MAKING OF A NEO-KGB STATE
Last week’s The Economist focused on Vladimir Putin’s political power over the Russian state with a collective of ex-KGB spooks. Might there be parallel similarities of such a power system in a post-Raul Cuba?
When Mr Putin was plucked from obscurity to become first Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister and later his successor as Russia’s president, few in the West had heard of this former KGB officer, who had briefly been head of the FSB, the KGB’s post-Soviet successor. Just before he became president, Mr Putin told his colleagues that a group of FSB operatives, “dispatched under cover to work in the government of the Russian federation”, was successfully fulfilling its task. It was probably a joke. Yet during his two terms since then, men from the FSB and its sister outfits have indeed grabbed control of the government, economy and security forces. Three out of four senior Russian officials today were once affiliated to the KGB and other security and military organisations.
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Over the two terms of Mr Putin’s presidency, that “group of FSB operatives” has consolidated its political power and built a new sort of corporate state in the process. Men from the FSB and its sister organisations control the Kremlin, the government, the media and large parts of the economy—as well as the military and security forces. According to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a quarter of the country’s senior bureaucrats are siloviki—a Russian word meaning, roughly, “power guys”, which includes members of the armed forces and other security services, not just the FSB. The proportion rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included. These people represent a psychologically homogeneous group, loyal to roots that go back to the Bolsheviks’ first political police, the Cheka. As Mr Putin says repeatedly, “There is no such thing as a former Chekist.”
The turn of political and economic power from Russian oligarchs to spooks does fortell what Cuba might look like once its future political/economic system goes through its own structuring post-Raul.
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