Unlike KGB at End of Soviet Times, FSB Now Animated by Desire to Repress, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 16 – Aleksandr Skobov, one of the last Soviet-era dissidents who has remained in Russia, continues to attack the Putin regime as fascist, and supports Ukraine in its war of defense against Moscow’s aggression, says that the FSB today is something very different from the KGB at the end of Soviet times.

            The KGB officers he encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, he says, “gave the impression that they were unbearably tired of engaging in repression, tired and crushing and strangling the population. They weren’t enthusiastic about what they were told to do but did so out of inertia” (holod.media/2023/05/16/aleksandr-skobov/).

            “In 1986,” Skobov recalls, “Gorbachev called the chairman of the KGB and said that we don’t need any new cases about anti-Soviet propaganda, and this huge machine despite all if its inertia to the contrary stopped.” According to the dissident, “I think most of [the KGB officers] were happy with this order.”

            Now, however, the situation with the FSB is very different. Its officers are “more and more inflamed with the desire to crush and choke.” And that attitude infects not only the FSB but the Putin regime in the broad sense. “You can see just how much they want to take action, to ban something else, and to put more pressure on society.”

            In short, one can say, that they are “itching to engage in repression.”