Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 20 – Today, the
Day of the Chekist is being marked by the Russian Federation, perhaps the only
country in the world to have a special holiday devoted to the security services
and an indication not only the Chekism “cannot be destroyed,” as one KGB
officer put it, but that in Russia today, it is triumphant, Leonid Mlechin
says.
The historian of the Russian security
services begins his reflections on this point by quoting General Valery Vorotnikov,
the former head of the Fifth Chief Directorate of the Soviet KGB: ‘How to
destroy Chekism? Chekism cannot be destroyed. Hundreds and thousands of people
have been trained on its principles” (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/175012).
“If you want to
create a new service, you have the power to do so,” Vorotnikov said in the
early 1990s, “but keep in mind that with these people you will create nothing
but the KGB of the USSR because you will not be able to reeducate these people.
To establish a new service, you would have to remove every single one and
assemble entirely new people.”
After the USSR disintegrated, all
Russian government structures absorbed the Soviet ones, except for the KGB. It
in contrast “swallowed the Russian structure,” Mlechin says, and managed to
create a situation that was best for itself, one in which no outsider like the CPSU
Central Committee could change its basic values and approaches.
Of course, the successor to the KGB couldn’t
restrict travel abroad as it had in the past and couldn’t vet appointments
except in the state apparatus. But that
had consequences: the new security agency focused on “the spiritual situation of
society” in order to ensure its influence under the new political system.
The appearance in the 2000s of new
laws restricting criticism in fact gave the FSB new possibilities. As former
FSB director Col.Gen. Nikolay Golushko warned, “the application of these norms
of the criminal code will bring on more problems” that the earlier Soviet ones
about slandering the Soviet state system.
As an experienced specialist, Golushko understood that “such
laws push the operational worker down the old path,” not to fight terrorism or
espionage but to “try to influence the attitudes in society and to direct them,”
Mlechin continues. That is because the security agency consists of people who
believe that strict control and subordination are always required.
They
are recruited and trained to be suspicious to everyone around them and to view
the world as “sharply divided between us and them. And they are accustomed to act with methods
which often are unacceptable in civic life,” the historian says. Moreover and
quite rapidly, they spread their values into many other spheres of Russian
life.
Post-Soviet
Russian businessmen were glad to recruit former siloviki but they quickly
discovered that in the new system, they could not get along without them. The former KGB officers moved into all kinds
of other positions as well, “but they rarely became deputies or ministers. That
too was part of the Soviet tradition.”
In
Soviet times, only rarely did KGB officers become senior party officials. There
were only three exceptions: Geydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan, Boris Pugo in Latvia
and Givi Gumbaridze in Georgia. The first was installed to fight corruption;
the second and third weren’t really professional Chekists but rather party and Komsomol
workers who went into the KGB.
The
FSB like the KGB before it won support from politicians because it suggests
that any shortcomings are not the result of mistakes by leaders but rather the
product of criminal conspiracies that must be rooted out and that only the
security service has information, not available to others, that allows the
system to defend itself.
In
the short term, this gives the security services enormous power; but their
influence over time corrupts the political leadership and even gets it in
trouble by robbing the latter of the ability to view the world accurately and
encouraging them to give the security services their head, something that may
land the politicians in trouble, Mlechin says.
Over
the last 15 years, the security services have triumphed sometimes helping the
political elite but sometimes acting in ways that undercut the goals of the
rulers, the historian continues. The
turning point was the February 2004 murder of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen
leader, in Qatar.
That FSB action showed
that once again the Russian security agencies could act on the basis of their
own conclusions rather than in cooperation with political leaders who might
have decided on a different approach. Since
then, the situation has become even more problematic with the FSB acting abroad
in ways that instead of furthering Russia’s interests, undermine them.
But Chekism is now triumphant in the
Kremlin; and the Kremlin has to live with the consequences of that. How long it
will be able to do so very much remains to be seen, the historian suggests.
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