The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (14 page)

For the domestic corps, these problems pushed officers into the private sphere, with many retaining their connections to the power structures, now in the service of business. The Soviet era concept of active reserve – a quasi-legal scheme by which KGB officers would work for another organization while retaining their title and salary with the KGB – returned, with a new, powerful incentive to use one’s FSB connections for private gain rather than necessarily serving the FSB.
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Virtually practicing corporate espionage, these officers started insisting on “double-dipping” at both places of work. As one officer described to security expert Andrei Soldatov, “I was forced to do my official job and then the job for the FSB, having meetings with agents at night, so why am I refused a second salary?”
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While the foreign intelligence wing of the former KGB was not nearly as debilitated by corruption as the domestic corps, its officers were plagued by the same questions. The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had to grapple with a new understanding of the very concept of friend and foe as it built a new
modus operandi
after the Cold War was over.

Oleg Nechiporenko, a KGB general who served under legal cover in Mexico during the 1970s, described a dangerous dissonance where the goals of the officers and the goals of the particular government they were serving were beginning to diverge.

“When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, … the country entered a new dimension. The head of intelligence said then, ‘we have no friends and enemies, we have national interests,’” he said. But those national interests, as he and other former spies have pointed out, were not clearly defined.

“I don’t know. I have my own views about the role of the enemy, the role of the friend and the role of the victim. If there is an army, shouldn’t they have enemies to fight, rather than ‘interests?’ These roles are integral to any conflict. An army imagines a foe, they imagine their motherland in the role of a potential victim, and they imagine themselves as protectors of that victim. Those who have been delegated by society with the legitimate right to wield force – and those are all power structures of the executive government in any society – don’t they need those roles to be motivated?”

When I posed the same question of ideology to Gennady Yevstafiev, a retired SVR general who followed the same career
ladder once ascended by Vladimir Putin, serving in the KGB’s notorious First Main Directorate (PGU) as an intelligence officer under legal cover, he described a lacuna that he went to great lengths to fill.

“Many people asked themselves this question. We weren’t the first to be faced with it. When I was faced with this question, I started reading, looking for an answer,” he explained. Having been attracted to the service by its aura of an intellectual elite, Yevstafiyev had naturally turned to historic literature, and found the motto of the 17th century French statesman, Jean-Baptiste Colbert:
Pro rege saepe, pro patria semper
. “‘For king – often, for country – always.’ It’s a brilliant formula, and it often helped me reconcile myself to what was happening in the country.”

If the motto presumed that sometimes the interests of the king differed from the interests of the country, did Yevstafiyev always find that he could distinguish between the two?

He laughed in response. “It’s completely obvious! Didn’t you see that the interests of [Boris] Yeltsin and the country were diametrically opposed?”

For educated, principled officers like Yevstafiyev and Nechiporenko, with careers spanning nearly half a century and decades served abroad, it was possible to find an inner justification for their service that was only moderately at odds with the interests of their government, if it diverged at all.

But for a vast majority of servicemen in the domestic corps, who joined the force for a mix of “ideological and material” stimuli, as Yevstafiyev put it, the lack of a clear-cut set of instructions or a mission that they could follow to their death revived an inherently feudal network of organization based on an explosive, often contradictory mix of loyalty and profit.

“Everyone turns into a vassal,” Kirill Kabanov told me of the state of his former colleagues towards the end of the 1990s. “Because there were no new rules of the game, and to this day they don’t exist.”

Kabanov grasped the importance that divine right had for such a chaotic, archaic system.

“The difference is that in the classical system the chief feudal lord is anointed by God,” Kabanov said. “And by serving him you serve God.”

There is no shortage of divine right delusions among Russia’s security structures. A senior Russian official once described Viktor Cherkesov, the one-time head of Putin’s drug-fighting agency and an offshoot of the KGB, as being convinced that the security forces were “like the masons, given tasks by God.” During the height of his influence Cherkesov, who went on to lose Putin’s favour after blowing the whistle on a pre-election clan war within the forces in 2007, had said that the
siloviki
, the term referring to security personnel and literally connoting “those of force,” were viewed as “demigods… doing something that will either save Russia or badly damage it.”
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For Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB officer who became a prominent parliamentarian, the services also constituted something of a “Masonic” brotherhood.
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These divine allusions predate the ideological zeal of the Soviet era. A regiment of the White Army wore black tunics and called itself a “brotherhood of monastic knights,”
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while Putin’s 2006 decree to change the security services’ uniform from green to black in a bid to delineate it from the military was interpreted as historically symbolic.

There was another secret society that wore black monk’s tunics in the more brutal recesses of Russia’s history; a regiment instructed to don pauper’s rags to cover gold-embroidered brocades and mink furs when they rode out on black horses to slaughter unrepentant boyars and confiscate their property; a brotherhood that forswore breaking bread with outsiders and jealously served a sovereign who believed himself to be Christ come back to lead the true chosen people to salvation.

Ivan the Terrible instigated the
oprichnina
in 1565, when he divided Muscovy into the lands of the sovereign (the
oprichnina
) and the lands of the aristocracy (the
zemshchina
), singling himself out not only as the head of the church but as a living god. The
oprichnina
essentially constituted a holy land – boyars who had lived on it were forcefully relocated and given new lands in the
zemshchina
. Noblemen who were suspected of treason had their property confiscated – as well as their lives, and, in Ivan’s understanding, their very souls. The separation of lands, in other words, launched
a seven-year reign of terror that would only be matched by Joseph Stalin’s mass purges in the 1930s.

Historians are still divided over whether the
oprichnina
was an act of policy that was taken too far or merely the product of Ivan’s deranged mind. But the chief function of the secret police – also called the
oprichnina
– was not policing the people or protecting the sovereign but rather confiscating on behalf of the sovereign as part of a holy crusade. Thus Russia’s first secret police emerges both as a religious phenomenon and an economic one. A large part of what happened between 1565 and 1572 was, essentially, a vast redistribution of property as Ivan IV, who had just proclaimed himself the first Tsar of Russia, sought to consolidate the elites.

The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 amounted to a turning point for the way that Russian rulers would see their autocracy for the next several centuries. Muscovy, which had nominally considered the Byzantine emperor its suzerain, would go beyond merely adopting the Byzantine model to make its Tsar the head of the Orthodox Church; its sacralisation of the monarch would mean that he was not just god-like – he was “understood to be a supernatural being.”
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The very ceremony of anointment, meanwhile, likened the Russian monarch to Christ himself.
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This circumstance was well noted by foreign travellers during the period, who marvelled at the Russians treating their Tsar “as a higher god.”
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When applied by Ivan the Terrible, the entire mystical explanation for his
oprichnina
actually served to justify and legitimize another dimension: property ownership not just by the landed aristocracy, but by those deemed worthy of it by the sovereign. The elaborate praying rituals, the black rags cast over tunics embroidered in gold and fur, the monastic order, all masked a very simple process: Ivan was confiscating land and property from the old nobles, the boyars, and creating a new nobility of
oprichniki
– his loyal soldiers, in the service of a demigod. Their closeness to this God-anointed sovereign gave them the right to confiscate, elevating their pillage to the level of a holy crusade.

When Kirill Kabanov was booted out of the FSB in 1998, he suffered a brief period of anxiety over losing his badge, that coveted symbol that separated officers into a higher caste which was immune to the brutality of the government because it was the government itself. Kabanov got over the shock relatively quickly because he soon joined forces with Georgy Satarov, a political expert and a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin, and created the National Anti-Corruption Committee.

But for his former colleagues, building their careers years before Putin would come to power, it was already clear that the lure of newly-available luxury goods and properties – be they real estate or businesses – enhanced the existing, Soviet-era mystique of their badge.

“I got over it rather quickly,” Kabanov said of the days after he quit the FSB – and in no small part he owed it to the success of his NGO. “[But] our officers… became like drug addicts to power. It is part of the psychology. If you don’t represent the law, then anyone who does can walk all over you. And people are afraid to be in that category where people can walk all over you.”

By the time Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, returned to the organization as its director in 1998, the system was already firmly in place. When he became Russian president in 2000, he integrated himself into the quasi- feudal relationships that were already forming between business and power, and tried to make the best of them.

“Putin is part of this system,” Kabanov said. “Did he have a choice to change it?”

Putin’s mere appearance at the apex of the government, his KGB background, the familiar, cold, expressionless mask worn by a fellow member of the elite, served to legitimize a pattern of behaviour that had already re-emerged and was firmly entrenched.

Thousands of officers disenfranchised during the Yeltsin era breathed a sigh of relief when, by his mere appearance, they seemed to be given unspoken permission to find ways to enrich themselves to compensate for what the state salaries lacked. And they were heartened by this unspoken permission. Kabanov watched as many of his former colleagues started capitalizing on the virtually
unlimited powers that their status acquired with the appearance of new property. He saw their lifestyles transformed as they bragged about their expensive watches, their new Mercedes SUVs, the furs that they started wearing in winter, and the exclusive nightclubs they talked of visiting the night before.

They started treating their jobs as a sort of divine right, a mandate to extort first hundreds of thousands, then millions of dollars from opponents who crossed their interests. “It was a life of glamour,” Kabanov said.

As early as 2003, he recalled meeting a banker who wore a sword and shield in white and yellow gold on the lapel of his jacket. “‘What are you doing walking around like that,’ I ask him. ‘Don’t you understand,’ he says, ‘it’s the symbol of the new nobility! Vladimir Vladimirovich is creating a new nobility!’”
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These attitudes didn’t limit themselves to the FSB – they corresponded with lower-tier bribery in other law enforcement agencies and even civilian bodies like the Tax Inspectorate. But because the practice itself was not new, the officials involved seemed to be searching for a justification for a way of life that they were not able to change. The idea of belonging to a government that no longer looked like the disgrace it had become during the Yeltsin period offered them that justification.

But many seemed to adopt the lifestyle out of a sense of inertia.

Kabanov described another acquaintance, a colonel in the Investigative Committee of the Interior Ministry (one of two Investigative Committees with functions similar to those of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation), who took to smoking £50 cigars (despite an official salary of less than £700 a month). He had a special golden knife to clip the cigars – and he also bought himself a coat lined with jaguar fur. When Kabanov confronted him about his lifestyle, he got an honest response: “I want to live a little,” the colonel said. “What if they arrest me tomorrow?”

Vladimir Putin, himself born of the KGB, appeared to be the perfect candidate for someone these people could trust, obey and manipulate all at once. Citing Gennady Gudkov, journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser described Putin as presiding over a highly cohesive “brotherhood” that believed it had a “monopoly on upholding the integrity of the Russian state.”
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The reality, however, has proven far more complex.

Led by Putin, the rise of the
siloviki
by 2000 may indeed have had as its objective the reining in of a corrupt bureaucracy, as it did under Putin’s mentor, Soviet KGB head Yuri Andropov. Putin’s pledge to establish a “dictatorship of the law” seemed to herald nothing short of a restoration of the kind of “law and order” widely associated with the KGB. In fact, not only was there a yearning for a perceived “rigid law and order of the past”
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among the general populace, the business elite also proved eager to embrace former security men for their efficiency, their connections, and their sense of order.