The New Nobility of the KGB (12 page)
Read The New Nobility of the KGB Online
Authors: Andrei Soldatov
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #International Relations, #Security (National & International), #Intelligence & Espionage, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Social Classes
The decree was not fully executed until December 1999, although the reason for the delay has never been revealed.
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The FSB openly took over Dynamo in 2000, when the FSB deputy director, Pronichev, a muscular general popular in the ranks because of his experience in special operations, was appointed chairman of Dynamo’s national association. Sergei Stepashin, who had served as head of the FSB in 1994-1995 and as prime minister briefly in 1999, was named chairman of the club’s board of trustees. The links were reinforced by appointments at the regional level. For example, Victor Zakharov, the chief of the Moscow department of the FSB, headed Moscow city’s Dynamo organization.
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The FSB openly took over Dynamo in 2000, when the FSB deputy director, Pronichev, a muscular general popular in the ranks because of his experience in special operations, was appointed chairman of Dynamo’s national association. Sergei Stepashin, who had served as head of the FSB in 1994-1995 and as prime minister briefly in 1999, was named chairman of the club’s board of trustees. The links were reinforced by appointments at the regional level. For example, Victor Zakharov, the chief of the Moscow department of the FSB, headed Moscow city’s Dynamo organization.
With the FSB as its patron, Dynamo, which for a decade had suffered from a shortage of cash, saw its financial problems disappear. In 2001 the club signed a sponsorship deal with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos, then the country’s largest oil company. When Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and Yukos began to sink under the weight of official pressure, Dynamo turned to another investor, signing a new sponsorship contract in 2004 with Monaco-based Russian businessman Alexei Fedorychev, head of the sulfur supplier Fedcominvest. Fedorychev lost no time in pumping an estimated $200 million into the club. Dynamo’s next sponsor, under a pact signed in February 2008, was Metalloinvest, owned by steel magnate Alisher Usmanov, a Dynamo fan for many years. In April 2009 the Russian state bank Vneshtorgbank announced that it had become Dynamo’s general sponsor, replacing Metalloinvest, to help the financially strapped club repay a loan to the bank for construction of a new stadium.
Sponsors are critical to the success of sports clubs in Russia, which draw less revenue from ticket sales. According to Dynamo, in 2009 outside sponsors were expected to provide 1 billion out of a budget of 1.8 billion rubles.
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To sports clubs, having the FSB’s protection means an end to their funding problems, open doors to governors in the regions, and even occasional access to the Kremlin. That is much better than the sports clubs’ situation in the 1990s, when criminal authorities offered clubs their money and friendship in exchange for an improved public image.
More prestige than business, sport became an easy and convenient way for FSB generals to establish unofficial contacts with important people. The national volleyball federation was long controlled by FSB generals, including Patrushev after 2004. The next seat at the federation’s leadership table, after Patrushev, was occupied by Oleg Dobrodeev, a general director of the All Russia State Television and Radio Company, who was elected vice president. In October 2009, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev ordered state security officials to leave their posts as heads of sport federations, saying the sports groups should be led by professionals. Most of the government officials complied. Officially the FSB also complied, but in fact the agency managed to maintain control. On November 18, 2009, Patrushev retired as president of the federation but was immediately elected chairman of its advisory council, while two FSB generals retained their federation positions.
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While Dynamo was carefully passed from hand to hand among tycoons willing to support the FSB-backed club, former state security officers were placed in crucial posts in other sports organizations. In 2003, Vladimir Plushev was appointed main trainer of the Russian national hockey team; he was also a lieutenant colonel in the counterterrorism section of the KGB. In 2004, another counterterrorism expert, Mikhail Golovatov, was named chairman of the Russian ski federation. In the past Golovatov had been a member of the national ski team—and in the early 1990s, Golovatov headed the KGB special operations unit Alpha.
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In October 2006 colonel Nikolai Malikov, director of the central sports club of the FSB Border Guards service, was chosen to become the main trainer of the Russian national pig team by the Sport Pig Federation, which claims more than a hundred member organizations. Since 2005 the Sport Pig Federation has been hosting Pig Olympics in Moscow, which were attended in 2008 by Vladimir Putin. Piglets competed in three events: pig racing, pig swimming, and “pigball.”
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“We got seventeen applications from different countries,” explained Boris Bukalov, the president of the federation, “but at a meeting with candidates, our compatriot [Malikov] won their hearts unconditionally, and the commission could not oppose such a choice. Thus the executive committee has unanimously approved as the deserved trainer of Russia, the doctor of pedagogical sciences Nikolai Malikov.”
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“We got seventeen applications from different countries,” explained Boris Bukalov, the president of the federation, “but at a meeting with candidates, our compatriot [Malikov] won their hearts unconditionally, and the commission could not oppose such a choice. Thus the executive committee has unanimously approved as the deserved trainer of Russia, the doctor of pedagogical sciences Nikolai Malikov.”
By meeting in the sports arena, security service officers and influential businessmen, thinkers, and media people maintain close ties in a seemingly innocuous environment.
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THE RENAISSANCE OF YURI ANDROPOV
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S PART OF Putin’s strategic campaign to bolster the security services’ prestige in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s fall, he carefully devised an embellished narrative of Yuri Andropov, depicting the ruthless KGB head as a competent, effective leader, with an excellent understanding of national and global economics. While leading the FSB into a new era of service—one in which counterterrorism weighed heavily—Putin chose to praise a leader of the old guard, and a leader with a brutal legacy.
S PART OF Putin’s strategic campaign to bolster the security services’ prestige in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s fall, he carefully devised an embellished narrative of Yuri Andropov, depicting the ruthless KGB head as a competent, effective leader, with an excellent understanding of national and global economics. While leading the FSB into a new era of service—one in which counterterrorism weighed heavily—Putin chose to praise a leader of the old guard, and a leader with a brutal legacy.
After the failed coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, large crowds outside the KGB’s Moscow headquarters toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzinsky, the first head of the Soviet secret police after the Bolshevik Revolution. On one corner of the building was a plaque honoring Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving head of the Soviet secret police and general secretary before his death in 1984. As crowds swarmed over the Dzerzinsky statue, KGB officers, in the dark of the night, quietly removed the Andropov plaque to prevent its destruction.
In the summer of 1999, when Putin was still head of the FSB, the decision was made to restore Andropov’s plaque on the building. On December 20, 1999, Putin attended the ceremony rein-stalling the plaque, in his new role as prime minister.
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The occasion marked the start of an official campaign to promote Andropov’s legacy as proof that the security services could lead Russia out of its troubles. The aim was to use his persona to exemplify the state security approach to solving the problems of the state—political as well as social and economic. At the same time, the image of a ruthless champion of discipline and control appealed to a security service eager to define themselves after a decade of uncertainty.
The facts about Andropov were far from laudable. To mask the less savory details of his life, the FSB presented him as a modest, highly intellectual ascetic—a poet who also had a grasp of economics, and a man who worked hard to fight corruption.
In truth, Andropov was a brutal chief of the Soviet secret police for nineteen years. His term as general secretary lasted a scant fifteen months—hardly enough time to allow him to pursue lasting change.
Andropov put himself on the map in 1954 when he was sent as the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, a position he maintained during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. According to the British historian of intelligence services Christopher Andrew, the horrific reaction of the Hungarian resistance left a deep impression on Andropov. He had “watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov was haunted by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple.”
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In 1967 Andropov was appointed head of the KGB. Obsessed with the dissident movement, two months after his appointment he created the notorious Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which was responsible for political investigations.
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In his view, dissidents “violate the law, they supply the West with libelous information, they spread false rumors, and they try to organize various anti-Soviet sorties. These renegades have no foothold and can have none within our country.”
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In his view, dissidents “violate the law, they supply the West with libelous information, they spread false rumors, and they try to organize various anti-Soviet sorties. These renegades have no foothold and can have none within our country.”
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As head of the KGB, Andropov expanded the policy of confining dissidents to psychiatric institutions. Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the founders of the dissident movement, was sent to a psychiatric clinic in 1963 for two years for photocopying anti-Soviet literature (an illegal act), namely
The New Class
by Milovan Djilas. Institutionalization was not limited to those guilty of political opposition. Mikhail Shemyakin, a famous Russian sculptor, was subjected to forced psychiatric treatment to “cure” him of views that did not conform to Soviet norms. Bukovsky and Shemyakin were eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 and 1971, respectively.
The New Class
by Milovan Djilas. Institutionalization was not limited to those guilty of political opposition. Mikhail Shemyakin, a famous Russian sculptor, was subjected to forced psychiatric treatment to “cure” him of views that did not conform to Soviet norms. Bukovsky and Shemyakin were eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 and 1971, respectively.
As modern security service leaders constructed their image, they studiously avoided Andropov’s infamous past. Instead, they borrowed a page from Andropov’s own propaganda efforts. Andropov had engaged in a celebratory campaign for Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Soviet state security, by sidestepping the details of Dzerzhinsky’s past and highlighting his personal qualities.
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As Andropov portrayed him, Dzerzhinsky was an extremely shy, ascetic man who slept on a narrow iron bed and ate only the most meager rations of food.
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As Andropov portrayed him, Dzerzhinsky was an extremely shy, ascetic man who slept on a narrow iron bed and ate only the most meager rations of food.
The mythmaking about Andropov borrowed the same approach. When Russia marked the ninetieth anniversary of Andropov’s birth in June 2004, celebrations included renaming a school after him, unveiling a ten-foot-tall Andropov statue, and several new scholarships in his name for students wanting to train as intelligence officers. In Andropov’s home village of Nagutskaya, celebratory events were attended by Alexander Zhdankov, the deputy head of the FSB, and several local dignitaries.
In the same year, several laudatory books were published as part of the FSB’s Andropov campaign, with titles such as
Unknown Andropov
,
Team of Andropov
,
Yuri Andropov: Unknown About Known
, and
Andropov
. Nikolai Patrushev, then director of the FSB, wrote a major article in the state-owned newspaper
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
titled “The Mystery of Andropov,” in which he stated that the officers of the FSB tend “to keep the best professional, patriotic values, formed by this uncommon person, the professional politician-intellectual who created a structure appropriate to the needs of the [times of Andropov].”
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Unknown Andropov
,
Team of Andropov
,
Yuri Andropov: Unknown About Known
, and
Andropov
. Nikolai Patrushev, then director of the FSB, wrote a major article in the state-owned newspaper
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
titled “The Mystery of Andropov,” in which he stated that the officers of the FSB tend “to keep the best professional, patriotic values, formed by this uncommon person, the professional politician-intellectual who created a structure appropriate to the needs of the [times of Andropov].”
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In addition to his strong prowess as a leader, Andropov was celebrated as a great economic mind in an effort to recast the state security services as historically involved in the country’s economic policy. In the early 2000s, an exhibition at the FSB museum was changed so that statements by Andropov’s predecessor Dzerzhinsky about economics and fighting bureaucracy were hung on a wall. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov proposed in 2002 to restore the monument to Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanka Square: “Dzerzhinsky is primarily associated with the solution of the problems of vagrancy, restoration of the railroads, and economic recovery. The NKVD and KGB were after Dzerzhinsky.”
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Andropov became the second brilliant economist of the system. The story was widely disseminated that, after the long years of stagnation under Brezhnev, Andropov intended to embark on a program of economic reforms and was in fact the real initiator of perestroika, the restructuring later carried out by Gorbachev.
As the story went, it was only Andropov’s death in 1984 that prevented his plans from being realized. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Elite Studies, said in a 2007 interview: “Andropov thought that the Communist Party had to keep power in its hands and to conduct an economic liberalization. This was the path China followed. For people in the security services, China is the ideal model. They see this as the correct course. They think that Yeltsin went along the wrong path, as did Gorbachev.”
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TAKING THE MYTHMAKING to an even grander level, a top FSB official declared that the security services had created a whole pantheon of great managers. In a 2001 interview, Vladimir Shults, then the first deputy director of the FSB, said this band of officials included Felix Dzerzhinsky, Yuri Andropov, Sergei Stepashin (director of the FSB in 1994-1995 and prime minister in 1999), Vladimir Putin, and Nikolai Patrushev (by then director of the FSB).
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From the point of view of the FSB, it was important to show the public that the country needed the economic know-how of the security services, in order to justify their rise into high-level positions in government and business. These management positions demand knowledge that isn’t taught in the FSB Academy. The generals and colonels have to have an explanation—for themselves as well as for society—of why they are qualified for work not in their background.
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Andropov’s legacy also furthered the idea promulgated by the FSB that the country’s difficulties were caused by external enemies rather than internal problems. One of the key people involved in the Andropov campaign was Oleg Khlobustov, an FSB colonel, lecturer, and senior research fellow at the FSB Academy, and the author of the book
The Unknown Andropov
. In his lecture “The Phenomenon of Andropov,” delivered at Lubyanka in December 2004, he quoted Andropov as saying: “Nowadays the source of threats to the security of the USSR lies outside. From the outside the class enemy tries to transfer subversive activities onto our territory, to provoke ideological diversions.”
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The Unknown Andropov
. In his lecture “The Phenomenon of Andropov,” delivered at Lubyanka in December 2004, he quoted Andropov as saying: “Nowadays the source of threats to the security of the USSR lies outside. From the outside the class enemy tries to transfer subversive activities onto our territory, to provoke ideological diversions.”
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