Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, March 25, 2011

Money and power in Russia

Joseph Schottland of Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California suggested this book review to teachers who subscribe to the College Board's AP Government and Politics electronic discussion group. Then Kevin James repeated the suggestion in his Albany High School Comparative Government blog. He described its potential value this way: "An article in the 16 December 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books examines the extent to which the Russian state is dominated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and reveals the brutal conflict within the FSB for power and money." I second both recommendations, with some reservations.

The article is a book review. It's over a year old. And reviewer Amy Knight pretty quickly gets into tracing the details of individuals involved in the rivalries among the siloviki and away from the "big picture" issues of importance to AP students. The book being reviewed and the review are trying, with better sources than most of us have, to describe what's going on inside the black bag that is Russian politics.

The Concealed Battle to Run Russia

Despite their professed mutual respect, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, and his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, apparently cannot agree on one question—which of them will be running for the Russian presidency in March 2012…

As it has in earlier contests over leadership, the country’s all-powerful Federal Security Service (FSB) is bound to have a crucial part in deciding who will be the next president…

Although Putin had the backing of powerful oligarchs like Boris Berezhovsky (who later became one of his fiercest enemies), his main power base was the FSB and he set about reversing the Yeltsin-era reforms that had weakened its authority…

Putin filled the ranks of the FSB leadership with Pitertsi—former colleagues from St. Petersburg. He also gave friends from the security services key positions in other law enforcement agencies, as well as in the Kremlin and in state corporations, thus creating a new power base of officials—commonly referred to as the siloviki (“strong men”), with loyalties to the security services and to Putin himself…

Not surprisingly, the siloviki see themselves as elite. As Russian economist Andrei Illarionov put it: “Their training instills in them a feeling of being superior to the rest of [the] populace, of being the rightful ‘bosses’ of everyone else.”…

[T]he FSB is in several ways more powerful and more of a threat to individual rights than the KGB was during the Soviet era. The KGB took its orders from the Communist Party, which always kept a close watch on its operations. In contrast, although both Putin and Medvedev have influence over the FSB, it is in many respects its own master…

Because its main concern is preserving the current political regime, the FSB focuses its efforts on protecting the Kremlin’s vast economic interests, suppressing legitimate political opposition, and ensuring the Kremlin’s control over the press and television through intimidation and violence…