Power to the power people

A spider's web of hidden controls

“IT'S a typical post-revolutionary situation,” says Georgy Satarov, a former aide to Boris Yeltsin who now runs INDEM, a think-tank. “Attempts to strengthen the state, using the rubble of the previous state. After the French revolution overthrew the aristocracy, Napoleon created a new aristocracy. The same thing is happening here.”

By “aristocracy”, though, Mr Satarov does not mean the oligarchs. He is talking of the new elite: the siloviki, loosely translatable as “power people”, to whom Russians refer by tapping an imaginary epaulette on their shoulders; the men from whose ranks Mr Putin comes.

The siloviki infest the nightmares of those who fear that Russia is returning to authoritarianism. Like horror-film zombies, they seem to proliferate. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Centre for the Study of the Elites at the Russian Academy of Sciences, people with a military, intelligence or law-enforcement background make up around three-quarters of Mr Putin's top officials, as against just 5% of Mikhail Gorbachev's Politburo. They occupy more than a third of the posts in the top three levels of government, and make up 70% of the staff of Mr Putin's seven federal envoys or “super-governors”. Mrs Kryshtanovskaya classifies Mikhail Fradkov, the new prime minister, as a “hidden silovik”: there are tell-tale hints of some KGB training in his youth (a brief gap in his biography, an early diplomatic post), and he was a protege of Sergei Ivanov, Mr Putin's defence minister.

As a group, Mrs Kryshtanovskaya says, siloviki are “the part of society that lost out the most from democratisation. They were privileged in Soviet times, they were above the law...They want a return to 'fairness', which in their eyes means a strong state that gives them these privileges.” Leading siloviki have their own powerful business ties, including to state-owned arms and oil firms.

Yet to raise the alarm about the siloviki themselves partly misses the point. First, they are not a united group with common goals. In the old days, those in foreign intelligence considered themselves an elite and felt “contempt for what they saw as the idiots who ran internal security,” says a senior western diplomat. (Mr Putin, who served in the KGB in East Germany, straddled the two.) Thanks to their contact with the West, they were often the most sophisticated members of the Soviet nomenklatura. Second, it was Mr Yeltsin, not Mr Putin, who began appointing siloviki at all levels, perhaps because they were often more disciplined and professional than other bureaucrats.

Third, last year's scare of a silovik-led takeover of power owes a great deal to Yukos. When the company faced the Kremlin's wrath, it tried to win support, especially in the West, by circulating scary tales about its run-in with two of Mr Putin's silovik sidekicks, Victor Ivanov and Igor Sechin. But it is now clear that the oil company had annoyed the president and his economic team every bit as much.

And fourth, though he has put siloviki in charge of some of the important ministries--such as defence and internal affairs--Mr Putin has kept economic policy under the control of liberal economists. In the cabinet reshuffle he went one further by replacing the six deputy prime ministers of old with a single one, Alexander Zhukov, a respected economist, who is to oversee reform. Cabinet purges have been aimed at those loyal to the oligarchs, rather than specifically those who oppose the siloviki. Mr Fradkov seems to have been picked not so much for his possible KGB ties as for his obedience, efficiency and--allowing that Mr Putin wants Russia to become a member of the World Trade Organisation--long experience of foreign-trade issues. Even in his presidential administration, Mr Putin has kept counterweights to Messrs Ivanov and Sechin.

There are real concerns about the siloviki, though. One is that in their strongholds, they are now as powerful and unaccountable as in Soviet days. Historical researchers complain that access to KGB and Communist Party archives is closing up again. Meddlesome journalists and newspapers can expect raids, and worse, from the FSB, the KGB's successor. The threat of terrorism is used to justify everything from more document checks on the street to trials being held in camera.

More sinister still, there has never been a public explanation of how a large band of Chechen terrorists managed to take control of Moscow's Dubrovka theatre in October 2002, nor for the deaths of at least 120 hostages--some think many more--after special forces gassed and then stormed the building. The Duma commission investigating claims of FSB involvement in a series of apartment-block bombings in 1999, which were officially blamed on Chechen terrorists, has suffered a suspicious number of misfortunes. Last year one of its members was murdered, a second died mysteriously of food poisoning, and a third was severely beaten up. Mikhail Trepashkin, an ex-FSB agent and lawyer representing two of the bombings' victims, who was planning to voice his own suspicions about the FSB's role at the bombers' trial last autumn, was jailed a week before the trial started.

Big Brother is watching

What is also worrying many people is that the whole federal apparatus has become bigger and more intrusive. Mr Yeltsin had told the 89 regional governors to “take all the power they could”. That led to chaos. Mr Putin appointed inspectors to each region and grouped them into seven federal districts, where his envoys have helped redraft a large number of regional laws that contradicted federal ones, and sorted out jurisdictions.

Most other law-enforcement agencies have opened regional offices too. Regional police chiefs and prosecutors, who used to be appointed and promoted locally and were often in corrupt cahoots with local bosses, are now appointed by the central government and rotated from one region to the next. According to Nikolai Petrov at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, three-quarters of them have been replaced or moved since Mr Putin took office.

The presidential administration has also opened over 2,000 “public bureaus” for citizens to file complaints or seek advice. The administration itself has swelled almost into a parallel government, like the Central Committee of the old Communist Party; a recent “cut” after the cabinet reshuffle turned out to be largely cosmetic.

Some order after the chaos of the Yeltsin years was certainly needed. But the new structures, says Mr Petrov, do more: they form an extensive intelligence-gathering network, which comes into its own at critical times such as elections. The public bureaus, which local businesses are invited to fund as part of their “philanthropic spending”, collect information at the grassroots level, and the federal-district offices keep a close watch on the local bureaucracy. And although the regional law-enforcement bosses may no longer serve local masters, “that does not necessarily reduce corruption,” says Mr Petrov. “It simply redirects it.”

Thus, he says, Mr Putin's weakening of democracy “is not a plan, but a logic: it's a side-effect of the strengthening of the federal centre.” But side-effects sometimes take centre stage. In several instances, the Kremlin has blocked governors' re-election or installed its own appointees. In October Mr Putin, blithely ignoring a law that bans senior officials from electioneering, openly supported Valentina Matvienko, his chosen candidate for the governorship of St Petersburg. She won, but nearly three-quarters of the voters showed their disgust by staying away.

Freedom of speech--as long as it's quiet

Some of the heaviest criticism of Mr Putin concerns press freedom. Mr Gusinsky's and Mr Berezovsky's television networks, NTV and ORT, were the first to be taken over. NTV itself, under its new government-appointed manager, Boris Jordan, was still relatively independent. But late in 2002 it came under fire for imperilling the Dubrovka hostage rescue. The networks had promised to get clearance before airing footage of special forces storming the theatre in order to keep the terrorists in the dark. NTV had supposedly broken the promise. Mr Jordan insisted that its pictures went out only after the rescue ended, but was ousted soon after.

But the real picture is rarely clear-cut. The journalists at NTV and ORT are under state orders now, but they were hardly “free” under their old bosses, who had used their channels to engineer Mr Yeltsin's 1996 election victory and later to attack Mr Putin. Mr Jordan's departure, some at NTV think, may be mostly due to his refusal to sign a deal with Video International, a powerful advertising company formerly run by Mikhail Lesin, who later became press minister.

Moreover, smaller media outlets are thriving, even if owned by oligarchs. Mr Khodorkovsky may lose Yukos, but he still controls TV2 in Tomsk, one of the best and most independent--not least of its owner--regional stations. He also bought and revived a former dissident newspaper, Moskovskie Novosti, putting Yevgeny Kiselyov, the original editorial chief at NTV, in charge of it. Mikhail Fridman's Alfa-Group has a stake in a national entertainment channel, STS. Mr Berezovsky controls the feisty Kommersant, a leading Moscow business daily, and three other papers often critical of the government.

On the other hand, Vladimir Potanin's papers, Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda, have bigger readerships and are much more loyal to the Kremlin. “There is freedom of speech,” says Rustam Arifdzhanov, who has just started up his own media group catering for ethnic minorities, “as long as it's not a threat to the authorities. Russia will have just as much freedom of speech as it needs.”

But who decides how much it needs? As in his dealings with the oligarchs, Mr Putin prefers wielding arbitrary power over the media to having clear laws. Clearly he distrusts media owners. He may tolerate some press freedom now, but no one knows for how long.

“He sees the media as an instrument,” says Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of the fiercely independent Ekho Moskvy radio station, who has often discussed the media with Mr Putin and those around him. “In 2000, he met with all the chief editors and told us, 'You ought to help me. These reforms are unpopular and hard ...After that you can do what you want, but for now you're working for the good of Russia.' I said to him, 'Our job isn't to help or not, it's to report!' He said that wasn't enough.” Mr Venediktov thinks his station, which is majority-owned by the state firm Gazprom but has a charter guaranteeing its independence, will be fine as long as things go well and Mr Putin is popular. “Where else am I going to hear the news?” one minister is said to have demanded. But if the honeymoon ends and Ekho Moskvy becomes the echo of public discontent, the station may find itself in trouble.

Lacking a real lobby, the press is vulnerable to legal attacks. One such was a law, drafted before the Dubrovka hostage crisis and rammed through the Duma after it, that clamps down on reporting in “emergency situations”. Most free countries have such laws, but in Russia the authorities have enormous discretion over what counts as an emergency. A second was a law passed last year that banned the media from publishing comments on candidates for election. It was overturned by the constitutional court soon afterwards, but by that time, says Mr Venediktov, the law had already been used to launch cases against 17 regional media outlets.

The other thing that makes the press vulnerable is the small size of the advertising market. Video International's dominance therefore gives it great power, as TV stations have found to their cost. Paid-for articles are common (a full-page story in a leading Moscow daily commands $20,000, according to one advertising-agency manager).

In the regions things are even worse: many publications are loss-making arms of other businesses whose owners may use them for their own ends. If the governor does not like what a paper prints, he may order a wave of tax inspections on its owner's shops or make life hard for it at the regional press that still prints most local publications. Local journalists who investigate corruption are sometimes murdered with impunity.

The Samara region, an industrial hub on the banks of the Volga, has over 500 registered media, says Andrei Gavriushenko, the co-editor of Delo, a business magazine. Yet even there, in one of the most prosperous regions outside Moscow and St Petersburg, the company that owns Delo and a handful of sister publications is one of only three publishing houses not owned by another business. “All our 'independent' Russian media are very dependent,” Mr Gavriushenko smiles.

Now journalists are worried about a new press law on which an “industrial committee”, made up mostly of media owners, has been working since the Dubrovka crisis. Mr Venediktov, who sits on the committee, says the law defines the press's responsibilities to its owners but says nothing about its responsibilities to the public--another way of making it “just an instrument.”

Passing bad laws, or good laws with bad details, or good laws that are badly implemented, are all risks of Mr Putin's system. The intentions may be excellent, but what of the results? This matters most when it comes to his main project: making Russians better off.

Article forms part of a survey on Russia in this issue of The Economist. Article looks at the slowly increasing spider's web of hidden controls in Russia under President Putin.

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