The group of FSB personnel assigned to work undercover in the government has successfully carried out the first step of their assignment.
Vladimir Putin, December 199964
History has arranged it that the burden of upholding Russian statehood has to a considerable extent fallen on our shoulders.
Viktor Cherkesov, KGB veteran and Putin ally,
December 200465
Putin presumably was joking when he made the statement quoted in the epigraph at a reception for secret police personnel on December 20, 1999, less than two weeks before he would become acting president when Boris Yeltsin surprisingly resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999. But, as Russians like to say, in every joke there is an element of truth. And if Putin was joking, his close friend Cherkesov was deadly serious, arguing that Russia itself would perish if secret police alumni could not unify their forces.
During Putin’s tenure as president, he relied heavily on officials who had made their careers in law enforcement and military agencies. State coercive bodies, referred to in Russia as the power ministries (silovye ministerstva) or power structures (silovye struktury), rose in stature. Russian citizens, for example, believed that Putin represented the interests of the power ministries - more than big business (“the oligarchs”), “ordinary people,” the state bureaucracy, or society as a whole.66 The increased prominence of personnel from these agencies throughout government led the Russian sociologist Olga
Kryshtanovskaya to dub Putin’s regime a “militocracy.”67 The term used to label people with power ministry backgrounds, siloviki (singular = silovik), swept into general Western usage and became a staple of journalistic accounts.68
To set the stage for an investigation of the role of the power ministries in Russian state building, in this chapter, I explain what the power ministries are and who are the siloviki. By the power ministries I mean those state structures, such as ministries and agencies, in which some personnel generally wear uniforms and which possess armed units or formations. I outline their roots in the Soviet period and note the most important organizational changes in these structures. I discuss several important law enforcement structures that are often excluded from the power ministry category, but are important actors in this policy area and thus interact frequently with the power ministries. I also provide some basic information on personnel and budgets, demonstrating the increased stability and resources of these ministries under Putin.
I then move on to examining the “rise of the siloviki” story that became a standard framing device for thinking about Russian politics under Putin. In particular, I stress the importance of distinguishing between the use of the term “siloviki” to refer to a cohort of personnel, a “clan” in Kremlin politics, and a group of state ministries and organizations. These three usages I refer to as the cohort, clan, and corporate understandings of the term “siloviki.” These three different lenses suggest that the notion that the power ministries came to dominate Russian politics under Putin had an element of truth, but that there were important differences between the agencies and factions within this group of officials. An examination of the rise of the siloviki also demonstrates the importance of patrimonial bureaucratic practices in Russia.
Russia’s power ministries: an overview
Firm control over the organs of state coercion was a hallmark of Soviet rule. Three large, powerful agencies represented the core Soviet force-wielding institutions: the Committee on State Security (KGB), the Ministry of Defense (MO), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Under the control of the Communist Party, they were the ultimate physical embodiment of Soviet power.
The last years of the Soviet Union and much of the 1990s represented a period of decline and fragmentation for the power ministries. In addition to the territorial disintegration of these structures brought about by the Soviet collapse and the establishment of new state coercive bodies in the Soviet successor states, within Russia, these agencies were splintered into multiple.
FIGURE 2.1. Fragmentation and consolidation of the power ministries, 1986-2006.
Parts. The change was most important for the KGB, the organization that represented the greatest potential threat to the new, more liberal and democratic order, but it affected the Ministry of Defense and MVD as well. The three core organizations were divided into more than a dozen different power ministries. This fragmentation was somewhat reversed under Putin (see Figure 2.1).69 Overall, probably about 3 million people serve in Russia’s various power ministries and law enforcement structures (see Table 2.1).70
Main Power Ministries and Their Approximate Size, 2007
TABLE 2.1.
Ministry of Defense (MO) 1,027,000
Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) 1,230,000
Internal Troops (VV) 200,000
Special Forces (Spetsnaz - OMON & OMSN) 27,000
Federal Security Service (FSB) 350,000
Federal Border Service (FPS) 160,000
Special Forces units 4,000
Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Situations (MChS) 262,831
Civil Defense Troops 20,000
State Fire Service 220,000
Federal Customs Service (FTS) 61,352
Procuracy 53,837
Federal Service for Control of the Narcotics Trade (FSKN) 33,677
Federal Guard Service (FSO) 10,000-30,000 71 troops in the late 1990s, the number it remains at today.72 A key achievement of the early Yeltsin years was bringing home more than 1 million military personnel and their families from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The military also went through multiple internal reorganizations. For example, the main services and branches were reconfigured several times. Currently, there are three main services - army, navy, and air force - and three separate branches - strategic rocket forces, space forces, and airborne forces.73
A key issue for the Ministry of Defense in the post-Soviet period has been the issue of “military reform.” Despite the considerable downsizing and multiple reorganizations, critics contended that the Russian military under Yeltsin and Putin remained very Soviet in terms of personnel policies (especially conscription and the very weak non-commissioned officers [NCO] system), doctrine, and overall culture. More sympathetic analysts argued that Putin turned the military around after the virtual collapse of the 1990s with an influx of rubles and a series of careful reforms.74
In terms of civil-military relations, one notable continuity between Yeltsin and Putin is that, by Western democratic standards, civilian control is weak because of the small number of civilian personnel in the Ministry of Defense and the limited role that the parliament plays in defense oversight, including the budget.75 Throughout most of Putin’s presidency the Minister of Defense was Sergey Ivanov - like Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer from St. Petersburg. A purely civilian Minister of Defense, Anatoliy Serdyukov, was appointed in February 2007, but the Ministry of Defense continued to have a very small number of civilian employees and a huge staff of military officers. The appointment of Serdyukov, the former head of the Federal Tax Service, was certainly a bold move, given his lack of any relevant experience for the job, although he proved to be a more committed reformer than Ivanov was. Serdyukov owed his rapid political ascent to his St. Petersburg background, where he met Putin in the 1990s, when Serdyukov managed a furniture store.76
For the most part, the Russian army has maintained its orientation toward external defense. However, the Chechen wars necessitated a larger role in internal fighting than the military had experienced in decades. Thus, after this chapter, the military as an organization is a minor player in this book and largely drops out of the story until we turn to the North Caucasus in Chapter 7. Although the military is a key attribute of state power, because of its organizational culture and the limited role it plays in domestic politics, it is less important than law enforcement and security bodies in the evolution of state capacity and quality in post-Soviet Russia. At the same time, military officers are part of the larger cohort of siloviki placed in key positions throughout the country under Putin, and these individuals are included in calculations about the increase in power ministry personnel in government.
World History
