Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began his career in the Russian state as an agent of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret service. He was working in the agency’s East Germany office in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
Eleven years later, when he was elected president for the first time (he had already held the position on an interim basis since the end of 1999), Putin said in a meeting with members of the Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the agencies that replaced the KGB: “The mission of the KGB to infiltrate the Russian government was accomplished.”
Irony or not, the phrase illustrates how the FSB would gain prominence within the Russian state during Putin’s reign. Pursuing opponents and former allies of the dictator, the organization helped the former KGB agent to consolidate his power.
However, it was only after the start of the war in Ukraine, in February 2022, that the FSB defeated the last opponent in its dispute to completely dominate the Kremlin: the Armed Forces.
In 2012, about to take over the Ministry of Defense, Serguei Shoigu, close to Putin, had imposed a condition: he did not want members of the FSB interfering in the department.
This distance was respected, but only until the start of the war in Ukraine. Initially, the FSB took advantage of the conflict to intensify the repression of dissent and critical voices in the country: one of the most high-profile arrests it carried out was that of American journalist Evan Gershkovich, detained in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg on espionage charges.
However, the KGB’s successor did not stop there and began to use its functions to gain more power and win the final battle for Kremlin dominance: this year, under the pretext of combating corruption, important members of the Russian Defense Ministry were arrested.
In May, Lieutenant General Yury Kuznetsov, then head of the ministry’s main personnel directorate, was detained in the Moscow region, accused of “receiving bribes from representatives of commercial structures to carry out certain actions in his favor”, according to the Committee of Russia investigation.
At his home, the FSB seized gold coins, luxury items and more than 100 million rubles (around R$6 million) in cash. His wife, who previously worked at the Ministry of Defense, is also being investigated.
Before Kuznetsov’s arrest, the most high-profile case had been the arrest, in April, of former deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov, also suspected of receiving bribes.
Due to suspicions about the portfolio, in May, Shoigu was replaced at the Ministry of Defense by civilian Andrei Belousov. His fears that the FSB could be a threat to his position were confirmed.
The former KGB forms a “new nobility”, a term that has been used in Russia, a condition that gave its employees exemption from military service (much to Shoigu’s fury), and its presence in the Kremlin, with Putin’s blessing, is increasingly bigger.
According to an article published by The Moscow Times earlier this month, in the last years of the Soviet Union, only 3% of employees in senior government positions came from the special services. During Boris Yeltsin’s presidency (1991-1999), this share rose to just over 30%; today, it is between 70% and 80%.
In the crony capitalism that is the Russian economy, this presence is not restricted to politics and security, highlighted the author of the article, journalist Andrei Kalitin.
“Officials from the Ministry of Culture can testify that all films [produzidos na Rússia] they are reviewed by two plainclothes police officers before the rental certificate is issued. Businesspeople in the raw materials sector can attest to how the new board of directors includes undercover FSB officers. The work of the presidential administration is controlled by the Second Service of the FSB (which combats terrorism and ‘protects the constitutional order’), and the Security Council is made up only of security agents,” he explained.
“To paraphrase Putin’s phrase from 2000, the Lubyanka [como é conhecido o prédio na praça homônima em Moscou onde ficava a sede da KGB, hoje do FSB] has infiltrated the country’s power hierarchy more successfully than at any other time in history,” Kalitin wrote. “At the beginning of Putin’s fifth presidential term [em maio]the FSB had won.”
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