The New Nobility:
The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
Public Affairs, 299 pages
President Obama’s entire policy vis-à-vis the withering behemoth known as Russia might be reduced to: yes, we know the forces of reaction and chauvinism control the Kremlin, but we’re going to work with them whenever our interests overlap—on, say, slashing nuclear stockpiles, curbing tuberculosis, or exporting Twitter to deepest Siberia. The official organ of cooperation is called the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, but the policy is more commonly called “the reset,” as in a resetting of relations following the Dark Age that supposedly was the George W. Bush administration. To hear it from the current White House, the reset amounts to a latter-day détente. Only through the interplay of carrots and sticks (but mostly carrots) can Washington achieve a meaningful, working relationship with Moscow.
This would not be a bad way to approach the Putin-Medvedev regime were it not for one problem: there is no cohesive entity called “Moscow.” The notion of “Moscow”—the geopolitical “Moscow” that is meant to encapsulate the whole of the Russian state—no longer exists. It hasn’t since at least 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and even before that it was never a unified, self-contained organism so much as a tableau of warring ministries whose job was not to govern but to steal. To the extent that actual administration took place, it was often accidental.
The first faction among factions, the all-important substrate that has held together the Russian governmental complex and its many subsidiaries and client-despots, has always been the secret police. The bezopasni organi, or security organs, have been called many things—the tsarist Okhrana, the Bolshevik Cheka, Stalin’s NKVD, and the KGB—but their mission has always been, more or less, the same: to maintain the status quo. In this way, the secret police have provided for Russia what an independent judiciary and free elections have provided for the United States—stability.
American presidents who grasp the underlying chaos and thuggishness of Russian politics tend to fare better than those who do not (case in point: Jimmy Carter); the latter group often finds itself mystified by a Russian vlast, or power, that refuses to play by rules that it deems alien and illegitimate. Alas, Carter is not alone. In the post–Cold War era, the United States has struggled to reconcile the collapse of Communism with the persistent misbehavior of a post-Communist Russian state. This is why Washington has had so much trouble creating a post–Soviet Russia in its own image. It may also explain why the words “Bill Clinton,” “George W. Bush,” and “Barack Obama” do not appear even once in The New Nobility, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan’s compelling and thoroughly reported book on the KGB’s successor organization, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. An America that does not understand the psychology and configuration of Russian power is an America that is naive, pious, and self-marginalizing. It is a country that can be omitted.
The defining feature of the FSB, Soldatov and Borogan argue, is its unaccountability. In Soviet times, the KGB was ubiquitous. It collected foreign intelligence, guarded borders, protected Kremlin leaders, quashed dissent, and monitored every major institution in the Soviet Union, including the armed services, factories, churches, collective farms, universities, hospitals, orchestras, and professional societies. But the KGB was not omnipotent. That’s because the Communist Party controlled it. When that control ended, toward the very end of the Soviet period, so too did the party and the regime. No party controls the FSB, because there is none.
In the past several years, Putin has attempted to reassemble the old political structures—first, by propping up the ideologically vapid United Russia, which doesn’t believe in anything except Vladimir Putin; and second, by creating a faux-opposition party called Just Russia, which stands in opposition to United Russia by standing up for Vladimir Putin. But neither United Russia nor Just Russia, nor a combination uber-party overflowing with indistinguishable rubber-stampers, is equipped to keep tabs on the so-called state within the state. It’s worth bearing in mind that the KGB was created in 1954 by the party to do the party’s bidding. The FSB, by contrast, was not created by anyone. It descended from the KGB’s counterespionage and counterintelligence division. Under Boris Yeltsin, the FSB was one of a handful of intelligence services—weakened, demoralized, rudderless. Under Putin, the FSB has been reorganized into the country’s central intelligence-gathering agency. It spies, imprisons, interrogates, infiltrates reform movements, and ferrets out enemies of the state, including anyone the Kremlin dubs “extremist.”
An appendix at the back of The New Nobility notes that, among other developments, in June 2003 the FSB launched its foreign-intelligence operations. In March 2006, the FSB, as stipulated by the Law on Counteraction of Terrorism, was made the state’s chief counter-terrorism agency; and in July of that year, the FSB was authorized to kill people in foreign countries. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, in London, appears to fall under this rubric. Although no one has publicly confirmed that the FSB was responsible, the Kremlin’s refusal to extradite the leading suspect, Alexander Lugovoi, and Lugovoi’s subsequent state-orchestrated election to the Duma (giving him legal immunity) appear to implicate the secret police. That Litvinenko once served in the KGB and FSB, and that he publicly accused the FSB of plotting to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky, underscores the FSB’s apparent complicity. Amazingly, this is a species of secret police that even Russia has never known. It is a sprawling and subterranean machine that is not an instrument of a party or a monarch but an end unto itself, inward-looking, secretive, and untethered from any controlling authority.
With this in mind, the tragedies at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater in 2002 and the elementary school at Beslan in the North Caucasus in 2004 should come as no surprise, write Soldatov and Borogan, both Russian journalists who have reported for a slew of Moscow papers and, most recently, launched the investigative website, Argentura.ru. In both cases Chechen terrorists were behind the attacks, and in both cases the FSB greatly compounded the loss of life by bungling the operation—in part, one suspects, because the agency fears no one, does not value individual life, and doesn’t actually care very much about preempting terrorists. What matters is power and holding on to it. If a few Russians die while that is taking place, well, their deaths will not be in vain; they will be lamented, and their honor and courage will be remembered and celebrated by the narod, the people, and, of course, by the organs, who will stoke the fear and anger of tens of millions of fellow Russians who will demand that the state do something to stop these “black asses” from the Caucasus.
The authors’ minute-by-minute account of the Dubrovka attack and the security services’ handling of that attack, which they witnessed from a nearby apartment building, illustrates the surreality of a police force doing its job without knowing how or why it should be doing it. At 7:06 a.m. on October 26, shortly after the FSB secretly funneled fentanyl, a narcotic analgesic 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, into the theater and then stormed the building, the authors report: “Bodies are still being carried out. . . . [T]o the left of the main entrance the rescuers continue placing bodies; there are dozens, and the number of corpses increases rapidly. A few minutes later they occupy the whole area; all the steps on the left are covered with multicolor sweaters worn by the hostages.” At 8:00 Soldatov and Borogan overhear another journalist shout, “‘Look! They’re putting dead bodies on the buses—they are falling down from their seats!’” Forty-five minutes later, they report that “black body bags [are] being loaded onto a bus. A bus comes up, and the corpses are put on board.” More than two hours later, at 11:00 a.m., “the dead are still being carried out. . . . Even when we leave the apartment, some corpses still remain on the steps of the main entrance.”
At least 130 hostages died. Just five of those deaths were attributed to the terrorists. When Russian journalists tried to unearth a few facts about the attack, they were publicly chided by Putin. An FSB major known only as Vladimir told Soldatov, then reporting for the weekly newspaper Versiya, to give up plans for a lengthy piece on the Dubrovka attack, also known as Nord-Ost, after the musical that was being staged at the theater at the time of the hostage-taking. “Vladimir asked for a meeting and chose to meet at the entrance of the Moscow Zoo,” Soldatov and Borogan report. “‘Look, Andrei, you know we are all in big trouble,’ Vladimir said. ‘I was told to tell you they are ready to finish the investigation, but we have to make a deal. Forget about Nord-Ost.’”
For those who remain convinced that the waters began to recede on January 20, 2009, they ought to consider that, in the two years since the Obama administration “reset” relations with the Kremlin, zero progress appears to have been made in curbing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, and that this is the only yardstick with which to measure the effectiveness of the president’s Russia policy. Russia, after all, has relatively little to offer the United States. It is underdeveloped and backward-looking, and it is hemorrhaging 750,000 human beings every year. It has oil and gas, but America buys most of its oil and gas elsewhere. And it has a huge army, but as the 2008 war in Georgia made amply clear, that army is a rusting adumbration of its former self. One of the few things Russia has that is of great value to Washington was bequeathed to it by the Soviet Union: good relations with the world’s bottom-feeders, including the dictators and theocrats who rule Iran. The whole point of the reset was to foster goodwill in Moscow so that Washington could then lean on Moscow to lean on Tehran. Yes, Russia backed last year’s UN sanctions against the mullahs, but there are few indications that those sanctions have slowed Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.
The failure to rein in Iran may have to do with Iran’s intransigence, or it may have to do with Russia’s unwillingness to do much about that. So far, the FSB has sent worrisome signals. In August 2009, Soldatov and Borogan recall, the agency apparently tried to embarrass U.S. diplomat Kyle Hatcher into resigning his Moscow post by leaking a doctored video that purported to show him with a prostitute. The embassy, to its credit, stood by Hatcher. If years from now Iran is still nuclear-free, one imagines the president’s supporters will credit his wisdom and tough-mindedness. The likelier explanation will involve military force and sabotage, some combination of U.S. air strikes and Israeli computer viruses.
Alas, much of the confusion surrounding all the above could have been avoided had senior administration officials read The New Nobility, which powerfully illustrates the nature of the regime with which they are trying to reset relations. It’s not that the Obama White House is being “soft” on the Russians. It’s that the administration doesn’t appear to get how the security organs work. (Happily, many in the State Department do. WikiLeaks shows that plenty of U.S. Embassy officials, whose job includes implementing the reset, appreciate the essence of Putinism.) The security organs understand force more than anything else. They cannot be won over or cajoled; they must be pushed into a corner and made to heel. Like the muzhik who presides over his village or the collective-farm director in charge of wheat production, the “KGBnik,” to use a Russian term, is essentially a well-dressed peasant—educated, sophisticated, and close to the earth.
Soldatov and Borogan have done a great service. Their book is not well written. It lacks color and personality. But this is hardly important. What matters is that they’ve documented, with facts and quotes, the Putin-Medvedev record. It should also be noted that Soldatov and Borogan wrote their book in English, which is to say they are speaking to a Western, and especially an American, audience. That audience would be wise to listen carefully. The authors’ courage also cannot be overstated. It is often said that Russia is a dangerous place for journalists. This is inaccurate. It is a dangerous place for Russian journalists. Of course, foreign reporters have had their run-ins, but it is the Russians who get killed. One hopes The New Nobility will provide Soldatov and Borogan with a little cover.
