Budapest Protocol,his thriller about the rise of the European super-state, is published by Reportage Press
