This paper is intended more as a compilation of available information than as an analytical work.  Consequently, it draws heavily on a number of secondary sources, whose authors have gone through the tedious but vital process of compiling and analyzing the primary sources available.  Such sources, which vary widely in quality and usefulness, include:

• Published laws or decrees defining the functions and the structure of various security organs.  These are known to be frequently supplemented by secret documents not available to the public.

• The web sites of the main security organs such as MVD, FSB, SVR, etc; while generally propagandistic in tone, they do present useful legal and historical material.

• Articles published in the Russian media, often based on leaks (kompromat).

• Speeches pronounced by security or government officials.

• Interviews given by security or government officials.

• Memoirs and articles written, as well as interviews given, by defectors from the Russian (or Soviet) security organs.

I would like to acknowledge my debt, primarily, to the work of Mr. Gordon Bennett of the Conflict Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst; Mr. A.A. Mukhin of the Tsentr Politicheskoï Informatsii; and the Russian website www.agentura.ru.  I have also in places leaned heavily on concepts and analyses introduced by Mr. Nikolai Petrov and Mr. Vadim Volkov; and my discussion of the final years of the USSR KGB owes a great deal to the work of Ms. Yevgenia Albats.  Other sources used are listed in the bibliography.

The KGB of the USSR – “the Monster,” as it was called – was dismantled in the months following the failed August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and his attempt at reforming the Soviet Union known as perestroika.  The coup counted among its leaders many senior generals of the KGB, first and foremost Vladimir Kryuchkov, the last Chairman of the Committee.  For these men, however, the coup was but a last-ditch attempt to avert a fate they had seen coming and sought to ward off for some time.  The seeds of the breakup of the KGB were planted in the early 1980s by one of its most preeminent and effective leaders, Yuri Andropov (Chairman of the KGB 1967-82; General Secretary KPSS 1982-84).  The KGB, the only organization in the country with both access to genuine data and the ability to analyze it, had come to realize by the end of Brezhnev’s long reign that the economic and technological gap with the West was growing, and that unless the trend could be reversed the USSR was doomed to lose the Cold War.  General of the Army Filipp Bobkov, a key figure of the late KGB, put it succinctly in a 1990 interview: “The KGB in 1985 understood very well that the Soviet Union could not develop without perestroika.”1  Andropov, during his brief tenure as General Secretary, thus began planning radical reforms intended, through a calculated policy of openness and economic restructuring, to attract foreign investment and technological know-how, while firmly maintaining the reins of political controls in the hands of the KGB and the KPSS (China, under Deng, was coming to the same conclusions at the same time; thanks however in large part to the ruthlessness shown by the Party at Tiananmen in 1989, it succeeded where the USSR failed in meeting this double objective).  But Andropov died before he was able to implement his plan.  The elite of the KPSS remained highly divided about the advisability of the radical moves proposed; a caretaker General Secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, already very ill, was nominated as a compromise figure while the two sides fought out the matter.  As Chernenko lay dying, the Andropov camp pushed forward the nomination of Mikhail Gorbachev, the young Secretary of Agriculture of the Central Committee, an Andropov protégé;2 the old guard opposed to the reforms backed Grigory Romanov, the second youngest member of the Politburo and the Secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization.  The “reformists” won: on March 11, 1985, the day after Chernenko’s death, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary with a mandate to begin the programme of reforms devised by the KGB under Andropov.  This programme was officially launched at the 27th Congress of the KPSS in February 1986, and initially comprised three main components: glasnost, or transparency, perestroika, or restructuring (reform), and uskorenie, acceleration (of economic development).  It led within a few years to a liberalization of the economy, which the KGB both drove and took a broad advantage of.  The process was mainly managed by the KGB’s infamous Fifth Main Directorate, created in 1967 by Filipp Bobkov to monitor and repress political dissent, together with the Sixth Main Directorate, tasked in the 1960s with fighting “economic crimes” (i.e. private trade, called “speculation” in the USSR).3  One Western report details the “division of labor:” by the mid-1980s the Fifth Main Directorate had “shifted its focus from monitoring political dissidents to manipulating dissident economists and reformers to create the perestroika economy,” while the Sixth Main Directorate began to concentrate on economic counterintelligence, economic security, and monitoring the fledgling “cooperatives” created under perestroika.4  It also, of course, kept a close watch on the joint ventures set up to attract Western capital.  But the two departments, together with the First Main Directorate (a.k.a. PGU, in charge of foreign intelligence), in fact secretly stood directly behind many of the new firms and joint ventures.  “According to my sources,” writes Albats, “funds from the [KGB and KPSS] were used to found nearly 80% of the new banks, stock markets and companies.”  KGB agents, she notes, had already acquired a great deal of commercial experience while setting up firms as “covers” for illegals “in countries with every variety of market economy imaginable.”5  Komsomol officials were also deeply involved, and it is no accident that a majority of the new “oligarchs” of the 1990s were drawn from their ranks.  This view of events was recently confirmed by a well-known former GRU Lieutenant-Colonel, Anton Surikov, who adds: “It was impossible to work in the black market without KGB connections and without protection from the KGB.  Without them, no shadow business was possible. …  There was a conscious creation of a black market.  The creation of the oligarchs was a revolution engineered by the KGB, but then they lost control.”  Surikov however sees the creation of a new class of businessmen as the result of a “battle for power” between the KGB and the Communist Party, not of their cooperation as Albats argues: “The … Party was heading into a dead end, and the people from the Fifth [and Sixth] Directorate saw that a new impetus was needed.  This was how perestroika was started.”6

The KGB and Gorbachev’s ambitious programme, however, unraveled within a few years.  Glasnost had allowed nationalist demands, forcefully suppressed until then, to emerge in dozens of “hot spots” around the Union; by 1989, this led to mass demonstrations, clashes with the authorities, and inter-ethnic rioting and mass killings, probably in several cases provoked or at least encouraged by the KGB.7  By the end of the year, the USSR, having pulled out of Afghanistan, had also allowed all of East Europe to go in a wave of “democratic revolutions.”  At the center of the Empire, Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev had sacked from the Politburo in 1987 for his outspoken criticisms, had gotten elected to the Congress of People's Deputies and was preparing his forceful return to the political scene.  Yet, as the USSR came apart at the seams, Gorbachev – unlike his Chinese counterparts – shied from resorting to violence and repression to keep the lid on; the KGB’s brutal but half-hearted interventions, such as in Tbilissi on April 9, 1989, or in Vilnius on January 12, 1991, proved both inadequate and counter-productive, and served only to accelerate the process of disintegration.  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of the East European communist regimes, which was accompanied in some countries by the killing of security service agents and the sacking of agency headquarters, shook the KGB leadership.  In December 1990, Vladimir Kryuchkov legalized the KGB’s commercial ventures by signing a decree forming KGB commercial structures.  As the breakdown of the USSR gained momentum, vast amounts of KPSS capital fled the country through these structures.  Albats quotes an August 1990 secret memo entitled “Emergency Measures to Organize Commercial and Foreign Economic Activity for the Party:”

As Albats notes, the author of this memo, the KPSS’s administrative director Nikolai Kruchin, committed suicide “under mysterious circumstances” along with one of his trusted aides, shortly after the failed August 1991 coup, taking a great deal of information about these secret arrangements to his grave.8  It seems however that from the very start a great deal of this capital flight took place in a completely uncontrolled manner.  Rather than provide a basis for a future counterrevolutionary effort, as some may have hoped, the money was in most cases grabbed by whoever had access to it, and some of it probably served as the seed money for a few of the extraordinarily rapid fortune-buildings of the 1990s.

The USSR KGB, in the run up to August 1991, remained a formidable organization.  At its head sat a Collegium of senior generals whose Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, reported directly to the Politburo.  This Collegium controlled the central apparatus; the Republican State Committees; and the UKGBs in every Autonomous Republic, Krai and Oblast of the USSR.  The central apparatus was divided into a number of directorates and departments, of which the most important were:

• 1. Main Directorate (PGU): foreign intelligence; Directorate “V” a.k.a. “Vympel”

• 2. Main Directorate (VGU): counterintelligence; Main Directorate for the Border Troops

• 3. Main Directorate: military counterintelligence (which controlled the osoby otdely or “special departments” within every branch and unit of the Armed Forces)9

• 4. Main Directorate: security of transport

• 5. Main Directorate: ideological counterintelligence and political investigations (renamed Directorate for the Protection of the Constitution or Directorate “Z” in 1989)

• 6. Main Directorate: economic counterintelligence and industrial security

• 7. Main Directorate: external surveillance & protection of diplomatic buildings (“toptuny”); Antiterrorist Group “A” a.k.a. “Alfa”

• 8. Main Directorate: cryptography & communications security

• 9. Directorate (“Guards” Directorate): guarding of superior functionaries (transformed into the KGB Protection Service by the late 1980s)

• 12. Directorate: eavesdropping

• 15. Directorate: building & exploitation of secure objects (bunkers for leadership)

• 16. Directorate: communications transmission & interception (SigInt) ; Directorate OP: struggle against organized crime; Operational-Technical Directorate (OTU)

• 10. Department: archives; Investigation Department; KGB Higher School; SIZO “Lefortovo” (Investigative Isolator, a prison)

The central apparatus controlled, in 1991, 420,000 employees; of these, over 200,000 were soldiers serving in the Border Troops.  The KGB was the only organization in the USSR, outside of the Armed Forces, to control military units (the Interior Troops were indeed subordinated to the MVD, but remained part of the Armed Forces until 1992).  The KGB also had at its disposal two elite commando units: “Alfa” and “Vympel.”  Alfa, formally known as Antiterrorist Group “A” under the 7. Main Directorate of the KGB, had been set up in 1974 by Yuri Andropov, following the killing of Israeli athletes in Munich during the Olympic Games, to give the KGB the capacity to respond to such incidents on its own territory.  The post-1991 pattern of deploying Alfa for missions far exceeding its formal scope was in evidence from the very start: it was employed for the first time in the storm of the Kabul Presidential Palace in December 1979, during which the Afghan Communist leader, Amin, was killed.  Vympel was set up in the late 1970s as a “diversionary unit” to conduct special operations on foreign territory, and was formally known as Directorate “V,” placed under the PGU, though only the Chairman of the KGB could authorize its operations.

On May 6, 1991, shortly before being elected President of the RSFSR, Boris Yeltsin, following a decision of the Congress of People’s Deputies, obtained the formation of a RFSFR KGB, signing a protocol with Kryuchkov.  Until then, the fourteen other Soviet Republics had each had their own Republican KGB (which remained however tightly controlled by the central KGB in Moscow; all forms of dual subordination, even to the Politburo of the Republican Party, were strictly avoided).  Only in the RFSFR were the regional KGB directorates (UKGBs) run directly out of the central KGB.  The new organism, which was placed under the leadership of Lt.-Gen. Viktor Ivanenko, had the status of a Republican State Committee like the other fourteen.  Until the failed Coup, however, it remained an empty shell: Ivanenko, at first, controlled only two deputies and twenty agents; the regional directorates, especially the powerful Moscow city and Moscow oblast UKGB, remained directly subordinated to the central KGB until fall 1991.

The Internal Ministry (MVD) was a far weaker power structure than the KGB, but by the end of the 1980s was no longer a negligible force either.  In 1954, following the death of Stalin and the liquidation of Beria and his cronies, the NKVD had been broken up and the security police separated from the regular police; the diminished MVD, though an All-Union Ministry, had from the start far less clout than the Union-Republic State Committee for State Security (KGB).  The MVD was further weakened in 1960 when Khrushchev abolished the central Ministry and handed all police functions over to Republican Ministries, renaming them in 1962 Ministries for the Preservation of Public Order (Ministerstvo Okhrany Obshchestvennogo Poriadka – MOOP) and further restricting their functions.  As crime rose, though, the regular police came under increasing criticism; starting in 1964, after Khrushchev’s overthrow, Brezhnev began rebuilding the police, raising MOOP to All-Union Ministry status in 1966 and renaming it MVD in 1968.  Strong efforts were made to upgrade the personnel, training and equipment of the police, but corruption and inefficiency remained massive.  In 1983, Andropov, as part of his anti-corruption drive, ordered the KGB to reassert control over the MVD; Nikolai Shchelokov, Brezhnev’s Interior Minister, who had been sacked as soon as Andropov took power, was arrested and tried on corruption charges, along with many other senior Brezhnev-era officials – including Brezhnev’s son-in-law Yuri Churbanov, a First Deputy Interior Minister.  At this time, the MVD was in charge of a broad range of bodies: the ordinary police (tasked with maintaining public order and policing drunks), the criminal police, fire brigades, the traffic police, the internal passport and registration service, the Soviet prison and labor camp system (managed by GUIN, the Main Directorate for the Enforcement of Punishments, formerly GULag), and, until 1988, special psychiatric institutions (psykushki).  Nonetheless it remained mostly helpless when faced with the new challenges brought about by the corruption of the Brezhnev years and the overall degradation of the Union, “omnipresent and powerless,” in the words of a French scholar.10  Throughout the 1980s, new branches and units were created in attempts to give the MVD more teeth.  In the late 1970s already, MVD had gained two counterterrorist units, RSN (Special Purpose Company) and OMSN (Specialized Purpose Police Detachment); company-sized at first, they grew to battalion size under Gorbachev.  In the 1980s, faced with the rise of the informal, illegal economy, the MVD set up, on the basis of a pre-existing structure, its first genuine economic police, the GUBKhSS.  As its name, Main Directorate for Combating the Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation, indicates, its conceptual and legal framework somewhat handicapped its ability to grapple with the rise of capitalistic initiatives in the USSR.  In 1988 Aleksandr Gurov, the leading Soviet specialist on organized crime, brought about the creation of the shestoi otdel (6^th Department of the MVD, renamed GUOP and then GUBOP after 1992 – see Fig. 6 below), tasked with the struggle against organized crime; again, its successes were limited, as its adversaries, both the traditional Soviet vory-v-zakone (“thieves-in-the-law” or “thieves-under-the-code”) and the rising generation of “violent entrepreneurs,” were evolving and adapting much faster to the changing conditions than the bureaucratic repressive apparatus of the Soviet state could follow.  As glasnost and perestroika generated massive strikes, riots, and bursts of intercommunal violence, the Internal Troops, lightly armed regiments, supposedly better trained than Army forces but nonetheless also made up of conscripts, were deployed to quell public unrest, with often disastrous results.   Finally, in 1987, the MVD created the OMON, Special Designation Police Detachment, organized somewhat like the American SWAT teams, and tasked with dealing with “terrorist incidents, serious criminal activities and the ‘maintenance of public order’;” their repressive activities in the Baltic states in the last years of the USSR, which caused civilian casualties, gained them much notoriety both within the Union and abroad.11

A last institution that should be mentioned is the General Procuratura, which not only prosecuted cases in court but had broad investigative powers that supplemented those of the MVD and KGB.  In principle, all criminal cases opened by either MVD or KGB had to be turned over to the Procuratura for prosecution; the Procuratura could also supervise other agencies’ investigations, and intervene if these were being conducted illegally.  In practice however the Procuratura had no hold over the KGB, and the KGB often investigated and arrested people outside the established legal system, detaining them in its special prison at Lefortovo.  The Procuratura also had no control over the Glavnaya Voennaya Prokuratura, the Main Military Procuratura with jurisdiction over all members of the Armed Forces, which remained subordinated to the Ministry of Defense.

The failed putsch of August 1991 brought about the immediate breakup of the KGB.  As stated, a number of senior KGB officials participated directly in the attempt: besides Kryuchkov, one of the main organizers of the coup along with Interior Minister Boris Pugo, officials involved included Col.-Gen. Geni Agayev, First Deputy Chairman, Lt.-Gen. Anatoli Beda, Head of the 8. Main Directorate, who cut off all of Gorbachev’s communications in his Crimean dacha, and Maj.-Gen. Vladimir Medvedev, Gorbachev chief bodyguard.12  A great many other KGB generals did not participate actively but had advance knowledge of the attempt and approved, waiting however to see if it would succeed before declaring their loyalty: Col.-Gen. Viktor Grushko, another First Deputy Chairman, for example, participated in the planning of the attempt but then stood back when it was set in motion.  When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, on August 21, purging and reforming the KGB was his first priority.  He nominated Grushko Acting Chairman for a few hours, and then the Head of the PGU Lt.-Gen. Leonid Shebarshin, who had not taken part in the coup (though his chief deputy did).  But Boris Yeltsin, who unlike Gorbachev did not want to reform the KGB but dismantle it, bitterly opposed Shebarshin’s nomination; after two days, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were finally able to agree on Lt.-Gen. Vadim Bakatin, a career Kemerovo KPSS official who had briefly served as Interior Minister (from October 1988 to December 1990), initiating controversial reforms during his tenure.  Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s objectives strongly diverged: while Gorbachev wanted to weaken the KGB yet maintain the USSR intact, Yeltsin, already aiming to dismantle the Union as part of his strategy against Gorbachev, hoped that breaking up the USSR KGB would weaken Gorbachev’s overall control over the country, as well as reinforce his RSFSR KGB.

Bakatin immediately plunged into his task: three days after his nomination, he produced five separate reform plans for the KGB.  But implementing them proved difficult.  Bakatin was able to rapidly transfer KGB military units to the Armed Forces, which had overall played a positive role during the coup; but purging the leadership proved a far more complex task: so many senior cadres had, if not actively participated, at least sympathized with the coup, that firing all of them would have gutted the organization.  In the end Bakatin only purged those who had openly participated in the August events; the fence-sitters were retained, as there was no one to replace them.  Already, pieces were coming off the KGB: on August 29, the 8^th, 12^th and 16^th Directorates were separated to form the KPS USSR, the Government Communications Committee under the leadership of General of the Army Aleksandr Starovoytov, Beda’s deputy at the 8. Main Directorate.  Yeltsin also began getting pieces of the KGB under his control: on September 3, part of the 9. “Guards” Directorate was broken off to form the SBP RSFSR, the Security Service of the President of the RSFSR.  Yeltsin entrusted its leadership to his personal bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov, who as a 9. Directorate officer had protected him since 1985, and who had left the KGB to continue working for him without pay when he was sacked from the Politburo in 1988; during the putsch, Korzhakov had faithfully stood by Yeltsin, organizing the defense of the White House and holding up an armored suitcase in front of his boss during the famous “tank speech.”  On September 26, Yeltsin finally gained control of the Moscow city and oblast UKGB, which passed under the control of the RSFSR KGB.  Numerous USSR KGB officers also transferred to the RSFSR KGB.  By December, Ivanenko’s organization controlled 20.000 officers in the regional directorates, including the crucial Leningrad UKGB, and 22.000 officers in Moscow.

The USSR KGB was abolished on October 24, 1991, by a decision of the USSR State Council (signed into law by Gorbachev on December 3).  Four agencies were formed in its place (see Fig. 1 below).  The KPS, in charge of all special communications, signal intelligence (SigInt), and electronic intelligence (ElInt) already existed since August 29.  The PGU (without Vympel) broke off to become the TsRS USSR, the Central Intelligence Service; its new leader was the respected KPSS stalwart, Academician and Arab world specialist Yevgeny Primakov, who had replaced Shebarshin a month earlier when this later resigned in disgust at Bakatin’s management and sharing of secrets with the USA.  The Border Guards also became an independent agency named the KPO, the Border Guards Committee.  Finally, some of the most important KGB Directorates, in whole or in part, were amalgamated to form the MSB USSR, the Interrepublican Security Service, of which Bakatin retained the leadership.  The feared and despised 5. Main Directorate (now Directorate “Z”) was disbanded and its staff scattered, though many remained in the MSB’s Anti-terrorism department.13

The ongoing conflict between Gorbachev and Yeltsin was mirrored in the conflict between the various services being formed.  Viktor Ivanenko, the Chairman of the RSFSR KGB, had supported Yeltsin during the coup; now, he did everything he could to accelerate the breakup of the KGB, constantly sniping at Bakatin.  Viktor Barannikov, who was briefly named Interior Minister to replace the disgraced Boris Pugo, also sided with Yeltsin; together with his deputy and close colleague Viktor Yerin, a career police investigator from Tatarstan who had served as Interior Minister in Armenia while Barannikov held the same position in Azerbaidjan, he conducted the investigations and arrests of several senior putschists (including his former boss Pugo, who managed to commit suicide before being taken in) before being replaced, a month later, by Andrei Dunaev.  Yerin, who as one of the first senior MVD officials to leave the Communist Party (in May 1991) had been a leader of the “de-partization” movement within the state organs, remained First Deputy Interior Minister; in the fall, he came into violent conflict over a number of issues with Aleksandr Gurov, the organized crime specialist, causing this latter’s departure from MVD.  Bakatin and his MSB, on their side, were finding it extremely difficult to regulate their relations with the Republican Committees, most of whom, isolated and directionless, soon found themselves either in open conflict with the republican leadership (especially in the Baltic states), or at least strongly dependent on them.  Yeltsin’s camp did not help matters with its aggressive language: at the end of August, already, Ivanenko was declaring “that ‘the use of special services, including espionage services’ could not be entirely excluded if the relations between Russia and some of the republics reached a high ‘state of virulence.’”14  As Gorbachev tried to work out a new Union treaty over the fall, the MSB drew up elaborate plans for cooperation with the Republican KGBs, which included plans to transfer over 6,500 officials to the republics.  None of these plans were ever implemented as the breakup of the USSR accelerated.

On November 26, Yeltsin signed a decree transforming the RSFSR KGB into the AFB RSFSR, the Federal Security Agency; Viktor Ivanenko remained its General Director.  Gorbachev’s December 3 law “On the Reorganization of the State Security Organs” did nothing to slow down the implosion of the Union: five days later, on December 8, 1991, at a secret meeting in the Belovezha forest in Byelorussia, Boris Yeltsin and the Presidents of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislau Shushkevich, unilaterally decided the dissolution of the USSR.  The fifteen Union Republics, whether they wished to or not, became independent states, most of whom soon formed a loose association baptized the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS or SNG in Russian); their local KGBs and power ministries also thus found themselves on their own.

Yeltsin, who for the past months had been calling in the name of democratic values for the dismantling of the KGB, reversed course as soon as he reached his objective and found himself the leader of an independent, sovereign state: on December 19 he decreed the merger of the MSB USSR, AFB RSFSR and the MVD USSR into a “super-ministry” to be called the MBVD RSFSR, the Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs, and appointed as its minister Viktor Barannikov.15  Uniting the security and the police apparatus into one ministry was a recurrent temptation in the history of the USSR, but such a behemoth had proved disastrous in the past, not just from the point of view of civil liberties but also in terms of basic functional efficiency; by Stalin’s death, the various components of the NKVD in effect functioned as autonomous organizations, with little or no oversight; as discussed, the post-Stalin leadership hastened to break it up after the fall of Beria and Abakumov.  Barannikov himself, who along with Yerin had strongly promoted the MBVD concept over the previous months, was anything but a democratic-minded reformer.  Thankfully, the MBVD never came into being: on January 15, 1992, at the request of the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet, the RF Constitutional Court declared its creation illegal and invalid.  Ten days later, on January 24, Yeltsin set up a separate MVD RF, under Viktor Yerin, and an MB RF (Ministry of Security) incorporating the AFB and most of the MSB, which he entrusted to Barannikov.

By this point, numerous other departments of the KGB had also undergone reorganization (see Fig. 1).  At the end of 1991, parts of the 9. Directorate and the 15. Directorate were amalgamated into GUO RF (Main Protection Directorate), under Mikhail Barsukov, a veteran 9. Directorate official; both Vympel and Alfa, as well as Korzhakov’s SBP, were subordinated to the new agency.  The bulk of the 15. Directorate, which controlled the numerous anti-nuclear bunkers scattered throughout Russia as well as the notorious special government metro system in Moscow (“Metro-2”), was formed into a new, ultra-secret service directly subordinated to the Presidential Administration and baptized GUSP (Main Directorate for Special Programmes).  On December 12, 1991, the TsRS received some departments of the MSB and was renamed SVR RF (Foreign Intelligence Service); Primakov remained as Director.  On December 24, the KPS USSR became FAPSI RF (Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information), still under Starovoytov.  Around the same period the KPO USSR briefly became the KOGG RF (Committee for the Protection of the State Borders of the RF), though the Border Guards were soon placed back under the control of Barannikov’s MB.  The Military Procuratura was subordinated to the civilian General Procurator, though effective control remained tenuous.  

The Russian security organs born out of these reorganizations, fall into two categories: federal or samostoyatelnye (“self-standing” i.e. autonomous) agencies, such as GUO or FAPSI, and departmental (vedomstvennye) agencies which are subordinated to a ministry or an agency, such as GRU or the Border Guards before 1994 and after 2003.  Under the 1993 Constitution, all the so-called “power ministries” (Defense, Interior, Exceptional Situations (MChS), Justice as well as Foreign Affairs), their departmental security branches, and the samostoyatelnye federal services or agencies (FSK/FSB, which replaced the MB, SVR, FAPSI, GUO, GUSP, etc.) report directly to the President, who alone appoints their ministers or directors, and exercises control over them with very little oversight, whether governmental or parliamentarian.  The Government and the Prime Minister remain in effect only responsible for economic and social questions, and only supervise the corresponding “civilian” ministries or services.

The leadership of the KGB, after the failure of the coup, understood that measures would have to be taken to prevent the dissolution of the KGB from placing at risk what they considered the state security of whatever political entity would succeed the Soviet Union; though not all of these officials were “Great-Russian patriots,” their allegiance, once the USSR was gone, in most cases remained with Russia rather than any of the other now-independent republics.  For these officials, institutional survival was the key to weathering the transition set into motion by the failed putsch.  The flight abroad of KPSS funds, through the network of KGB shell companies, has already been discussed.  A further key issue was the security of the KGB archives: the looting of the STASI archives, after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the subsequent arrest and trial of numerous STASI officials, had shown what could happen if “reforms” and “popular revolutions” were taken too far.  The Republican KGB archives were as important as the central ones: in the months after August, MSB officials successfully negotiated the transfer of most of these archives from the republics to Moscow, though many confidential files remained in the hands of local bosses, who squirreled them away for future use against their political opponents.  Preserving the overall operational capacity of the services was also a vital concern.  When Yeltsin’s RSFSR KGB gained control of the Moscow and Leningrad UKGBs, he appointed two men to head them who proved key to the survival of the KGB.  The Moscow city and oblast Directorate was entrusted to Lt.-Gen. Yevgeny Savostyanov, a career KGB counterintelligence official; the Leningrad city and oblast Directorate was placed under the control of Lt.-Gen. Sergei Stepashin, an MVD political officer, VV officer, and since 1990 a RSFSR Supreme Soviet deputy, named Chairman of the Defense & Security Committee in 1991.16  Both men were presented at the time as committed democrats, chosen to reform and control the KGB; Stepashin had been named by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin to head the Commission to Investigate the Activities of the KGB during the Coup; Savostyanov, it was pointed out, had worked alongside Sakharov during perestroika.  Some observers however paint a different picture.  Aleksandr Litvinenko, a well-known FSB defector who was granted asylum in Great Britain in 2000, alleges in a book he co-wrote that

Litvinenko’s claim appears validated by Stepashin’s subsequent career as one of Russia’s most prominent siloviki.  We will see below that though Savostyanov fell from grace in 1994 (for picking the wrong side in a fight between Korzhakov and the businessman Vladimir Gusinsky), Stepashin consistently, until 1999, appears as the key figure in virtually all the efforts deployed to reform, strengthen or rebuild the FSB and the MVD.  By the time Stepashin’s rival Vladimir Putin gained power, the ground had been laid for the rebirth of the Russian security empire.

Barannikov’s Security Ministry was a more modest creation than the MBVD Yeltsin had dreamed of but retained considerable means.  Its core was the formidable counterintelligence and military counterintelligence apparatus of the former KGB.  It also retained the powerful Investigative Directorate, a key operational component; the Economic Security Directorate; the anti-terrorism Directorate, heavily staffed with former officials of the 5. Main Directorate, which would only grow in power over the coming years; and a number of directorates dedicated to combating smuggling, corruption and organized crime.  Furthermore, the Border Guards were reintegrated under the control of the MB, putting a substantial armed force at its disposal (Vympel and Alfa remained under GUO).  Last but not least, when FAPSI was formed, the MB was given the signals intelligence component of the KPS.  

But the MB, compared with its predecessors, also suffered serious handicaps.  Between September 1991 and June 1992, over 20,000 KGB officers resigned or were discharged, entering private business or joining one of the private security agencies sprouting up throughout post-Soviet Russia.  With the collapse of the ruble in 1992, salaries fell to contemptible levels, encouraging the flight of senior cadres.18  

Within the context of a new Russia in which dozens of ministries and agencies competed bitterly for scarce resources, the MB held nothing like the dominant position of the KGB.  The KGB’s main tool of control over the Armed Forces, the osoby otdely (“special departments”) placed at every unit level and reporting directly to the KGB’s 3. Main Directorate for military counterintelligence, was gravely weakened, though it did remain separate from the military and highly secretive.  In the first years of the 1990s, several plans were floated to transfer the osoby otdely to the GRU or even to form a Special Military Police, but these never materialized; the struggle for the control of military counterintelligence finally ended in 1993, though it was only made a fully samostoyatelnyi department of the FSB in 1998.19  The MB’s (and then FSK/FSB’s) Military Counterintelligence Directorate had many tasks: to fight corruption within the military, to search for spies, to prevent the sale of weapons or information (a particularly acute problem after the start of the Chechnya campaign), and to protect the secrecy of special objects such as submarines and military factories.  After 1993 its powers slowly grew, though only under Putin were they restored to something approaching their former levels.

The quasi-monopoly on armed force the KGB had once shared with the military was irrevocably gone.  The MVD of course had its VV, whose means and power increased as the Armed Forces’ slumped, as well as its OMON and SOBR special units.  But many other bodies, old or new, also acquired a military force: before 2003, there were fifteen state armed formations in Russia.  The GUO with its SBP grew to over twice the size of the KGB directorates it had succeeded.  The Railway Forces broke off from the Ministry of Defense along with significant finances and resources, ending up under the control of the Ministry of Transport.  A new Ministry for Emergency Situations (MChS) was formed with its own armed units charged with civil defense tasks.  Obscure agencies also gained autonomy, such as the Government Forestkeeper Service (GFS, first formed in 1796 under Pavel I), placed under the Ministry of Communications in November 1991.  FAPSI, of course, had its own armed units, as well as the GUSP, which controlled some 20,000 men.20

More crucially still, the federal authorities as a whole had lost the monopoly over the use of force – a key attribute of the modern sovereign State.  Russia of course was confronted with the secessionist troops of General Dzhokhar Dudaev, the new President of the Chechen Republic, who had unilaterally declared independence from the Russian Federation and had acquired, in a secret deal with the Army, over half of the Soviet weaponry based in Chechnya, including some armor and a small Air Force (during this first period, there were as of yet no open hostilities, and the Chechens were in fact secretly collaborating with the GRU, sending several hundred fighters to Abkhazia to destabilize the Georgian regime of Eduard Shevardnadze).  Throughout the Russian Federation, furthermore, purely criminal elements now controlled several hundred thousand armed and trained men, veterans of Afghanistan, MVD personnel,21 and other military or special service types washed afloat in the breakup of the USSR.  For these gangs, in the chaos of the first period, access to weaponry and sophisticated communications equipment posed no problems: in a famous episode, on August 12, 1993, the Gerhat-Ural gang of Afghanistan veterans in Nizhnii Tagil hijacked a T-90 tank to threaten a rival Azerbaidjani gang; and Vadim Volkov also reports an episode in 1991 in which a gang hired a SU-17 jet fighter from an airbase to put a scare on a rival gang from Pskov.22  

Midway between government agencies and criminal groupings, “a long-term solution for the commercial use of the personnel and of the informational and technical resources of the KGB and MVD was found by legalizing the informal security and rule enforcement business.”23  On March 11, 1992, the law “On Private Detective and Protection Activity” created and defined three types of private security agencies: ChDA (a private detective agency), ChSB (a private security service, or rather company), and ChOP (a private protection company).  The ChOPs, independent firms, rapidly multiplied and entered into competition with the organized crime groups for the provision of protection to private business; they were most often formed “according to a corporate principal of recruitment” on the basis of a given former security service, department, or group of veterans, and thus tended “to preserve their corporate identity and resemble privatized segments of the state defense and security ministries.”24  The ChSBs, far less numerous, were in fact security subdivisions of major firms, and in a few cases literally formed “private armies” of several thousand well-armed and trained men.  The ChSB of Gazprom, headed by a former KGB colonel, employed 13,000 men; the Moscow Chechen businessman Umar Dzhabrailov hired Gorbachev’s bodyguard unit virtually entire; the ChSB of Vladimir Gusinsky’s Most financial group was headed by Filipp Bobkov, the former KGB Deputy Chairman and creator of the 5. Main Directorate, and with its extensive surveillance and analytical means in fact comprised a private secret service.  In such a fragmented field, where it had to compete for power and resources not only with its rival agencies but also with its privatized components, the MB, at the start, was hardly in a position of strength.

1993 was dominated by the conflict between Boris Yeltsin and his Parliamentarian opposition, led by Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and the speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov.  The struggle began in earnest in March; it soon became clear, as Barannikov made several ambiguous statements, that the MB was not supporting Yeltsin.  On July 27, Yeltsin fired Barannikov for “violations of ethical standards.”  Deputy Security Minister Sergei Stepashin, Yeltsin’s closest supporter within the MB, proposed Col.-Gen. Nikolai Golushko, a veteran official of the 5. Main Directorate and the Chairman of the Ukrainian KGB from 1987 to 1991, to replace Barannikov.  As Stepashin was still chairing the Supreme Soviet Defense and Security Committee, he was able to block all discussion of the nomination by the restive parliament, and Golushko was named Acting Minister in August; Stepashin, for his pains, was promoted to First Deputy Security Minister.  A month later, the crisis reached a head.  On September 21, Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet; Rutskoi and Khasbulatov barricaded themselves inside the White House and, in an action widely perceived as a second coup attempt, declared the formation of a new government, within which Rutskoi nominated Barannikov as his Security Minister.  Yeltsin had already promoted Golushko to full Minister on September 18, and Golushko loyally, albeit ineffectively stood by him through the events.  As the crisis degenerated into an armed clash in the center of Moscow on October 3-4, the MB, which apparently had not anticipated the putschists would resort to violence, mostly stood aside, allowing them to return to the White House after their incursions into several strategic buildings; as Savostyanov later admitted, the MB “‘did not play its role in averting the events’ because of unspecified legal constraints and the lack of in-house power structures.”25  Barannikov on his side was of little help to Rutskoi: though he worked the phones frantically and claimed to have rallied 7,000 officials to the putsch, only eighteen former KGB officials in fact joined him.  Other agencies also remained passive: when ordered to storm the White House, the elite Alfa and Vympel units, subordinated to GUO’s Barsukov, openly refused.  In the end Yeltsin was saved by Barannikov’s old partner, the MVD’s Yerin, who ordered VV units to attack the White House, and who was rewarded in return with a Hero of Russia medal and a place on the Security Council.

Yeltsin, as soon as the putsch was over, initiated a series of measures to punish and weaken the agencies that had failed him, and which he blamed for the disaster.  On December 21, he signed a decree that abolished the MB and created a far weaker structure, the FSK (Federal Counterintelligence Service); this decree “was followed by radical reforms amounting to purges.”26  Korzhakov’s SBP (Presidential Security Service) had already on November 11 been taken out of GUO and made samostoyatelnyi, reporting directly to the President.  Alfa and Vympel were transferred to the MVD.  Vympel was renamed Special Designation Group “Vega,” and 345 out of its 350 highly trained officers resigned: 215 were reemployed by the FSK and other agencies, while the rest moved into private security, many to the ChOP “Argus” created by former Vympel senior commander Yuri Levitsky, others to a new ChOP named “Vympel-Chest’” (former Alfa commanders I. Orekhov and M. Golovatov also set up a chain of ChOPs, baptized “Alfa-A,” “Alfa-B,” “Alfa-7,” and “Alfa-Tverd”).27  

The MB was in effect gutted (see, again, Fig. 1).  It was downsized from 137,900 to 75,000 staff, with only 1,520 in the central apparatus; all officials were declared “provisionally employed” until certified by a special commission; of the top leadership, only 13 out 227 passed and received an attestation.  Many of the officers relieved of their duties were transferred to other agencies (SVR, FAPSI, GUO); several thousand went to the newly formed FSNP (Federal Tax Police Service), but 11,000 left state security permanently, to swell the ranks of the ChOPs, or of organized crime groups.

The change of status of the agency, from Ministry to Federal Service, removed it from all parliamentary control; the new FSK answered only to the President.  It was to be a pure information-collection agency, able only to observe and report, and as such it lost most of its operational branches. The Border Guards were separated out to form a samostoyatelnyi agency, the FPS (Federal Border Guards Service) under the leadership of General of the Army Andrei Nikolaev; though the FSK retained a directorate for the provision of counterintelligence to FPS, the FPS was granted its own Intelligence Directorate and the right to conduct intelligence work, giving it a broad capacity as a special service.  The Investigative Directorate, which drew its power from its right to send cases to court directly, without first handing them over to the General Procurator’s office, was now transferred to the control of the General Procuratura; a few months later, in the wake of Golushko’s departure, the FSK also lost the SIZO “Lefortovo,” which was given to MVD.  The MVD also got the MB’s antiterrorist and anti-organized crime directorates; the SigInt directorate was transferred to FAPSI, whose legal powers had already been boosted in February 1993, and which now employed, according to conflicting reports, either 53,000 or 120,000 staff.  When the new Duma, dominated by the Communists and Zhirinovsky’s LDPR supporters, amnestied the arrested putschists in February 1994, Yeltsin asked Golushko to keep them in prison illegally; Golushko refused and resigned.  He was replaced on March 3, 1994 by his First Deputy, Sergei Stepashin.28

While Stepashin would go a long way to restoring the FSK-FSB to a prominent position, the dominant spetssluzhba (“special service”) in 1994, and at least until 1996, was the SBP headed by Yeltsin’s old bodyguard and drinking crony, Aleksandr Korzhakov. Already by 1993, the SBP, which paid two to three times the salaries of the other services, had taken the cream of the KGB’s specialists; by the time the agency became samostoyatelnyi, it employed 750 elite staff.29  Korzhakov rapidly exceeded his limited mandate, using his proximity to Yeltsin to turn the SBP into a key player on the Russian political scene, with its own interests not always strictly subordinated to Yeltsin’s.  The SBP’s new statutes, under the guise of protecting the President, gave it the right to conduct intelligence and counterintelligence activities, and Korzhakov took full advantage of this, infiltrating his people into nearly every federal ministry and accumulating, through surveillance and wiretaps, vast amounts of kompromat (compromising information) on most major politicians, businessmen and security officials; the widespread corruption in the government gave him easy access to this “political currency.”30  His business activities were innumerable: at one point, for instance, he placed an SBP official at the head of the National Sports Fund, a purely commercial structure that had been granted tax exemptions on imports by Yeltsin and could thus rapidly generate massive profits.  Under the guise of counterintelligence provision, he also succeeded in gaining control for the SBP, in part or in whole, over three vital and highly lucrative spheres: the export of oil, arms, and precious metals and stones.  This was effected by taking control over the distribution of export quotas to private companies and even by establishing an SBP shell company for the export of oil, Rostoplivo.  Additionally, in February 1995, the SBP established its supervision over the state precious-metal export company, Roskomdragmet, “officially, to prevent illegal exports of precious state resources, in practice, simply to establish the SBP’s monopoly over this business.”31  Many allege that thanks to this system Korzhakov diverted vast sums, either for the SBP or for himself; it also gave rise to some highly publicized incidents, such as when under the pretext of fighting smuggling (normally the province of Customs, the Border Guards or other agencies) the SBP confiscated $3 million worth of jewels which had arrived in Moscow’s Sheremetevo-2 airport from London.  

Korzhakov’s and the SBP’s status only continued to rise.  On July 27, 1995, at the same time as GUO, the SBP was incorporated into the Presidential Administration, of which Korzhakov was thus made a Deputy Head.  A few days earlier he had convinced Yeltsin to appoint his close friend Mikhail Barsukov, the head of GUO (whose son married Korzhakov’s daughter), as director of FSB in place of Sergei Stepashin (see below). The two men, together with First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, came to form a “troika” of hawks that virtually ran the country for the following year.  “Not a single appointment, even the tiniest personnel change, could be made without Korzhakov,” says Emil Pain, an advisor to Yeltsin.  “Anyone who wanted to get something in the Kremlin first had to go and bow before him.”32  Korzhakov was granted even more extensive surveillance means, gaining the use though not the direct control of the former KGB 7. and 12. Directorates (surveillance and eavesdropping).  On March 23, 1996, he was named to Yeltsin’s re-election staff, for which the SBP allegedly set up a secret, off-the-books fund.  The height of his power came in April-May 1996, when he was made First Assistant to the President with a rank of Federal Minister, and actively increased the placement of his own men in key positions throughout the government.  His fall however followed swiftly and dramatically.  Yeltsin, after the first round of the elections, found himself forced, in order to defeat the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov in the second round, to come to terms with his rival General Aleksandr Lebed and to put a lid on the conflict in Chechnya (which the “troika” had actively fostered and encouraged).  When Korzhakov triggered a public scandal by arresting and exposing two men working for the head of Yeltsin’s campaign, Anatoly Chubais, caught transporting a half-million dollars in cash, Yeltsin seized the opportunity to abruptly sack his old friend along with Barsukov and Soskovets, on June 20, 1996.  (See Fig. 2 for an organigram of the FSO/SBP after the fall of Korzhakov).

Korzhakov’s activities during his brief period at the summit of power vividly illustrate the blurring of the public and the private sphere in post-Soviet Russia: it is impossible, in most of his actions, to distinguish between the interests of the Russian State, of Boris Yeltsin, of the SBP as a bureaucratic entity, or of Korzhakov himself.  One should not however reduce Korzhakov’s activities to mere corruption: the issue is better addressed in terms of patrimonialism, a system under which an individual such as Korzhakov gains and maintains power through his ability to capture and redistribute resources, be they jobs, money, information, favors, or privileges.33  The ability to display and use force is of course another key component of the system.  The infamous “faces in the snow” incident that occurred on December 2, 1994 provides a very clear illustration of these dynamics.  The story, as recounted by V. Volkov, can briefly be summarized as such: Yeltsin, upset at Vladimir Gusinsky’s alliance with his political rival Luzhkov, secretly ordered Korzhakov to put pressure on Gusinsky, “to create an atmosphere around him as if the earth were burning under his feet.”34  At that time, the ChSB Most, 1,500 men strong, regularly displayed its force publicly when escorting Gusinsky through Moscow in a fleet of armored vehicles packed with armed men; under Bobkov’s leadership, it was actively collecting kompromat on the enemies and rivals of Gusinsky, whose HQ was located inside Luzhkov’s City Hall.  The SBP, when it went after Gusinsky, decided symbolically to target the office of ChSB Most.  After following Gusinsky from his dacha to the office, SBP officers “performed a typical naezd” (in the language of organized crime groups, a “run-over,” an often brutal demonstration of force employed to intimidate businessmen).35  Gusinsky’s security men were beaten and forced to lie face down in the snow for over two hours while the SBP aggressively searched the premises.  Terrified, Gusinsky first called the Moscow RUBOP; when a team arrived, the SBP men showed their identification and the RUBOP officers promptly left.  Gusinsky then called the head of the Moscow UFSK, Yevgeny Savostyanov, who immediately sent another team that started shooting in the air as soon as they arrived.  A massacre was narrowly averted; SBP reinforcements then poured in and disarmed and arrested the FSB men.  Savostyanov, whose position had already been weakened by failures in Chechnya, was sacked, and Gusinsky was forced to flee abroad until 1996, when he returned to help with Yeltsin’s re-election.  As Volkov writes:

This discussion leads us to a broader digression, on what Volkov has called “the use of force in the making of Russian capitalism.”37  In the past few years a body of work has emerged both in Russia and the West that has made broad conceptual strides in redefining the nature of Russian “organized crime.”38  This approach, which drew its concepts from research on the Sicilian mafia, has rejected the traditional normative approach (in which “criminal” is defined as whatever is against the law) in favor of a more functionalist approach seeking to define the specific roles of different groupings within the overall economic and political system.  Thus Volkov prefers to speak of “the violence-managing agency,” be it a crime group, a ChOP, a ChSB, or a government agency.  He defines krysha, “the roof,” as “agencies that provide institutional services to economic agents irrespective of the legal status of providers and clients. … legal status is secondary to type of action and function in the economic realm.”39

The specificity of Russian “organized crime” is linked to the origins of Soviet, and then Russian capitalism.  Before Gorbachev’s law on cooperatives, in 1987, any form of private business was considered, from a legal and normative point of view, “organized crime,” and fell under the purview of the GUBKhSS: it is thus not entirely surprising that organized crime, in turn, came to play a central role in the building of Russian capitalism.  When small businesses were finally allowed to emerge, they were obliged to function within a legal system that lacked the most elementary framework for capitalist activity.  It was at this point that groups of young thugs, usually either veterans of Afghanistan or sportsmen based around a given club, stepped in to offer “protection.”  While the initial approach was essentially predatory – the groups milked the businesses for everything they were worth and moved on – it was rapidly made to evolve.  Some groups, as the Soviet Union declined and then collapsed, understood that far more money could be made if the businesses they “protected” were allowed to thrive, grow, and continue paying a regular cut; as the system grew more sophisticated, these groups placed their own people on the boards or in various departments of businesses, or simply set up their own firms, thus fully “legalizing” their activities.  In fact, the “violence-managing agencies” in the space of a very few years came to fill a crucial niche in the developing capitalist economy, a niche that does not exist in the West but was created here by the legal vacuum.  They provided services absolutely vital for business’s ability to operate.  The most important of these were contract enforcement and debt recovery: in the absence of a functioning court system able to render and enforce judgment, businesses had to rely on a “violence-managing agency” to back up their business deals and ensure their partners would respect them.  Krysha thus fast came to mean much more than simply “protection.”  The groups that insisted on maintaining a predatory approach soon withered away or were eliminated; as the services provided by the kryshy proved both crucial and highly lucrative, competition surged, and only those “organized crime groups” that could move on to the next level survived beyond the very short term.  

Already in the very early years who protected a business became a crucial component in the ability to do business; businessmen would not conclude deals with each other before knowing – and verifying – who their respective kryshy were; often the kryshy would meet before the deal was concluded to trade guaranties.  Yet in spite of their dynamic approach organized crime groups proved unable to maintain a monopoly on the provision of protection for more than a very short period.  After the March 1992 law legalized security agencies, these immediately became major players on the protection market.  The law of supply and demand soon improved the position of business, now able to shop around for a krysha rather than be forced to accept the offer of the first group that walked through the door.  The ChOPs created by former siloviki had definite advantages over organized crime groups, or even over the ChOPs set up by organized crime groups to provide a legal framework for their activities: ex-KGB or MVD officials, by maintaining contacts and good relations with former colleagues still in official positions, were able to offer a broader range of services to their clients than the unofficial groups.  Businesses now expected their krysha to do a great many different things for them: solve problems with the tax authorities or the fire inspection, provide information on competitors, secure loans, and so forth.

Several different types of “violence-managing” agencies thus came to compete on the protection market.  Broadly speaking, by the second half of the 1990s, they fell into five categories:

• Organized crime groups, often operating through one or several ChOPs.

• ChOPs created by former siloviki from the KGB, GRU, MVD, or another agency.

• The ChSBs of major corporations, often built up by a former high-level silovik with good contacts within the security bureaucracies.

• Branches of the security bureaucracy legally mandated to provide protection services.  The most important is the MVD’s OVO, the Department for Extradepartmental Protection, set up in August 1992 on the basis of a pre-existing Soviet structure, which employs 367,000 guards, of which 147,000 are policemen.  OVO’s capability not just to guard offices, factories or sites but to provide a broad range of administrative “services” make it a major player on the krysha market.

• Branches of the security bureaucracy that provide krysha on an extra-legal, privatized basis.  Korzhakov’s SBP is the most famous example.  The main player after his fall, whose influence peaked in 1998-2000, was the Moscow RUBOP.  The FSB’s DEB (4. Department for Economic Security) has also been an important actor, as well as FAPSI.

A pattern thus emerged which has been analyzed by the Russian sociologist Vadim Radaev: by the end of the 1990s, he argues, one could establish a typology of businesses according to the type of krysha they employ.40  The more powerful or developed a business, the higher in the chain his krysha.  Thus, according to Radaev’s data, organized crime groups have been entirely forced out of the high-end market by their more powerful official competitors, and mostly only provide krysha for vulnerable small businesses.  Medium-sized businesses such as regional privatized state enterprises will frequently have good links to the local authorities and will work with an institution such as OVO for their protection needs.  Private conglomerates or the biggest state enterprises will have their own ChSB, and often in addition will be able to call upon a branch of a major security agency, on a private basis, in case of need (Gusinsky’s recourse to RUBOP and the Moscow UFSB in December 1994 is a good example).

All the security organs of the Russian Federation are now, to some extent, involved in the krysha market, whether officially or not.  The FSB, we will see further, has set up a body to coordinate its relationship to the major ChOPs born out of the organs.  Though the “Wild West” climate of the early 1990s is over, the notion of krysha, and of the correlative economic interests of the security structures, must still consistently be taken into account when attempting to analyze their actions.

The disastrous conflict launched in Chechnya at the end of 1994 by a physically diminished Boris Yeltsin and his siloviki cronies has played a major role in defining the evolution of the Russian security organs.  It has proved the major security challenge of the Russian Federation in its brief existence; it has, in spite of all their failures, brought vast additional means to the security services; and in the end it has affected the very nature of the Russian state, placing it squarely in the hands of representatives of these services, whose vision of the world and the state remains profoundly shaped by their professional background.

In 1994, as tensions rose between Moscow and Groznyi and as the clan of the “hawks,” Korzhakov, Soskovets, and Grachev, increasingly pressed Yeltsin for a forceful solution, the FSK remained a highly weakened player.  Nine months after his nomination and just two weeks before the first Russian tanks rolled into Chechnya, Stepashin – whose own attempt to solve “the Chechen problem” by backing a Chechen Opposition assault on Groznyi had just failed – admitted in an interview that “the decisions taken … to make the FSK a purely information gathering service were premature.”41  Stepashin, from the moment he took office, had started working to reverse these decisions.  He had a few minor successes in his first year: in June 1994, he secured the creation of a crime-fighting division; by the fall, he had obtained the return of the Investigative Directorate from the General Procuratura, and by the end of the year that of the anti-terrorism and the organized-crime directorates from MVD.  Stepashin also tried to boost the confidence, shaken by the purges, of the FSK’s staff, by signing a collective agreement with the FSK’s trade union organizations “protecting the economic and social interests of the civilian personnel,” which guaranteed that “all matters related to changing the FSK structure, its reorganization, and downsizing, will also be considered by the service’s management with direct participation of the trade union and subdivision management, and with mandatory participation of trade union committee representatives.”42  

But in regards to Chechnya the FSK retained practically no capacity.  From the moment they had taken power and declared independence, Dzhokhar Dudaev and his supporters had abolished the Chechnya-Ingushetia UKGB and launched an all-out war on its stay-behind assets.  Dudaev’s DGB (Department of State Security), headed by Sultan Geliskhanov, a former traffic policeman, effectively succeeded in wiping out the Russian security services’ capacity in Chechnya; Stepashin publicly conceded that “the old KGB administration in Chechnya had been ‘completely annihilated.’”43 By 1994, the FSK as well as the GRU were only able to work in Chechnya through the armed Opposition to Dudaev, entrenched in their bastions north of the Terek and in Urus-Martan.  The Federals’ SigInt capacity was also extremely weak due to the collapse in funding of the agencies concerned.  Nonetheless Stepashin and the FSK thought the Dudaev problem could be easily solved.  As Gall & de Waal write,

Stepashin thus cooked up a plan in the fall of 1994 to have Dudaev overthrown by his own opposition, with armored backing provided by the FSK.  He delegated the operation to his Deputy Director Yevgeny Savostyanov, who hired 47 tank crews on a contract basis from two divisions based near Moscow, without even their commanding officers being informed (the C-in-C of the Kantemirov Division later resigned because of this).  The attack would take the form of a pincer movement, with 17 tanks moving out of Urus-Martan under the command of Bislan Gantemirov, and the other 30 coming down from the North via Tolstoi-Yurt to support the forces of Ruslan Labazanov and Umar Avturkhanov.  The operation was a disastrous failure, and a number of Russian tank crews were captured alive by Dudaev’s forces and exhibited on television, publicly embarrassing the Russians who had denied providing any support to the Opposition.  The fiasco severely undermined Savostyanov, who was sacked a week later in the wake of the “faces-in-the-snow” episode.  Stepashin survived, but was unable to influence the subsequent course of events.  The Army, led by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who famously declared that “if the Army had fought, we would have needed one parachute regiment to decide the whole affair in two hours,” now took the lead.  When Yeltsin, with the support of his Security Council,45 ordered the use of force “to reestablish constitutional order in Chechnya,” the Armed Forces prepared to invade.  Though they deployed overwhelming strength, 40,000 men backed by columns of armor, and rapidly wiped out Dudaev’s small Air Force, the attack on Groznyi, the first major combat operation of the post-Soviet Russian Army, turned into a catastrophic debacle.  On New Year’s Eve, 6,000 Russian troops supported by 350 armored units moved into the city.  Dudaev’s forces, making brilliant use of shoulder-held RPGs in infantry tactics pioneered a week earlier by the defender of Bamut, Khizir Kachukaev, destroyed over 200 tanks and APCs, killing an estimated 1,500 Russians while themselves suffering only light casualties.  Though sustained bombardments and relentless assaults would force the Chechens out of Groznyi a month later, the military’s failure humiliated Russia and exposed its force structures’ glaring insufficiencies for the world to see.  Coordination between the different services was disastrous; though the three power ministers – Grachev, Yerin and Stepashin – were all in Mozdok to supervise operations, no combined joint HQ had been set up.  The intelligence failure, already evident in November, was glaring, and each agency tried to blame the other.  Legally, the responsibility lay with the FSK, as the Army’s GRU was not allowed to conduct military intelligence inside Russia, and the MVD had no intelligence-gathering capacity.46  In December, the FSK had set up a Special Operations Directorate in territory controlled by the Opposition, headed by General Dmitry Gerasimov, a former GRU officer who had also headed Vympel for a time.  This directorate, which originally started with only 17 men, had to frantically recruit new staff, and beg hardware off the GRU and sleeping bags and ammunition from the Army’s 8^th Corps.  It formed the nucleus of the FSK’s Chechen Directorate, set up at the start of 1995, which grew into one of its largest territorial bodies.47

In spite of the FSK’s frantic attempts to boost its capacity and of its own legal limitations, the lead role in intelligence collection in Chechnya was taken, de facto, by the Armed Forces’ GRU.  The GRU is the 2. Main Directorate of the General Staff (GenShtab) of the Russian Armed Forces; its head (Col.-Gen. Fedor Ladygin during the first Chechen conflict, replaced by Col.-Gen. Valentin Korabelnikov in 1997) reports directly to the Chief of the General Staff.  (It should be noted that prior to reforms recently and painfully imposed by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, the GenShtab planned and directed combat operations independently from the Defense Ministry, though Grachev often directly meddled with planning during the first Chechen conflict.)  The GRU remains one of the most secretive security organs of the Russian Federation, and little is known about its exact composition or the full range of its abilities.  The only available organigram is based on information provided by a Soviet-era GRU officer, Vladimir Rezun,48 who defected in 1989, and is thus seriously outdated and does not reflect either post-Soviet reorganizations or the capacity developed in respect with Chechnya (it is nonetheless, as a curiosity, presented here as Fig. 3).  

The FAS website presents additional incomplete information as to more recent organizational elements:

• 4. Directorate, responsible for the United States, Latin America, Canada, and England

• 5. Operational Directorate: “…functions include first of all the collection and processing of information relating to encroachments on the state order of the RF.” (Moskovskiy Komsomolets 26.04.95, p.1)

• 16. Spetsnaz Brigade: Reported to be “training mercenaries on a commercial basis.” (Russian Television Network, 19.10.94); Chuchkogo Spetsnaz Brigade

• 22. Spetsnaz Brigade: Participated in Pervomayskaya operation (January 1996)

• 10. Separate Special Purpose Brigade; Analysis and Decryption Service (Ground, Air, Naval); Cadres Directorate; Center for Space