FSB Focused Far More on Economic Crimes than on Terrorism, New Statistics Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 1 – Kremlin rhetoric about terrorist threats notwithstanding, the FSB currently is conducting six times as many investigations into economic crimes as it is into terrorist acts, a pattern that gives the security organs an increasingly large role in Russia’s economic life and raises questions about what the Lubyanka will do with that power.

            That is just one of the questions that is raised by a new 58-page study by Sergey Aleksashenko, Pavel Bayev, Aleksandr Kynyev, Nikolay Petrov and Kirill Rogov for the Liberal Mission portal concerning the expanding role of the security agencies in Russian economic life (liberal.ru/upload/files/krepost.pdf, summarized at ehorussia.com/new/node/18216).

            The number of cases against entrepreneurs launched by the FSB is been growing by 20 to 25 percent a year, the report says; and over the last seven years, it has thus more than doubled. Such cases form 25 percent of all FSB investigations, while terrorist investigations by the organs make up only four percent of its work.

            Since the FSB was able to secure the disbanding of the interior ministry’s “anti-corruption” section, the report continues, it has taken over all the most important “economic” crimes, including most prominently in recent months the case against the founder of the Baring Vostok investment fund.

            “The repressive strategies, as part of the general orientation of the political regime toward a policy of force in the first instance,” the report concludes, “has become a systemic factor of the current political regime. The growth of repressiveness in administration is the natural result, and the mechanism of the transition to a more authoritarian regime and its legitimation.”

            Further, the report says, this “actively working repressive regime not only supports itself but is the cause of organic changes in the law enforcement system as a whole which are conditions by the repressive inertia of recent years. The result of this repression is a breakdown in public trust to political elites as an institution, a decline in social capital and a growth of divisions of the elites.”

             Further and perhaps equally important, despite the fact that the Kremlin talks about supporting small and mid-sized firms, this drive by the FSB, which undoubtedly enjoys the support of the highest officials means that the authorities are not doing what they claim but exactly the opposite. The Russian economy and the Russian people are suffering as a result.