BOOK REVIEW: 'The New Nobility' Explores Role of FSB, the Re-invented KGB, in Today's Russia
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
"Our best colleagues, the honour and pride of the FSB, don't do their work for the money… there is one very special characteristic that unites all these people, and it is a very important quality, it is their sense of service. They are, if you like, our new ‘nobility.'" —Nikolai Patrushev, former Director of the FSB, in a 2000 message when he was director of the FSB, succeeding Vladimir Putin
In a non-fiction book that reads like a spy thriller, "The New Nobility" (PublicAffairs, 320 pages, $26.95) Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan manage to shed a great deal of light on the famously secret world of the Russian Federal Security Service, known as FSB for its name in Russian: Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopastnosti.
The agency was very recently in the Western spotlight because of the July 2010 U.S. expulsion of ten Russian sleeper spies, including 28-year-old Anna Chapman, who reportedly is considering running for a seat in Russia's parliament, known as the Duma. She could consider an alternative career as a glamorous star in one or more of the feature films and/or TV "documentaries" underwritten by the FSB.
In Chapter 9, "The Propaganda Machine: Image Making and the FSB" the authors write about this aspect of the FSB, which calls to this reviewer's mind our own FBI's support of radio and TV series telling the story as J. Edgar Hoover wanted it of the FBI. (The most famous actor was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., born in 1918, who starred as Inspector Lewis Erskine on the 1965 series "The F.B.I.). Soldatov and Borogan describe movies and TV specials that glamorize the FSB and similar agencies. Shades of Angelina Jolie and her recent movie "Salt"!).
If she does decide to enter politics, Chapman will hope to emulate a string of former agents who have run for office -- including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and later head of the FSB, and Andrey Lugovoy, the former spy that British police want to quiz over the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Anatoly Korendyasev, the deputy who represents Chapman's native southeastern city of Volgograd in Putin's United Russia party, is about to retire, Der Spiegel points out. Korendyasev was also an intelligence agent, according to the German news magazine.
The July 2010 spy swap -- Russia released U.S. operatives in exchange for the ten sleepers -- was the biggest spy swap between the U.S. and Russia since the end of the Cold War. Outed as sleeper agents by the FBI, she and her nine fellow spies were expelled from the U.S. in disgrace -- but she was welcomed with enthusiasm by Putin, who sang patriotic songs with the group to herald their return. (Maybe they even sang the FSB's own anthem, which begins with the stirring words: Always at the front / Always at one's post / Don't touch Russia / A Chekist is always vigilant). The word "Chekist" refers to one of the FSB's ancestors in spying, the dreaded Cheka, founded in 1917 by the Bolshevik regime and headed by Felix Dzerzhinski, whose statue at the Moscow headquarters of the KGB (and today of the FSB) was hauled down by anti-Communist forces in 1991.
The old KGB, dissolved with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, was under the watchful eye of the Communist Party. The new FSB, created in its present form in 1995 and headed by Putin from 1998 until he took over from Boris Yeltsin in 2000, has been deployed by the Kremlin to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, protect the Russian Orthodox Church against all enemies foreign and domestic, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse.
It goes without saying that Soldatov and Borogan are courageous practitioners of journalism. They live in a country where both foreign and Russian journalists have been murdered, undoubtedly at the behest of the government. This fact of life is well documented.
At the center of the FSB spider web is current Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, who officially retired from the KGB in 1991 and who, as noted, headed the FSB in the last years of the 1990s. There's a saying in Russia, the authors note, that there's no such thing as a former KGB agent, and Putin is living proof that this saying applies to the FSB as well. It's difficult to compare spy agencies, but the FSB seems to combine the functions of our CIA, FBI, NSA, and military intelligence agencies, with the ruthlessness of the spy agencies of the Arab dictatorships, the authors note.
"The New Nobility" is an important book, well written and meticulously researched by two journalists with the right sources, both inside and outside the FSB. The authors are founders of the website www. Agentura. Ru, which has a built-in English translation button.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are co-founders of the Agentura.Ru website. Soldatov worked for Novaya Gazeta from 2006 to 2008. Agentura.Ru and its reporting have been featured in the New York Times, the Moscow Times, the Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Federation of American Scientists, and the BBC. The New York Times called it "A Web Site That Came in From the Cold to Unveil Russian Secrets."
Publisher's website: www.publicaffairsbooks.com