Institute of Modern Russia

December 25, 2010

Many policy experts point out that the presidential campaign in Russia has already started. In the last decade Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has become the most powerful organization in the country that can influence the elections. With its dark recent history one can only imagine what actions FSB is going to undertake to preserve the current political regime.

Recently published book by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB could not come out more timely. With a little more than a year before the elections, the question who is going to be the next Russian president – Medvedev or Putin – becomes the key point of political agenda. In that context the reasons for how FSB has evolved over the past decade into an organization with enormous political and economic influence that is bound to have a crucial part in deciding who will be the next president, are thoroughly explored (more on the book here).

More evidence on how far FSB may go to secure its power grip can be found in the documentary Blowing Up Russia, based on the internationally known bestseller Blowing Up Russia written by Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko. Both the book and the film have been banned in Russia. In November 2006 one of the authors of the book, Alexander Litvinenko, former lieutenant colonel of the Federal Security Services’ special organized crime unit, was poisoned in London with Polonium-210.  Several people, like Vladimir Golovlyov and Sergei Yushenkov, members of the Russian Parliament, and Yuri Schekochikhin, also a member of the Russian Parliament and the deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, who had assisted in publishing the book or smuggling tapes of the banned documentary into Russia, were killed as well.

This exceptional documentary reveals that Vladimir Putin, a former FSB chief, became president in 2000 as Boris Yeltsin’s designated heir and gained public support thanks to his image as a strongman who initiated the second war in Chechnya in response to the shocking apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities in September 1999. Kremlin blamed these acts of terror on the Chechen rebels though many said they were the work of the FSB and named FSB chief of the time and a longtime ally of Putin’s from St. Petersburg, Nikolai Patrushev, personally responsible for these horrifying actions.