The FSB is the most obvious descendent of the KGB and chief inheritor of its domestic functions. It was formed on the basis of the KGB directorates for counterintelligence, military counterintelligence, transportation security, ideology and dissent, economic crime, and surveillance. In its first four years, it was renamed three times (Ministry of Security, Federal Counter-Intelligence Service, Federal Security Service), and was declared “unreformable” by a Yeltsin decree in December 1993, an act likely stimulated by the agency’s fencesitting during the September-October 1993 crisis. Until the Putin era, no individual served as director for more than two years in post-Soviet Russia.87 In contrast, Nikolay Patrushev became director in the fall of 1999 and occupied the position throughout Putin’s presidency. Patrushev was a close Putin ally who shared a KGB and St. Petersburg background with Putin.
Despite the turmoil of the Yeltsin years, the FSB expanded its responsibilities and legal mandate throughout the 1990s and under Putin became one of the most powerful state agencies. Current estimates suggest about 350,000 personnel work for the FSB, including the large border guards service that was autonomous for most of the 1990s but reincorporated into the FSB in Z003.88 The elite Alpha and Vympel special forces units are part of the FSB. More important than the specific armed units it commands are the FSB’s broad functions. It is simultaneously an intelligence, security, and law enforcement body. Its responsibilities include counterintelligence, terrorism and extremism, border security, economic crime and corruption, and information security. In addition to absorbing the Federal Border Service (FPS), it also took over many of the personnel and functions of the Federal Agency for Government Communication and Information (FAPSI) in 2003. The FSB was thus the big winner of the March 2003 reorganization of the power ministries, gaining back key powers and instruments it had lost in the early 1990s.89 The importance of the FSB as a domestically focused state coercive agency renders it a key actor throughout the book, along with the MVD.
World History
