End of project

Since last fall, the Kremlin has made many sharp, often chaotic movements designed, apparently, to mobilize the state apparatus and regional elites before the elections. A variety of methods have been put into use - from targeted repression to the resignation of the president’s old friends, and the fact that instead of mobilization, officials fell into paralysis, fearing for their careers in the conditions of new rules of life, not explicitly written down by anyone, does not stop anyone - the flywheel continues to spin up .

For the first months of this new order, it seemed that Putin would stick to the old rules when it came to the intelligence services. These rules, in force since the mid-2000s, boiled down to the fact that when the Kremlin became disillusioned with the effectiveness of existing security forces in countering political threats, new ones were created - this is how the Investigative Committee arose at one time, then the “E Centers” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs appeared, then the status of the Cossack formations grew to official status, and finally the National Guard was created.

However, several months ago it became clear that this time the mechanism had changed. Distinguished by rare passivity during the protests of 2011-2012. The Federal Security Service suddenly received several new deputies (first, in April 2015, the counterintelligence headquarters of the special service was headed by Vladislav Menshchikov, the former head of the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President, and in December Igor Sirotkin, who previously oversaw economic security in St. Petersburg, became deputy director), intensified the fight against spies and quickly reached the level of spy mania of the late 90s - early 2000s. Already this year, the special service was sent to carry out targeted repressions in the state apparatus. This was unusual, because according to the previous model, the latter should have been dealt with by newcomers - this is what explained the rumors about the possible use of the National Guard as modern guardsmen (this did not happen, and was not planned - the new structure did not receive the right to conduct operational-search activities).

Along with the increase in activity, the FSB quietly lost a function acquired during Putin’s first presidential term - Lubyanka stopped supplying personnel for the state apparatus, and FSB appointees were replaced by officers from another intelligence service, the Federal Security Service - people personally known to the president. At the same time, Vladimir Yakunin, the only person from the special services who claimed to be the developer of the national idea, lost all significance.

Thus, Putin abandoned the scheme that he had been trying to implement since the early 2000s, when he began to create a “new nobility” from the FSB - both a supplier of personnel and a brain trust for creating a new ideology for the country.

The concept of the “new nobility” announced by Nikolai Patrushev, despite all the propaganda tinsel with the return of Andropov’s memorial plaque to the Lubyanka building and promises to carefully preserve the traditions of the KGB, had nothing in common with the Soviet scheme of interaction between the authorities and the special services. Party officials remembered Stalin’s repressions too well, so they deprived the KGB of any opportunity to directly influence decision-making in the country - the State Security Committee did not have the right to engage in analytics (the first analytical department of the KGB was created in 1989), and the state security bodies themselves were under strict party control control. The regulations on the State Security Committee, approved in 1959, stated: “Party organizations... ensure the development of business criticism and self-criticism. Party organizations and every communist have the right... to report shortcomings in the work of state security agencies to the relevant party bodies.” In addition, all key appointments within the special services were approved by the Administrative Department of the Central Committee. The Putin-style FSB not only received a full-fledged analytical apparatus (in the 1990s it was headed by Sergei Ivanov, who also symbolically lost his position as head of the presidential administration as part of the recent reshuffle), but also got rid of any trace of external control, enjoying the status of untouchables.

The “new nobility” was thus a post-modern invention of Putin, who had little understanding of how the Soviet state worked, but who sincerely believed in the mythology of the “best people in the country”, which was created through films and books under the control of Yuri Andropov in the late 70s - early 80s.

It took Putin 16 years to become disillusioned with this model. Not knowing any other, he, apparently, decided to return to the Soviet experience, when the intelligence service was the “advanced detachment of the party” - that is, an effective, but absolutely controlled tool for controlling society in the hands of the country’s political leadership.

The next logical step should be the revival of the full functionality of the KGB. The plan published in Kommersant looks exactly like the implementation of this step - the merger of the SVR, the FSO and the FSB, the strengthening of the investigative apparatus, and finally the return of the term “state security”.

This reform is unlikely to lead to an increase in the efficiency of the intelligence service - the merger of departments will not automatically lead to either improved coordination between departments or an increase in the quality of information exchange - the main bottlenecks for modern intelligence services around the world. Moreover, some ideas directly contradict the interests of the FSB itself - Lubyanka has long had its own intelligence service, which over the years has developed its own corporate culture, and a merger with the SVR is unlikely to be painless for the agency, and the bureaucratic chaos that will inevitably follow is likely to paralyze the intelligence service , placing it in a state exactly opposite to what the Kremlin demands from the state apparatus today.

But no one, apparently, today is going to create modern intelligence services that can respond to real, pressing challenges.

The model of the Soviet state security agencies, apparently, has been accepted as the most adequate to the new concept of interaction between the Kremlin and society, which is being built in the country after the annexation of Crimea. Replacing the term “Russian security” with “state security” will mean exactly what this term meant in Soviet times – ensuring the security of the regime, and not the country and the citizens living in it.

Photo: Alexey Druzhinin / TASS