{"id":379,"date":"2025-10-03T20:15:48","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T17:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/?p=379"},"modified":"2025-10-30T20:21:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T17:21:33","slug":"russia-cleanses-its-spy-agencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/new-nobility\/russia-cleanses-its-spy-agencies\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia Cleanses Its Spy Agencies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin\u2019s intelligence services are being cleansed of non-Russians, a policy completely at odds with the agencies\u2019 multiethnic histories. It is a risky move that may one day bring serious consequences to the regime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The change is happening despite the continuing decline in the ethnic Russian population and thus the growing proportion of minorities. While past intelligence services were always Russian-dominated, this has been strongly reinforced in recent years. According to the official 2021 Russian census, only about 72% percent of the population is ethnic Russian \u2014 six million fewer than in 2010.  The country\u2019s demographic crisis is now so severe \u2014 and politically discomforting \u2014 that officials this year halted<\/a> public updates of the official figures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, if one looks through the list of high-ranking officials \u2014 that is, the heads of the key departments of the FSB, Russia\u2019s main security service \u2014 one finds hardly any Tatars or, say, Chechens, the second- and third-largest ethnic groups in the Russian Federation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surprisingly, until recently, there were some ethnic Ukrainians among the bosses on Lubyanka Square, including in the infamous 5th\u202fService, which so notably failed to provide accurate intelligence about the situation in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion of 2022. They\u202fhave now all been replaced by ethnic Russians.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This total russification of the FSB leadership makes it strikingly different from Stalin\u2019s secret services.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite constant purges, Stalin\u2019s services remained highly capable and brutally efficient  \u2014 due in no small part <\/strong>to their ethnic diversity.<\/strong> This was a legacy of the early Soviet secret police, which had absorbed the most ruthless and effective elements from the militant underground groups of the former Russian Empire.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These included Jewish staff, who had spent decades perfecting methods of\u202fkonspiratsia<\/em>\u202fwhile resisting Tsarist pogroms \u2014 often through criminal networks and revolutionary parties; Armenians, who had built a truly international movement aimed at avenging the perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide; Georgians and other ethnic groups of the Caucasus, with their experience in funding the revolutionary movement by any means necessary, including robberies\u2014 it was through these operations<\/a> that Stalin first made his name; and Latvians, whose legendary resilience in ethnic regiments of the Russian army during World War I earned them a reputation for toughness (many supported the Bolshevik revolution and became Lenin\u2019s praetorian guard). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These ethnic groups had their own leaders, client networks, and shared interests \u2014 and Stalin made a sustained effort to suppress them, seeing such clans as a threat to his monopoly on power. His successors in the Kremlin redoubled these efforts by filling the ranks of the security services with Communist Party appointees.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, Soviet leaders were pragmatic enough to allow so-called \u201cnational personnel\u201d to lead KGB departments in the most sensitive Soviet republics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev\u2019s foreign minister and later president of Georgia, had served as Minister of Public Order in Georgia from 1965 to 1968, and later as the republic\u2019s interior minister. Geidar Aliyev, the first president of Azerbaijan, had a long career in the KGB and became head of the Azeri KGB in 1967.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But under Putin, the FSB has adopted a more aggressive and openly xenophobic approach. An FSB colonel \u2014 an ethnic Tatar \u2014 told these authors in the late 2000s about his experience of being transferred from the regions to Moscow to serve in the central apparatus. He was something of a believer in the state security cause \u2014 he had volunteered for the Soviet KGB as a young man and had spent years monitoring Islamist movements in Uzbekistan, where his Tatar (i.e., Muslim) background had come in handy. Eventually, he was promoted to serve in the counterterrorism department in Moscow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to tradition, he organized a welcome party for his new colleagues. During the gathering \u2014 held inside the Lubyanka building \u2014 his drunken boss suddenly confronted him with accusations about the Tatar-Mongol invasion. He demanded that the colonel apologize for what had happened in the 13th century. From that point on, the colonel took the precaution of giving a Russian rather than a Tatar name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, the FSB colonel was not alone in facing such treatment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An FSB general, Rashid Nurgaliev, rose to prominence thanks to Putin and his close associate Nikolai Patrushev \u2014 they had served together in Karelia. Promoted by Putin, Nurgaliev served as Minister of the Interior from 2004 until 2012 and has been a member of Putin\u2019s Security Council ever since.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, Nurgaliev was Tatar and Muslim,<\/strong> just like the colonel. Rumor had it that an FSB officer was assigned a sensitive mission: to convince Nurgaliev to be baptized as an Orthodox Christian \u2014 a mission that, once completed, earned the officer the rank of general. Apparently, conversion was set as a condition for Nurgaliev\u2019s appointment as Interior Minister.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The FSB is a sprawling organization, with departments across Russia. In this environment \u2014 marked by total impunity and widespread corruption \u2014 the clan system and personal patronage inevitably play a major role in officers\u2019 careers. But these modern clans are no longer ethnic; they are regional.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An FSB general promoted to Moscow will always try to bring with him trusted officers from the region where he previously served. Putin himself did the same when he had brought to Moscow the people he had served with in the St. Petersburg FSB. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The FSB today serves only one master: Vladimir Putin. Its corporate culture reflects the fears and prejudices of that one man. It embodies a paranoid, tribalistic, and almost medieval approach to the question of loyalty \u2014 one that assumes a man\u2019s behavior is pre-determined by his ethnicity and religion rather than by his professional competence or education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But such fear cuts both ways. Putin\u2019s deep suspicion toward non-Russians <\/strong>reflects his anxiety that the country\u2019s <\/strong>regions like Tatarstan and Chechnya (where the FSB local departments are led by ethnic Russians, unsurprisingly) might one day follow the path of the former Soviet republics and break away. And yet, by russifying the leadership of his security services, Putin may be only weakening his most important tool of control.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, how can his early-warning system detect regional crises if it excludes the very people most capable of recognizing the signs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published in CEPA<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Putin\u2019s intelligence services are being cleansed of non-Russians, a policy completely at odds with the agencies\u2019 multiethnic histories. It is a risky move that may one day bring serious consequences to the regime. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}