Men in Black

July 8, 2016

Open-Wall---May-2016

Men in Black

In late June, a group of FSB Academy graduates celebrated the end of their studies by driving around central Moscow in twenty-eight luxury Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons – all in black.

When the video hit the net, a scandal ensued. An FSB general reprimanded his young colleagues for neglecting the basics of best practice conspiratorial conduct (the video was in fact posted online by the graduates themselves).

Russian netizens were soon debating the motivations of the young officers – were they just fooling about, or were they celebrating the fact that they’d finally broken into an elite club whose members can operate virtually without restraint in today’s Russia?

The column of identical black vehicles conveyed the clearest of messages to the country’s unnerved populace: we are power, we are might, we are preeminence. “[The video] presents the FSB as a sort of clan – a clan that spells danger for everyone else,” asserts Blue Bucket coordinator Pyotr Shkumatov [the Society of Blue Buckets is a protest movement that campaigns against the misuse of emergency blue flashers by officials on Russian roads]. Russian netizen Arick76 concurs: “Well, they didn’t exactly study at the academy instead of going to London just so they could sit on the tram along with the rest of you suckers! […] They see themselves as the country’s ‘enforcers,’ so driving round in these Mercs is a natural priority for them.”

In today’s Russia, FSB status is a kind of Aladdin’s lamp. You hanker for capital, inviolability and status? Your wish is my command.

That the FSB has its own business interests, and protects them using spectacularly illegal methods, has been a well-known fact for a very long time. Towards the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term, the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper published a high-profile investigation into the security forces’ informal policing of business: “The oil, gas and banking industries are all controlled by the chekists [state security organisations and personnel], as are other major business sectors. Police don’t even bother sticking their oar in. The way it works is simple. A spouse or relative (son, daughter, brother, uncle) of a senior chekist is brought onto the board of the bank (or corporation, or what have you). This is an expedient set-up for the bankers (or traders, etc): firstly, no one will put the squeeze on you, and, secondly, it allows them to discover any sort of information about their competitors through the chekist’s spouse or relative.”

But if the entrepreneur is unhappy with this arrangement, and refuses to share his spoils with the FSB, he faces the prospect of jail-time and, occasionally, even torture. Alexey Shmatko, a businessman from the city of Penza, suffered precisely this fate. His persecution was orchestrated by Nikolai Antonov, the deputy head of the Penza Region FSB Directorate. “I was summoned by Antonov, who proceeded to demand 50% ownership of the business […]. We’d just scored a major design and construction order. I refused, and that’s when my problems began. […] FSB personnel fabricated a criminal case against me; I was arrested, held in jail for two months, and tortured. […] They beat me and threatened me, and it wasn’t long before they were threatening my family. They broke my nose and jaw and injured my arms and legs.”

Alexey Shmatko insists that the FSB’s attitude to entrepreneurs is founded on nothing less than pure class hatred: “For them, businesspeople are just profiteers and crooks. They regard them not as any kind of elite, but as consumable material – as sheep that need shearing or slicing up.” Shmatko’s experience in Penza is representative of Russia as a whole: “The role played by the FSB is simply monstrous – they have everything under their thumb. Every major enterprise is saddled with an FSB ‘gatekeeper.’ If you become a big deal in the business landscape of Penza, one of their ‘gatekeepers’ invariably comes along; you’ve then got to keep him happy, and you’ve got to keep other FSB personnel happy by bribing them through him. This is common knowledge. I worked at Gazprom, and even Gazprom had a ‘gatekeeper’. […] So the FSB controls literally everything – all the major business entities, all the banks, and everyone has to render tribute to them.”

When Putin’s press-secretary Dmitry Peskov was asked about the FSB motor rally, he made a few noises about the “rules of the road” and the “moral-ethical aspect” of the issue – just for the sake of appearance, of course – before pardoning the large-living graduates: “We don’t consider any comment from the Kremlin to be necessary in this case.” Enough said.

Operating under the watchful eye of Vladimir Putin, the FSB has ruled Russia for the last sixteen years; its clandestine power perhaps even exceeds that of the government itself. The Russian regime is effectively an iceberg – the very tip may be changeable (for instance, the blusterous “cold war” with Turkey culminated in a no less ostentatious peace), but its submerged bulk of security agencies, concealed from prying eyes, remains absolutely immutable, And these selfsame agencies have now come to resemble gangsters and raiders – so much so that you can hardly tell them apart. Even their G-Wagons are identical.