The headquarters for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) at Lubyanka Square in Moscow in the same building that used to be the HQ of the KGB.
Wikimedia Commons/NVO

There is some doubt about whether Vladimir Putin will remain President of the Russian Federation, effectively Russia’s dictator, for much longer. In a post on The American Interest website entitled The Siloviki Coup in Russia,  Ms. Karina Orlova informs us a very slow moving coup is proceeding in Russia. It is being conducted by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, often referred to by the Latin alphabet initials of its Russian name as the FSB. (using the Cyrillic alphabet the initials are ФСБ. Remember that when you are looking at photos of Russian police in action. If they are wearing flack jackets with that on the back, you know they are FSB, the main successors of the old KGB.

Orlova calls this slow coup the Siloviki coup ( silovik, siloviki plural, is the Russian word for a government official) because high ranking Russian officials are being taken out of their positions, sometimes by forced retirements and sometimes by accusations of criminal acts and imprisonments.     

Karina Orlova has written a large number of posts about this slow rolling coup, with the earliest on The American Interest website being Who Would Dethrone the Tsar?, dated February 28, 2016. Following that was The Siloviki Shuffle (May 30, 2016), Putin Cuts Legs Out From Under Medvedev (June 3, 2016), Russia’s Election Commission Gets Its Guns (June 7, 2016), On His Majesty’s Secret Services (June 28, 2016), One Man’s Land: Behind the FSB’s Attack on Russia’s Investigative Committee (July 20, 2016}, No Country for Old Men (July 27, 2016), The Siloviki Shuffle Goes Nationwide (August 2, 2016), Who Framed Dmitry Medvedev? (August 11, 2016), The Rise and Fall of Sergey Ivanov (August 12, 2016), Busted Anti-Corruption Official Cashed Out $120 Million (September 15, 2016), And Then There Were None? (September 17, 2016), and The Siloviki Coup in Russia (September 21, 2016). Americans should study these posts very closely, because the manner and speed of American progressives’ evolution suggest the manner of politics revealed might very well be our own way of politics soon.

The Characters in the Drama

One of the most important questions is whether or not Putin is directing this coup to consolidate his own power, or is the coup ultimately directed against him? You might think it a contradiction in terms that Putin would be directing a coup against his own government. However, if he is consolidating power, he has to sweep aside the remnants of incipient democratic institutions from the previous Yeltsin régime and get an iron-handed control over his siloviki. He also would have to get total control of the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia, the Russian legislature. The new constitution introduced by Boris Yeltsin replaced the old Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union with the State Duma. The head of the entire legislative branch is the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, who because of the parliamentary form of government is colloquially and informally called “the Prime Minister of Russia”. One very important detail is that the current occupier of that office is Dmitry Medvedev, who has often been considered as a part of Putin’s team, albeit somewhat more liberal than Putin in the classical sense. Right after Yeltsin’s regime, Putin was President and appointed Medvedev as his Prime Minister. However, because of constitutional term limits of two terms for the Russian President, Putin and Medvedev exchanged offices with Medvedev becoming President and Putin Prime Minister. During Medvedev’s administration, terms were extended from four to six years, After serving a single four-year term, Medvedev and Putin again traded offices in 2012 with Putin as President and Medvedev as Prime Minister. The theory was a President is only forbidden to serve more than two terms consecutively, and after a hiatus is again allowed to be President.

The alternative to Putin directing the coup is that someone is trying to wrest power away from Putin. There is some reason for believing this, since many of those who have been purged have been old allies of Putin. In Putin’s Purges I assumed Putin was the initiator of the purges, however many of the victims were old KGB colleagues and friends. Perhaps some old KGB general in the FSB figures he would be a much better leader against NATO than Putin. Perhaps someone like General Viktor Zolotov, who Orlova informs us is “the long-serving bodyguard of Vladimir Putin and the head of recently formed National Guard …”. Orlova herself thinks Zolotov is the main individual driving the purges, although there is not enough evidence to confirm it. If he is driving the purges, is he doing so under Putin’s direction or is he seeking power for himself? Or is some other ex-KGB officer in the FSB behind it all? We have yet to get definitive answers to these questions. Given the overall power of Putin, I still think he is the one in ultimate control and Zolotov is his instrument. Finally, as Karina Orlova says. “Viktor Zolotov has always been very close to Putin, and has direct access to the President.”

Whoever is the driving force behind the purges, there is absolutely no question that the FSB is the institution actually conducting them. They are the largest single inheritor from the old Soviet KGB, including hold-over ex-KGB officers, responsibilities, and as mentioned above, the old KGB headquarters building

on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Under Russian law its main responsibilities are within the country and include counterintelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, surveillance. In addition they have the responsibility to investigate some other types of grave crimes and violations of federal law, such as organized crime and drug smuggling. Russian law classifies the FSB as a military service just as much as the regular armed forces, although their commissioned officers do not usually wear military uniforms on duty. Think of the U.S. institutions of the FBI, the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service, the National Security Agency (NSA), U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the United States Coast Guard, all rolled into one, and you have the Russian FSB. The Wikipedia article on the FSB states the FSB has 66,200 uniformed troops, including about 4,000 special forces troops, as well as 160,000-200,000 border guards.

What Has Happened So Far

According to Karina Orlova in The Siloviki Coup in Russia, the slow-advancing coup began in February of 2014 when FSB officers raided offices at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. More specifically, they were after the Committee for Economic Security and Combating Corruption, and its head, General Denis Sugrobov. A few days later he resigned and in May he was arrested. The actual charge is immaterial since virtually all siloviki at  Sugrobov’s level are guilty of some kind of corruption to enrich both themselves and their organizations. Concerning a somewhat similar case starting in August of 2015 and ending in February of this year, I wrote in Putin’s Purges,

Unlike Hitler’s and Stalin’s purges, Putin’s pruning of the tree of power has generally been non-lethal. Those purged have generally retired, been fired, or at worst have been sent to prison. The first to be forced out was Vladimir Yakunin in August 2015, who retired as the CEO of the Russian Railways. Only ten days later, the head of the state hydropower company was fired, and later sent to ten years in prison for corruption. Then last February, Vladimir Dmitriev, the CEO of the big state bank, Vnesheconombank, was lucky enough to be only required to retire. Åslund informs us that  “Yakunin and Dmitriev were widely considered KGB generals.” Perhaps, you might ask, was Putin really only getting rid of the rotten wood? After all, is not crony-capitalism almost synonymous with corruption? Yet, Åslund disabuses us of this idea when he writes:

In each case, there were allegations about gross mismanagement and corruption, but that was hardly the cause of their ouster, because Putin is showering ever more state money on other, rather more corrupt cronies, including the major state contractors Arkady Rotenberg, Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk, and Nikolay Shamalov. Russia’s ruling elite is so pervasively corrupt that larceny cannot be a reason for dismissal, while it is a standard excuse.

So if Sugrobov was actually guilty of something other than corruption, what was it?  In The Siloviki Coup in Russia Orlov writes:

Officially, Sugrobov was responsible for investigating and prosecuting criminality in the Russia’s financial sector. In reality, his department was running various protection rackets and schemes involving businesses and banks (of which the obnalichka, or illegal cash-out, was a particularly profitable example).Another department with overlapping jurisdiction over—and overlapping interests in—the financial sector is the FSB’s Economic Security Service (SEB). General Sugrobov, in a bid to eliminate competitors, tried to set up an FSB officer by offering him a bribe, and was caught doing it. Soon after he had arrived at his post at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sugrobov reportedly ran afoul of Oleg Feoktistov, the deputy chief of the FSB’s Interior Security Department’s (USB), as well as the chief of the USB’s 6th Service, Ivan Tkachev. As RBC later reported, Tkachev and Feoktistov personally orchestrated the operation against Sugrobov. The USB was set up to oversee corruption and crimes inside the FSB itself, so de facto it had the authority to arrest any official or silovik in Russia. The 6th Service was the most powerful and secretive organ within the entire FSB.

Aha! Sugrobov’s true sin was trying to muscle-in on an FSB organization’s racket! What was particularly striking was the power of the FSB’s Interior Security Department (USB) and its 6th Service. The USB 6th Service is so secretive that almost nothing can be found about it on the internet. One gets the impression that it is something like Hitler’s Secret Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo).

Earlier this year the purges of the siloviki were reaching within the FSB itself, particularly within the FSB’s Economic Security Service (SEB). Orlova reports,

First to go was Viktor Voronin, the head of the SEB’s Directorate K, which oversees the banking sector. Voronin, one of the most powerful siloviki in Russia—powerful enough to be targeted by the Magnitsky Act—resigned after some of his subordinates were charged with bribery. Shortly after that, Voronin’s boss, Yury Yakovlev, the head of the SEB, retired. The USB was behind these hits as well. The fight culminated with the USB’s head, Sergey Korolev, being appointed to lead the SEB.

Karina Orlova has many other stories like this in all her articles for which links are provided at the beginning of this essay. However, she has one more tale of note from The Siloviki Coup in Russia that I must include. She writes:

The grand finale of the crusade being waged by the USB and its 6th Service is approaching. Russian media this week is abuzz with reports of a massive restructuring of Russia’s security services. Kommersant broke the story over the weekend, reporting that the FSB would be reconstituted as a new Ministry of State Security. This literal reincarnation of the KGB (KGB after all stands for komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, which means the Committee for State Security) will also incorporate the Foreign Intelligence Service (which at the time of the USSR was part of the KGB), and several units of the FSO. The FSO itself will remain the official security service of the Russian President. Apart from that, the newly-formed MGB [Ministry of State Security] will provide internal security for all the remaining law enforcement and military agencies.

That is, by providing “internal security” for all enforcers of the states diktats, the new MGB will ensure that all Russian law enforcement and military organizations will not allow resistance to the desires of the state.

At the end of The Siloviki Coup in Russia, Orlova speculates on just who might be driving these events, and her speculations center on General Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s head bodyguard. At the end of these speculations, she remarks,

Even if it’s not Viktor Zolotov, the person responsible for such a complete change of fortunes for the siloviki has to be someone other than Vladimir Putin. Why not Putin, especially since he is a silovik himself? For one thing, all the major moves appear to have originated from one source: the FSB’s security service, the USB—an agency several levels below that of the President himself. Given all the other possible options available to Putin to shake the system up, why resort to this particular one?

I am a bit skeptical of Orlova’s reasoning. Why would Putin want to keep the blame for all the upheaval away from himself? One very cogent reason would be to deflect people’s unhappiness about upheaval onto a lower agency, and be able to say he was just following the law and letting a lower agency do its duty.

In my post Is Russia Stable?, I wrote about the power struggle between Putin and Russia’s crony capitalists, the Russian oligarchs. By demonstrating the power and will to imprison one of the Russian oligarchs’ own, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and then take all his wealth away by nationalizing his oil company Yukos, Putin crushed the Russian oligarchs’ will to oppose him. After that to consolidate his power, Putin had to make sure the siloviki could not oppose him. I suspect that is what the purges, or the siloviki coup as Karina Orlova has described it, was all about.

Why the Coup Is Important to Us

What all this shows us is that all hope Russia would evolve in the near future to a democracy is totally crushed, and the evil of the Soviet Union has been revived in modern day Russia. Worse, it is more dangerous because that nation now moves to the will of a single man, Vladimir Putin. In the post Putin not threatened by a coup now but Russia is by its dependence on him, Kyiv analyst says, the author Paul Goble quotes the views of Kiev (or kyiv) analyst Taras Berezovets that there is no likelihood  of a coup overthrowing Putin, but that there is a very real threat to Russia and its elites because of their subjugation to Putin’s will. Goble writes:

After 1953, the top leadership of the Soviet Union operated largely by collective decision making and thus blocked things from going too far in any direction, a very different situation than in Russia now where unlike the CPSU, the ruling party “most often simply fulfills the function of collecting corrupt rents.”

According to Berezovets, “Putin has created a situation in Russia similar to that which existed in Stalin’s time,” one in which the system is so dependent on the supreme leader that his possible ouster leads many to fear for their futures and whose actual departure is likely to be accompanied as Stalin’s was by suicides and purges.

However, there is one more thing that is very different from Stalin’s times. Putin has a lot of nuclear weapons loaded on ICBMs, and a will to rebuild the Soviet empire.

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