BRIEFING: “The making of a neo-KGB state: Political power in Russia now lies with the FSB, the KGB’s successor,” The Economist, 25 August 2007, p. 25.

Another great Economist piece. The KGB entered the post-Soviet period with roughly 500,000 in its ranks, meaning something like one-out-of-every-300-Russians. Not exactly FBI numbers. Plus, unlike our G-men, the KGB really were the cream of the crop. Not a put down of the FBI so much as the simple admission that this was THE job of career advancement in the old Sov system. I have always said that if I had grown up in the USSR, I definitely would have been KGB. Would have been a waste, but there you had it. Now, according to estimates from Russian scholars (as in, scholars in Russia), as much as one-quarter of the government’s senior bureaucrats are “silovki” (Russian, for “power guys”), and just like there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, Putin likes to say “There is no such thing as a former Chekist” (and old slang name for the KGB which comes from a predecessor organization). That the KGB, now called the FSB, survives communism should come as no surprise. Both modern terrorism and modern police state agencies began in Tsarist Russia in the late 19th century, so this form and function both predate and now postdate the USSR. From our perspective, Putin and silovki largely make Russia a place we don’t have to worry about, meaning I don’t see us planning war with them in the old vein. Moreover, Russia’s in a better place to deal with some stuff in its environs that we clearly don’t want to take on. Yes, Putin is selling a certain domestic propaganda about the “evil West” (the U.S. in particular), but oddly enough, we remain more popular there than in most countries (admittedly, America isn’t really popular anywhere like it was just a decade ago). Plus, it’s really for domestic consumption, as the regime’s truly paranoid about its legitimacy, as only “power guys” can be. Yes, Putin is getting aggressive in his foreign policy, but it’s a toothless form of aggression based on its status as energy source, which only gets you so far in this world. As one noted American (Russian émigré) scholar put it in Australia last week, we see in Putin’s regime an “omnipotent impotence”: he talks a big game but it’s mostly show from behind a rather brittle shell.