“Virtually all key positions in Russian political life — in government and the economy — are controlled by the so-called “siloviki,” a blanket term to describe the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies. “
The unexpected replacement of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov by former Federal Financial Monitoring Service Director Viktor Zubkov is the latest consolidation of this group’s grip on power in Russia. Although Zubkov is not an intelligence officer by background, he has become one de facto during his years at the Financial Monitoring Service, and he has intimate knowledge of where the country’s legal and illegal assets are to be found.
Never in Russian or Soviet history has the political and economic influence of the security organs been as widespread as it is now.
The core of the siloviki group, led by former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Vladimir Putin himself, comprises about 6,000 security-service alumni who entered the corridors of power during Putin’s first term. Now, as Putin’s second term winds down, their clout is virtually unassailable.
- Victor Yasmann, September 17, 2007 (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). Link.
“Russia’s Espiocrats”
“The plutocrats have been tamed, and replaced by a vast horde of spies. Much as this ominous prospect gives me pause, I have to think that maybe the siloviki are an *improvement* over the former semibankyrshina. Those moguls were a deeply unpleasant lot, and think what you may of Putin’s spy petrocracy with its giant bombs, oil blackmail and hideously poisoned dissidents, he is hugely popular with the general Russian population. ”
- Bruce Sterling @ Wired: Link.
“Ex-spook cult now running most of Russian politics”
“Russian political life has been usurped by “siloviki” — ex-spies — who have apparently seized power from the small network of hyper-rich plutocratic “bankers” who rose to power after the Wall came down. The siloviki are a tight mafiyeh whose methods include high-profile international assassination of defectors (the assassins walk free and then run for high office).
- Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing: Link.
“What motivates these so-called siloviki? “
In part, the wish for revenge on those who challenged them in the early 1990s, especially after the abortive KGB coup of August 1991. Greed may be the most powerful motive: some Kremlin insiders have hugely enriched themselves in the past decade, and corruption may be worse even than in the later Yeltsin years. But the new elite also has an ideology of sorts. They see the break-up of the Soviet Union as, in Mr Putin’s words, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Capitalising on a widespread sense that Russia has been humiliated, they want to create as mighty a state as the Soviet Union once was. They see the West as a foe bent on stopping them.
- The Economist: Aug 23rd 2007 Link.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and His Style of Democracy”
In his first decade as a KGB agent, Putin’s job was to help prevent change. In 1985, only months before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in power and started to advocate glasnost and perestroika, Putin was assigned to the Soviet Union’s hardline ally East Germany. True, it was not “exile”; but psychologically, Putin’s isolation in Dresden may have been experienced as emigration. Like a true emigrant, he kept his home alive, sweet and unchanged, in his heart: the Soviet rodina, the place of his youth, his parents - and his tongue.
While his generation personally experienced the erosion of Soviet power, Putin spent the Gorbachev years in an East German time-bubble, isolated both from a Russian society in transition and (as a KGB bureaucrat) from his crumbling host country as well. He missed the moments of awakening, the years full of hope as the Soviet empire crumbled, when millions took to the streets and democracy was a dream. It was only after the fall of Soviet power that he returned from Germany to his native St Petersburg.
To this day, Putin seems to be nostalgic for the pre-Gorbachev USSR - like the people of a decade older than him, who have been unable to make the transition. He has even reinstated some of its insignia, such as the Soviet anthem and the red banner for the military. And his team consists mostly of so-called siloviki, former Soviet military and security-apparatus officers who also speak the language of the past.
- Vichar Bhatt: Link.
“Siloviki Versus Oligarchy”
Russia today is ruled by Vladimir Putin’s siloviki, former K.G.B. men and military officers who have the nation by the throat. That power-hungry mafia (the Russian word is rooted in “power”) brooks no opposition from either the small band of democratic reformers or the political leftovers from the Yeltsin regime.
Only one power center posed a threat to the siloviki’s domination of Russian life. This was the group of oligarchs, who became the super-rich by ripping off the old Soviet Union’s natural resources when Communism collapsed.
The K.G.B.’s Putin came to power by making a deal: we of the siloviki run the country, and you oligarchs can keep your ill-gotten gains — provided you cut us in on some of the money and stay out of politics.
- William Safire @ New York Times, November 5, 2003: Link.
“Silovik (силови́к, plural: siloviks or siloviki, силовики́, from a Russian word for power)”
“[A] Russian politician from the old security or military services, often the KGB and military officers or other security services who came into power in the terms of Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.
Opinions concerning siloviki in Russia are polarized. Some argue that the siloviki have Russia by the throat and threaten the fragile democracy; their power is immense, and they tend to favor a statist ideology at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.
Another point of view in Russia is that the siloviki are an appropriate counterweight to the Russian oligarchs, who might otherwise loot Russia and subvert its government.
- Wikipedia: Link.
It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this “compromise” bill is the telecom amnesty part. It’s true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill’s expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.