Separately, Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s National Security
Council Chief, claimed that several Russian generals have been fired. The
implications portend more suffering yet to come, but likewise opportunities to
increase pressure on the Russian leader from within.
Perhaps emulating Joseph Stalin, this could be the onset of
a purge and Putin’s desperate ploy to provide his domestic audience with a fall
guy for self-inflicted wounds. His call to rid Russia of ‘scum and
traitors’ as ‘a necessary self-purification of society’ might be Putin’s
theatrical unveiling of not merely a further crackdown against the Russian people,
but also his version of a ‘cultural revolution’ to bring further to heel those
around him on whom he has counted to take and maintain power. If I were one of
the oligarchs or siloviki, those from Russia’s intelligence services
who profiteered on Putin’s kleptocracy, I’d be more than just a little worried.
Putin’s rhetoric is victimization, villains and heroes. He
casts himself as the people’s champion. Putin chose the FSB, a machine
organized and conditioned to execute his autocratic vision and tell him what he
wants to hear — whether or not it conforms to reality.
Putin has relied on the FSB as his principal source of power
and protection, not merely at home, but also across the former Soviet states
over which he is determined to restore Russia’s dominion. His reorganization of
the FSB from the KGB’s ashes should have told us precisely the direction he
planned to take.
Putin’s outlook was made clear to me during my first meeting
as the CIA’s chief of station in a former Soviet state with the local FSB
chief, the “Rezident,” a general known for crushing the anti-Russian
rebellion in Chechnya. He looked the part of a film noir Cold War villain,
comically uncomfortable in the posh local restaurant. FSB protocol required
that he bring another officer; Moscow prohibited its officers from meeting
alone with the CIA.
Our contact was an education for me, a Russian-speaking CIA
operations officer who had worked the target beyond Russia’s borders. The FSB
chief wanted to let me know whose turf this was and how the game was played in
his house. While we toasted collaboration to fight the evils of terrorism, he
depicted the local officials as “members of his team” and the territory as an
extension of “greater Russia.”
Although the CIA’s natural official counterpart is Russia’s
Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, it was the Kremlin’s internal security
agency, the FSB that ran the show across the former Soviet states. Putin, while
FSB director in the 1990s, structured it as such, providing what had been the
KGB’s former counterintelligence directorate with a disproportionately larger
share of its parent organization’s power and influence. The KGB’s Foreign
Intelligence directorate would become the less muscular SVR.
The Fifth Service, or Operational Information Department,
was established as a new FSB branch to collect intelligence on the former
Soviet states and conduct “active measures” to assure they continued to
gravitate around Moscow’s orbit. That meant everything from propping up
pro-Kremlin regimes to neutralizing threats from those aiming to move their
countries closer to the West.
From 1999 to 2009, the Fifth Service grew and took charge of
Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya, where the FSB, not the army, called the shots.
It was the Moscow apartment building bombings in September 1999,
which killed 300 and wounded over 1,000 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to
justify that war, claiming the attacks were undertaken by Chechen militants.
The bombings, as it turned out, allegedly were the FSB’s handiwork
under Putin’s direction.
Putin does not trust the army, a sentiment likely validated
by its poor performance and his natural KGB-era disposition. The KGB spied on
Russia’s armed forces, to purge them of reactionary elements, often the
country’s best and most faithful officers. Putin’s FSB is modeled after
Stalin’s chekists, the secret police, his most trusted means to reconstitute a
Soviet-era structure that keeps the public’s civil liberties and those
possessing any power within his tent well in check.
My FSB counterpart preached the need to target families who
offered leverage against hooligans, as he referred to Russia’s enemies. Better
to preempt them early, he said, ridiculing America’s surgical approach. He
argued that such enemies were cockroaches whose nests had to be destroyed. The
pests turned out to be his own people. The general was ethnically Chechen.
Whatever value Putin might believe exists in casting aside
his most important supporters has no upside for him — but possibly does
for us. Colonel-General Beseda, the reportedly detained Fifth Service chief,
had been in his job for years and was the driver behind Putin’s strategy. He
literally knows where the bodies are buried. That Beseda’s reporting and
counsel likely was spun to align with Putin’s own warped view of the world and
misguided expectations for the invasion of Ukraine is a product of the Russian
leader’s own making. In such a system, who’s going to tell Putin anything
different? But having done Putin’s dirty work and placated his demand for
absolute obedience, only to be thrown to the wolves, Beseda’s removal will
reverberate throughout the Kremlin, even if Putin leaves in place his FSB boss,
Gen. Alexander Bortnikov.
Unlike Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and SVR Director
Sergey Narayshkin, Bortnikov might enjoy greater protection as a career
officer, rather than a professional politician. Bortnikov’s elimination could
pose too great a risk, given his network and command over the safety net on
whose survival Putin depends.
Putin’s desperation does not bode well for whatever guard
rails we would hope to constrain him. A purge undermines Putin’s image of
infallibility and strength and could precipitate threats from those who see his
desperation as an exploitable vulnerability, or an incentive to act before they’re
next. As he chances antagonizing the hammer and shield with which he maintains
power — the FSB — and mistrusting the army’s ability to win his war
abroad, the dynamic could draw him inward, forcing reconsideration of his
Ukrainian campaign.
Facilitating this dynamic with continued external pressure,
and perhaps internal meddling, is not without risk, but it may be the best
means with which to force Putin to pay a dear price for his actions. A purge of
scapegoats among those he has enriched, coming as Russia’s economy collapses,
could boomerang and create a byzantine backdrop of palace-plotting that compels
him to compromise or causes his fall. But insular and paranoid as Putin’s
decisions seem to suggest he has become, a darker alternative is his choosing
to go down with the ship — and possibly taking us with him.
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