Putin Military Coup - On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin spoke to senior officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) at his headquarters in Lubyanka near Red Square in Moscow. The newly-appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who held the rank of FSB brigadier general, was on a visit to celebrate the prestigious Russian security holiday. "The task of infiltrating the highest level of government has been completed," Putin announced.

Putin became interim president less than two weeks later. From the beginning of his reign, he worked to strengthen the government to prevent the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unstable democratization. In order to achieve that goal, he considered it necessary to improve the country's security agencies, and former security officers were assigned to important government agencies.

Putin Military Coup

Putin Military Coup

However, in recent years, Putin's approach has changed. More and more, bureaucracy has displaced the popular figures who once ruled. And as the Russian president relies on these bureaucratic institutions to further strengthen his control, their power has grown relative to other government agencies. But it was in February, when Putin gave the order to first recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and then, days later, to send Russian troops into Ukraine, that it took over completely. new security. the device is clear.

Remembering The Failed Coup That Brought Down A Superpower

Early in the war, most branches of the Russian government turned a blind eye to Putin's decision to invade, and some prominent officials even questioned the wisdom of the decision, despite embarrassed. But in recent weeks, the government and society have backed the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, the individuals who used to have the power to make decisions - even if it was around them - have adapted to institutions whose purpose is security and control. What has actually happened is an RFD-on-RFB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now it has become a faceless security state, headed by Putin.

The modern FSB traces its beginnings to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when the All-Russian Special Committee, also known as the Cheka, hunted down enemies of the new Soviet government led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its successors, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB), developed the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin, most notably Genrikh Yagoda in the 1930s and Lavrenty Beria in the 1940s and 1950s. The KGB became the primary security agency of the Soviet Union in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor. Over the next decade, Khrushchev expanded the Communist Party's control over Soviet government agencies, limiting their influence. But when Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Yuri Andropov, the long-time head of the KGB, regained the organization's lost power, leading the security service to rise in power in the 1970s.

Andropov went on to lead the Soviet Union as the General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984. He was ruthless and imposed ideological control. Any "deviations"—such as secret disagreements with Soviet policy—were grounds for prosecution. Some dissidents were arrested or placed in psychiatric units for "re-education", while others were forced to emigrate. Living in Moscow at the time, I remember police raids on innocent citizens and plainclothes KGB officers - they acted as Orwellian "thought police" roaming the streets, arresting people suspected of being absent from work. jump or have a lot of free time. It was a totalitarian environment, with Andropov's KGB in complete control.

In the late 1980s, reforms by Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the power of the security forces. Perestroika was supposed to renew the Soviet Union - some scholars even claim that Andropov had a hand in the program - but it ended up threatening the survival of the system. The last Soviet leader defied his master, the KGB, exposed the crimes of Stalinism and continued opening up to the West. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the Soviet Union's satellite states in Eastern Europe left Moscow's influence, the KGB turned to Gorbachev, and two years later staged a failed coup that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Wanted: Russian Revolution To Topple Tyrant. Internal Applicants Welcome

The security forces were humiliated—but not destroyed. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, saw communism, not the KGB, as the ultimate evil. He thought that changing the name of the KGB to the FSB would also change the organization, making it more benign and uncontrollable. It was wishful thinking. Russia's security forces have their roots in Ivan the Terrible's ruthless security forces,

, in the sixteenth century and Peter the Great's Secret Chancellery in the eighteenth century. Yeltsin's attempts at reform could not permanently stop a system with deep historical roots, any more than Khrushchev did forty years earlier.

Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now it has become a security state.

Putin Military Coup

In fact, KGB officers were well equipped to prevent the collapse of communism and the transition to socialism. In the security service, during the Soviet era the call for a classless society of proletarians was always just a slogan; Ideology was a tool to control the people and strengthen the hand of the government. Former members applied that logic when they rose to the top positions in post-Soviet Russia. As Leonid Shebarshin, a former senior KGB officer, explained, it was natural that those who trained Andropov in a secret war against external and internal enemies - NATO, CIA, opposition and political opposition - the new bourgeoisie in Russia. They can handle irregular work hours, succeed in hostile environments, and use questioning and manipulation tactics when called upon. They removed the last points from their employees and subordinates.

Going Nuclear Could Be All Vladimir Putin Has Left In The Tank As He Stares Down The Possibility Of A Deadly Coup In The Kremlin

One of them, Putin, was hailed by Western diplomats as an expert after he rose from obscurity to become Russia's president in 2000. Even then, he made no secret of his intention to exercise absolute power. Andropov style. urgently to limit the power of the socialist market that flourished in the 1990s under the crazy presidency of Yeltsin. In Putin's mind, an independent oligarchy that controls strategic industries, such as oil and gas, threatens the stability of the region. He ensured that business decisions concerning the national interest were instead made by a trusted few - the so-called siloviki, or those connected to the military and state security agencies. These individuals effectively became managers or custodians of government-owned assets. Many of them are from Putin's Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and most of them worked with the KGB. In terms of companies, their ranks include Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Sergey Chemezov (Rostec) and Alexey Miller (Gazprom), while in matters of state security Nikolai Patrushev (Secretary of the Security Council), Alexander Bortnikov (Director of the FSB), Sergei Naryshkin (Director of the Security Service) Foreign Intelligence), and Alexander Bastrykin (head of the Investigative Committee), among others.

Putin is convinced that strengthening the "irregular elements" of the region will prevent the kind of revolution that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It seemed to give some of the economic and political stability to the former KGB-based operatives. management. In an effort to maintain that stability, Putin has moved to extend his presidency to 2020 and proposed constitutional amendments to bypass the 2024 impeachment term.

Since being approved, the constitutional changes have given the region more latitude to deal with problems ranging from COVID-19 to mass protests in Belarus to Russian opposition lawyer Alexei Navalny's return to Moscow. As was the case under Andropov, all matters are now governed by central legislative bodies - federal organizations that oversee everything from taxation to science (the word

, which means "supervisor" and many of their Russian names make it easy to recognize). Criminal prosecutions are a growing tactic used by Russian citizens who complain about abuse of power, demand better services or show support for Navalny, who himself has been convicted of trumped-up charges of fraud and other alleged crimes. The punitive apparatus of control has strengthened its hand, led by the technical prime minister Mikhail Mishustin, a former tax official, and various middle-level managers of the command system office.

Armenian Pm Faces Military's Demand To Resign, Alleges Coup

Putin's decision to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and then to launch a "special military operation" to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, followed the same pattern as the punishment for political secession: he tried to punish the whole country for what he saw. his "anti-Russian" role to join the West. But in Russia, the events leading up to and after the invasion were the culmination of a political transformation that had been going on for years. They have the diminishing power of

On February 21, during the session of the National Security Council, which was released, the president seemed to be completely unclear about what the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk could bring. Naryshkin, of the Foreign Intelligence Service, stumbled when Putin asked for confirmation of support for the decision. At the end of this exchange, Naryshkin seemed to be shaking with fear. Even

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