Kremlin reportedly planning to 'resurrect' KGB-style security behemoth. (
SG).
The Russian newspaper Kommersant, citing unnamed sources, reported
this week that before the next presidential election, scheduled for
March 2018, the Kremlin plans to create a gigantic new ministry that
will absorb most of Russia’s existing security agencies.
According to Kommersant’s sources, this new security behemoth will be
called the Ministry of State Security, with its Russian acronym MGB.
That is the same name Soviet dictator Josef Stalin gave to his
repressive apparatus which operated from 1946 until his death in 1953.
After Stalin’s death, the MGB was reformatted as the KGB, the Committee
for State Security.
The new MGB, the newspaper reported, will merge the existing Federal
Security Service (FSB), currently Russia’s principal security agency,
with the Federal Guard Service (FSO), which protects high-level
officials and includes the Presidential Security Service (SPB), which
guards the president.
The MGB will also absorb the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR),
Russia’s external spy agency. The investigative arm of the MGB will deal
with the country’s most important criminal cases, and MGB staff will
oversee the work of many of Russia’s remaining law-enforcement bodies,
including the Interior Ministry and the Investigative Committee.
If the rumored restructuring plan indeed comes to pass, it would be
just the latest major change that President Vladimir Putin has made to
Russia’s security system. Earlier this year, he created the National
Guard, which is charged with securing Russia’s borders, combating
terrorism and organized crime, ensuring public order and guarding key
state facilities.
The National Guard is directly subordinated to the president and
headed by Viktor Zolotov, who served as Putin’s bodyguard in Saint
Petersburg in the early 1990s. Zolotov headed the Presidential Security
Service from 2000 to 2013, after which he served as commander of the
Internal Troops, the Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, from 2014
to earlier this year, when he was picked to head the National Guard.
Is the Russian government really planning to revive a Stalin-era
security behemoth? VOA’s Russian Service spoke with several experts.
Boris Volodarsky, a former officer with the Russian military’s
intelligence agency, the GRU, and an expert on Soviet and Russian
intelligence agencies, said he believes there really is a plan to create
such a state security structure.
He also said the proposed use of the
name “Ministry of State Security” is not coincidental.
“Because the Kremlin has a clear tendency to refer to the good old
Stalinist and post-Stalinist days, it is clear that they intend to
create a ministry that will unite all the security structures under its
own roof,” he said. “They have already created the National Guard, and
are now recreating a ministry which earlier, under Stalin, consolidated
foreign intelligence and internal security.”
Volodarsky said he does not think that the FSB or its current top
officials will play the dominant role in the new security ministry,
adding that even now, the FSB is not the main player in Russia’s
security system.
“The main structure was and is the Federal Guard Service – and,
within it, the Presidential Security Service,” he said. “
In fact, people
from the Presidential Security Service dominate all the other security
bodies.
Viktor Zolotov, who heads the National Guard, was Putin’s personal
bodyguard, and he was made head of the Presidential Security Service.
And, from that post, Putin sent him first to the Interior Ministry to
get everything there under control, and then put practically all of the
power structures under his control,” Volodarsky said.
Reflection of Kremlin’s ‘fear’
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services and chief
editor of the Agentura.ru website, said Russia’s current main security
body, the Federal Security Service, has already acquired the
characteristics of the Soviet KGB.
“The FSB has been involved in a lot of things over the last 16 years
(time since Putin assumed power), but it has been obvious since last
year that two functions, two directions, have intensified – the hunt for
spies and targeted repression,” he said.
“These are functions of the KGB, if you think about it: it was
precisely through these [functions] that the system of KGB control over
Soviet society was maintained: keeping the population in the grip of spy
mania, and gathering material on the elite and using [that material] if
so ordered. Putin is changing the functions of the FSB closer to what
the KGB did. From that point of view, the new name [MGB], is quite
logical,” said Soldatov.
Still, Soldatov said the FSB no longer has the same influence it had
10 years ago. “The FSB suddenly stopped being ‘the new nobility’ – it is
no longer the supplier of personnel [for other government and state
bodies]; cadres are now chosen from among the Federal Guard Service and
technocrats.”
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center,
said the desire to create a single powerful national security ministry
is a sign of the Kremlin’s fear of the future.
“It’s a reflection of the power elite’s fear of what can happen with
the country in the coming years,” he said. “Moreover, this fear has
various characteristics – foreign policy and domestic policy [fears];
fear of the people; economic fear, that the crisis could drag on and…
cause some social turbulence, and this turbulence will have to be
extinguished somehow.”
Hmmm......Well Belarus never abolished the KGB shouldn't be to difficult to resurrect the whole apparatus.
Source:
VOANews.com
