The largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War sheds light on the nature of the regime led by Vladimir Putin and the solid fusion between a criminal world and a caste originating from the security services of the USSR, of which the president was a member.
Among the Russian citizens who returned to their homeland, convicted murderer Vadim Krasikov is at the centre of the delicate mix of the exchange. The reception he received confirms that the Russian system functions as an amalgamated structure around the so-called silovikias the set of Defense, Security and Public Order bodies of the country, and its members, are called.
For shooting dead a former Chechen independence commander, Krasikov was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany. Tiergarten murderer – as he is known for the Berlin park where he performed in August 2019 – was received at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport with a red carpet, an honour guard, and a hug and friendly greeting from Putin, who did his best to free him, thus following the motto of not abandoning his own.
Never before has Putin gone so far in publicly identifying himself with one of those figures who, inside and outside Russia, riddle and poison those who are perceived as dangerous enemies of the system.
Krasikov worked for Alfa, a special unit created in 1974 to fight terrorism and attached to the FSB (the federal security service, successor to the Soviet KGB), and has acquaintances among Putin’s active bodyguards, according to his press secretary, Dmitri Peskov. What Peskov did not say is that the returnee had a criminal record in Russia, since, together with two other officers, he was accused of ordering the murder of a businessman in the Karelia region in 2007 and, in 2014, he was wanted for the murder of another businessman in Moscow, according to data registered by Interpol from the Russian Ministry of the Interior.
In February, Putin referred to Krasikov as a man who “for patriotic reasons killed a bandit in a European capital.” Now, the “patriot” will be decorated for it. To understand the system that hails him as a hero, we must go back to the great transformations that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new global coexistence between the two blocs that had been at odds for decades created by the perestroika severely affected key social sectors of the Soviet system: hundreds of thousands of siloviki were demobilized and returned from their garrisons in Eastern Europe, hundreds of arms factories were dismantled and converted to produce civilian consumer goods. The economic system based on the arms industry had collapsed, but the Russian model for a peaceful new world remained in its embryonic state and even declined.
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In the early 1990s, many career officers discharged from the Armed Forces had to reinvent themselves from their unemployed status; they survived by working as pirate taxi drivers, bodyguards for the nouveau riche, arms dealers, mercenaries or volunteers in the still-smoldering armed conflicts, such as those between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh or those between Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Georgia.
The mafia and power structures in Russia were formed in this breeding ground. They were staffed by people who simultaneously acted as guardians of order and as bandits. Some, the most clever, rose to the top in the economy, politics and state administration. Others were content with guns to earn their bread and all coexisted in the same system.
With Putin’s arrival to the presidency, the siloviki They have multiplied throughout the state structure, and today they are in ministries, public and private companies, banks and financial institutions, and they are the ones who underpin and ensure the authoritarian and repressive character of today’s Russia. At least 13 of Putin’s bodyguards occupy important positions in the Russian power structures. One of the best known is Alexei Diumin, who, after being governor of the Tula province, has returned to the president’s entourage as his assistant and as Secretary of State of Russia.
After Stalin’s death, the siloviki had a place in the structure of the USSR under the control and direction of the Communist Party. With the disappearance of that state, these services, merged with judges, prosecutors and politicians, became an uncontrolled caste that uses the state for its own benefit. This phenomenon was referred to in 2007 by the clairvoyant Viktor Cherkesov, then head of the Russian Drug Control Service. Cherkesov, a Chekist (a veteran of the security services), was concerned about the way in which his fellow workers had evolved, who, according to him, were the only ones capable of ensuring the unity of the State after the end of the USSR. In the newspaper KommersantCherkesov urged his comrades to overcome their closed “corporatism,” to create binding state norms for all (rather than arbitrary regulations), and to move toward a normal “civil society.” He warned that the “privileged elite” of which he himself was a part risked turning into a “swamp” like the “worst Latin American dictators” if it delayed the pending transition. “The caste is destroyed from within when warriors become merchants,” he warned.
Methods of the USSR
Today the siloviki They set the tone for Russian politics with the methods they learned in the USSR and then perfected in a climate of resentment, greed and a lack of a vision of the future in line with the challenges of modernity.
On the other hand, the arrival of the dissidents released in Russia in the West also highlights a reality that is perhaps little known and appreciated: that of Russian citizens who, by their civic conscience, their courage and their sense of responsibility, are different from the crowd that ignores the repression of their fellow citizens. In his press conference after their release, the politician Ilya Yashin said that during his transfers from one prison to another during his captivity, he happened to meet “anonymous people” imprisoned for a comment or a phone call. “These are political prisoners who are outside our field of observation. These people are in huge numbers. They have no hope because nobody knows about them,” he said. Memorial, the human rights organization banned in Russia, gives a list of 1,532 political prisoners of various categories.
Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, another of the freed dissidents, spoke of thousands. One of the latest cases is that of Pavel Kushnir, a 39-year-old pianist and pacifist imprisoned for criticising the war and accused of inciting terrorism. Kushnir died on 29 July as a result of a hunger strike in a cell in the Russian Far East. He was an unknown, whose philosophical and poetic reflections on social networks had only half a dozen followers. It is an opportunity to reflect on the deep Russia and on Yashin’s words.
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