The interrelationship of Russia's internal security services with
the various elements of major crime is so complicated that
even the several services themselves have been unable -- or
unwilling -- to kept track of the extent. Simply put, Russian law
enforcement is now and has been for many years -- mobbed up!
The history of this phenomenon goes back to the days of the
Czars, but found a special role during the despotic days of
Joseph Stalin. During that time the relatively small club of
Communist Party members was supplied with hard-to-get foreign
goods and choice food products with the assistance of the
government-manipulated traditional criminal class. These
discriminatory practices increased exponentially in the years
afterward, most particularly during the Khrushchev-Brezhnev
years.
Yuri Andropov, former KGB chief, brought a degree of organization
into the security service/organized crime working relationship
when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party and
leader of the USSR. Gorbachev ran into serious political trouble
when he tried to rein in what had become an out-of-control
system. When the Soviet Union fell, the strongest economic
organizations in the nation were those with crime connections.
The heads of these favored enterprises soon became known as
"oligarchs" and personal and corporate protection was sought from
and supplied by the newly reconstructed internal security
services such as the FSB and the Interior Ministry's elite
surveillance division (OPU). Some analysts have set the figure of
40% as the proportion of former members of the KGB, 2nd Chief
Directorate (internal security service), who found such
employment in the public sector during the 1990s.
The scope of this employment has run the gamut from private
protection to utilization of their former agent networks to
develop smuggling and other illegal activities involving both
civilian and military goods. The result has been that after Putin
came to power the official Russian internal security service, the
FSB, now spent a great deal of its effort in countering criminal
activity in which former officers and agents were engaged.
The additional problem with this new paradigm is that the FSB
continues to seek to use for other covert purposes many of its
ex-agents and officers. Thus when a sophisticated operation such
as the assassination of former KGB intelligence officer Alexander
Litvinenko in London involves a former KGB 9th Department
(Protection Service) officer, Andrei Lugovoi, it is not the rogue
ex-officer class that is looked at by the British MI5 and Special
Branch. The extremely covert elements still officially within the
FSB are the target.
A recent trial of three Chechnyan men exonerated them for the
murder of the famous Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.
Russian prosecutors had to battle against confused testimony of
their own witnesses as well as an FSB that steadfastly avoided
providing evidential assistance. In the end the prosecution
was ineffective; it was based for the most part on contested
testimony of a former OPU colonel, himself formerly charged as an
accomplice, and now in hiding in a witness protection program.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Russian domestic security
service -- that may actually lap over to the external
intelligence service as well -- is the fact that on-duty security
officers have regularly "moonlighted" for private commercial
enterprises. Sometimes these private companies are involved in
illegal activity and the security personnel give them a form of
cover.
There is a philosophy behind all this illegitimate activity and
divided loyalty. With the allegiance to and protection from Party
membership gone, the individual bureau chiefs in state agencies
like the FSB in effect head profit centers. Officers in a given
department thus owe their allegiance to their nachalnik
(governor). This superior in turn provides his officers with
administrative and financial protection. In Russian this is
referred to as krysha (roof). Any officer with a
powerful "roof" is thus to be respected and even feared.
A young officer rising through the ranks of the Russian security
service usually doesn't get his job in the first place without
some form of connection. This is then developed as he or she
moves up the line. Promotions actually depend on further
development of this divided form of loyalty and effective
servitude. Eventually the successful security officer develops
his own cadre.
This then is the dirty not-so-little secret of the Russian
security service: The domestic security apparat of Russia is a
private business cooperative and not the state agency of
"untouchables" that is required to be the "sword and shield" of
the nation. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the original Chekist, must be
spinning in his grave.
topics:
Russia, Organized Crime, KGB
