Translated material
Blue ears of the Kremlin
Alexander Golts
Governance of the state is too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals and even colonels of the special services
Governance of the state is too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals and even colonels of the special services
Secretary of the Security Council Sergei Ivanov likes to show off his KGB uniform on special occasions. He thinks like a Chekist all the time. (Photo: Leonid Yagutin )
The authorities in Russia avoid halftones. Fifteen years ago she was red, but now she has turned decidedly blue. The bright blue buttonholes of a state security officer once adorned the lieutenant colonel uniform of the head of state, Vladimir Putin. The same ones are worn by Lieutenant General Sergei Ivanov, Secretary of the Security Council, and two generals, Viktor Cherkesov and Georgy Poltavchenko, recently appointed presidential representatives in the federal districts. At first glance, there is nothing terrible about this. After all, why are former KGB officers any worse than secretaries of city and regional committees of the CPSU, of whom there are a dime a dozen in both the Federation Council and the State Duma?
However, three months of the rule of Vladimir Putin, who is increasingly relying on former colleagues from the Lubyanka, have shown worse. For the simple reason that they are organically incapable of governing the country in conditions where society closely monitors their actions. Former party functionaries have already become accustomed to governing in conditions where there is political opposition and a free press.
Bright past
The trouble is not even that our main officials have a KGB past, but that they are proud of it. With what enthusiasm the current president talks about the amazing cunning that the KGB of his youth allegedly possessed. “Many things,” he told the journalists who wrote the book “First Person. Conversations with Vladimir Putin,” which they began to allow themselves from the beginning of the 90s, were then absolutely impossible. They acted as if from around the corner so that their ears would not stick out, God forbid.” Viktor Cherkesov, who was still in charge of dissident cases in Leningrad in the late 1980s, believes that he has nothing to reproach himself with: “The fact that these cases ended in guilty verdicts, in my opinion, confirms that the actions of the detectives and investigators turned out to be lawful ". Sergei Ivanov recently stated that the KGB hired the best of the best: the requirements for candidates took up as many as twenty typewritten pages. And already the foam from this cream ended up in reconnaissance. There could be no talk of any kind of cronyism. Meanwhile, in the 80s, there was a sad joke among intelligence officers: in foreign residencies under diplomatic cover there were DORs (children of responsible employees), ZHORs (wives of responsible employees), ENTs (mistresses of responsible employees), as well as SUKs (accidentally surviving personnel). Even the president is less enthusiastic than the Secretary of the Security Council, and admits that the intelligence service was full of thieves.
Salt of the earth
When you hear this from very old people who cannot admit to themselves that they have served all their lives in an organization that has stained itself with numerous crimes, this can still be understood. However, we are dealing with relatively young, obviously intelligent people - at least they should have learned to evaluate facts soberly in their intelligence services. But the fact of the matter is that they were taught (and as a result were taught) to completely ignore the facts. Unlike ordinary citizens, this public could observe with their own eyes how rapidly the economy was developing in the West, and what role democratic institutions played in this. And at the same time she continued to insist that the Soviet system is the most progressive. The authorities were deliberately engaged in transforming the consciousness of future security officers. From a young age it was instilled in them that they were the salt of the earth, fighters for an idea that was fundamentally so bright that all means to protect it were good.
“The current colonels and generals,” noted Evgeny Savostyanov, who headed the State Security Department for Moscow and the Moscow Region in the first half of the 90s, to the Itogi correspondent, “came to the authorities at a time when, thanks to Andropov’s purposeful actions, the image of a security officer in cinema and literature was extremely "romanticized. The training system of these people was based on the fact that the security of the country depends solely on them, and they have no right to make mistakes. From this grew the feeling that they, in principle, cannot make mistakes, that higher knowledge is available to them."
The Chekists experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union extremely hard, suffering from their own powerlessness and even a sense of guilt: they say they did not save a great country. And what was it like for them to watch how those who had recently been the object of their operational developments became tribunes, masters of minds, amassed capital, made a political career, in a word, turned into masters of life. And finally, the highest post in the state was occupied by a career security officer. His colleagues took heart - now they will build a proper state. What exactly, they themselves don’t really know. They dream of something similar to the romantic image of the KGB that remains in their heads: discipline, no corruption, cronyism, selfless service to the Fatherland and, of course, complete unanimity.
In a ring of enemies
This is the main thing. In Soviet times, when they were still lieutenants, no one dared to say a word against them. Now that one of them has become president, there can only be two positions in Russia: the one that occupies power, and the anti-state one. “The only thing that seriously upsets Vladimir Vladimirovich in the activities of journalists is not the attacks on him personally,” a high-ranking Kremlin official said not so long ago, “but the anti-state position taken by certain media outlets on Chechnya.” When asked what exactly this anti-state position is, the official explained that when a country is at war, any doubt about the correctness of the actions of the top leadership is treason with all the ensuing consequences.
The official is not at all embarrassed by the fact that war has not been declared, the country lives according to peacetime laws, and the constitutional norm of freedom of speech has not yet been abolished. But this is legal logic. The president and his associates proceed from the fact that Russia has enemies everywhere - internal and external - and therefore whoever is not with us is against us. It must be said that since the war between intelligence and counterintelligence does not stop even for a day, all intelligence services tend to transfer this model of relations to all areas of life. But it’s not everywhere that career secret service employees become top officials of the state. Both Vladimir Putin and Sergei Ivanov live with the conviction that all this nonsense about respect for human rights in Chechnya was specially invented by the United States and Western European states so that Moscow would get bogged down in the North Caucasus and would not be able to successfully complete the “anti-terrorist operation.”
“Defense consciousness” and the search for enemies permeated the leaders of our special services. Here Sergei Ivanov is looking for internal enemies and finds it unmistakably: “If an Israeli agent turns to a Jew for help, he can at least hope that he will not betray him,” that is, in fact, he assumes that any Jew is a potential accomplice of foreign intelligence. He, speaking at a board of the Ministry of Health dedicated to the problem of reducing the birth rate in the country, states: “The lack of youth ultimately leads to a decrease in the number of conscripts, which poses a threat to the country’s defense capability.” The Secretary of the Security Council thinks first of all about the war; the decrease in the share of the working-age population in the country does not concern him.
Civil liberties in general and freedom of speech in particular for defense-minded politicians are not absolute values, but something like a decent suit that has to be worn, although it restricts movement. They are convinced that the West doesn’t care about all these freedoms. And his entire struggle to preserve them is nothing more than a special operation, the purpose of which is to weaken Russia.
Monopoly on information
Former and current security officers do not want to share the right to collect information and dispose of it with anyone, least of all with journalists. Intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers learned from a young age: information collected with such difficulty should be accumulated, and if used, then for some specific purpose. In principle, they cannot understand that the most complete and objective informing of the entire people can in itself be the ultimate goal.
Identifying themselves with the state, security officers perceive any criticism of themselves as subversive activity. Whatever Vladimir Gusinsky is accused of, he ended up in Butyrka precisely because for him the “state line” is not concealing or dispensing information, which is what politicians with blue buttonholes want from him, but its maximum availability within the limits of the law.
Defense consciousness does not imply any other way of communicating with society other than through directives, failure to comply with which is punishable. The security officers consider arguing with someone and explaining themselves unnecessary and harmful. It is easier and more common for them to develop a special operation to discredit or destroy an opponent (see the article “ Measure of Excess ” on page 18). True, they forgot how to do this too. Let us remember how primitively, contradicting each other, they lied when they “exchanged” Babitsky, seized the headquarters of “Most”, and how they lied about the arrest of Vladimir Gusinsky.
True, they forgot how - this is not a completely accurate word. It’s just that in Soviet times there was no one to catch them in lies and point out their protruding ears. Then they were exposed as the bloody servants of the totalitarian regime, and in the 90s after its collapse they were relegated to the background. Now these people felt that the dark streak in life had passed and their time had come. Now, as in the Soviet years, you can lie shamelessly, without fear that your ears will stick out and someone will dare to doubt your words. And if he dares, then there are broad-shouldered guys with stockings on their faces, the prosecutor’s office and Butyrka.
It should be recognized that representatives of any special services are characterized not only by very specific views on the world around them, but also by equally specific morals. The indispensable attributes of intelligence and counterintelligence activities: invasion of privacy, blackmail, intimidation, lies - develop in a person a moral relativism that allows one to justify any actions if they are committed in the interests of the state. That is why one of the most important tasks of the political leadership of any state is to keep the intelligence services in tight rein. In our country, their representatives themselves have become political authorities. And they formulate state interests in strict accordance with their nature. From behind the Kremlin wall, no longer hiding, ears stick out, blue, the color of KGB buttonholes.