When KGB spy Yuri Andropov (pictured above) expired as leader of the USSR after only sixteen months in office, the West breathed a sigh of relief. Power passed from the first KGB spy to rule Russia into the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev, who seemed far less threatening (even though he was a close associate of Andropov’s). When the USSR itself then collapsed without a shot being fired, many breathed a deep sigh of relief at the West????????s good fortune. Little did they think that the Andropov????????s KGB might return to power in Russia in exactly the same manner.

Analyst Pavel Simonov traces the KGB????????s return to power in Russia back to 1998, when ???????a former non-staff assistant of Andropov, the ex-head of Foreign Intelligence, Evgeny Primakov, headed the government. The following spring the former chief of FSB (main successor of the KGB), Sergey Stepashin, replaced him. In parallel, representatives of the democratic camp had almost disappeared from governmental structures; the foreign policy of the state was turning back to the traditional Soviet course. In the autumn of 1999, a former officer of the KGB and ex-director of FSB, Vladimir Putin, became the new head of the cabinet.???????

Under Putin, the transition to KGB rule has proceeded with alarming speed, so that today ???????one study has concluded that 78% of leading political figures, heads of departments of the Presidential administration, all members of the government and members of both chambers of parliament, heads of federal structures and heads of executive power and legislature in regions, somehow in their career have been connected with the KGB or the organizations that had come to replace it.??????? A stunning 26% of the group actually admits openly to prior KGB service.

Last Tuesday, an article in the Washington Post by Peter Finn laid bare the horrors of the KGB????????s new ascendancy in Russia. Finn wrote:

On Nov. 15, the Russian Interior Ministry and Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, announced three new senior appointments. Oleg Safonov was named a deputy head of the ministry. Yevgeny Shkolov became head of its economic security department. And Valery Golubev was appointed a deputy chief executive at Gazprom. All three men had something important in common beyond the timing of their promotions: backgrounds as KGB officers and experience working directly with President Vladimir Putin when he was a KGB operative himself in Germany or later, when he was a rising presence in the local government of St. Petersburg, his home town.

Commenting in Foreign Policy magazine, Yevgenia Albats, one of the world????????s leading civilian experts on the KGB, stated:

Reform of the KGB never really happened. The organization was broken into several agencies in the early 1990s, but the reforms were abandoned,especially after ÄVladimirÅ Putin became president. The KGB????????s capacity to be a political organization is back. And unlike the Soviet era, the secret services are now in full power. ÄPutinÅ was a lieutenant colonel in the FSB Äthe KGB????????s successor agencyÅ and all his major associates and deputies in the Kremlin are former KGB employees. Major Russian monopolies such as Gazprom and the railroad monopoly are controlled by former KGB agents. Overall, some 6,000 former or current intelligence officers are in the executive ÄbranchÅ and legislature.

And The Independent chillingly reminded us:

Shortly after his election as Russian President in 2000, Vladimir Putin was driven to the headquarters of the former KGB in central Moscow to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police. The former KGB colonel, a Soviet-era spy in East Germany who later reached the pinnacle of the security services by becoming the first civilian director of the KGB’s domestic successor organisation, the FSB, was returning to his spiritual home. Inside the Lubyanka, the new Kremlin leader addressed 300 of the former KGB’s finest. “Instruction number one of the attaining of full power has been completed,” he dead-panned. Six years on, Mr Putin’s joke looks more like a statement of fact. The poisoning of the ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, which according to at least one Russian commentator has cast relations with the West back to the days of the Cold War, has placed Mr Putin’s links to his former FSB colleagues under fresh scrutiny.

The Independent quoted Jonathan Stern, a Russia expert who is the director of natural gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, as noting that ???????plenty of former MI5 employees are now in top jobs in British industry.??????? But Stern pointed out a key difference between Russia and Britain: ???????a small group of people are controlling very, very large state assets, and that is a concern.??????? Stern might also have mentioned the fact that Britain has no history of its secret police being used to build and run a ???????gulag archipelago??????? that killed more Britons than Adolf Hitler and ultimately drove the country into oblivion. It????????s also possible that a general education in Britain leaves one a bit more familiar with the basic principles of capitalist economics and better prepared to run a business than does a Soviet or Russian variant. Apologists for Putin are fond of pointing out that George H.W. Bush was a former spymaster too. They ignore, however, that Bush was never a career field operative, and he had been elected to office before becoming president with full public debate or the significance of his role. Putin has never participated in a single debate on any topic, much less his secret resume. In bizarre fashion, these apologists will condemn Alexander Litvinenko for his KGB ties while at the same time letting Putin off scot-free for his own, much deeper ties. Unlike Litvinenko, who defected to the West, Putin still maintains pride in his KGB heritage.

On top of that, as The Independent reported, there is no analogy between the Russian presidency and the American or British counterparts:

According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who has studied the Russian elite for many years, the FSB, police and military have become the dominant force under Mr Putin’s presidency. She said in a study published in 2004 that the most marked increase in the “siloviki” had been in the regions, where five out of seven presidential representatives were former KGB or military men. Ms Kryshtanovskaya told The Independent that there was cause for alarm in a political system where the presidency has the preponderant power. “It’s a problem because in the past there was collective decision-making. For example when Äformer president YuriÅ Andropov wanted to invade Afghanistan, there was a collective decision by the Politburo. Now there is no such organ and the president himself decides.” According to some Moscow commentators, Mr Putin is “very hardline” politically, but an economic liberal. But Ms Kryshtanovskaya compares the economic centralisation in Russia to South Korea, which placed big companies under state control. Why is Mr Putin doing this? “Because he wants full control,” she says. Ms Kryshtanovskaya worries that civil society has no input because “the parliament is like a department of the Kremlin. Everything comes from the top. These people don’t want to give up power, they want to concentrate power.

The BBC has also reported on these developments, including a photograph of the ominous new Batman-like logo adopted by the KGB????????s successor entity (pictured below).

The Beeb observes:

???????How different Russia looks from other formerly communist countries in eastern Europe, where there have been attempts to identify individuals who worked for Soviet-era security services, many of which were highly repressive. Some of these individuals have been put on trial for their alleged crimes. But perhaps more significantly, there has been a real effort to keep them out of politics and big business.???????

Russia????????s economy also looks quite different from that of many of those countries ???????? it lags far behind many of them, and without its oil and gas resources would be a third-world state compared to them.

The West now finds itself as if awakening from a pleasant dream where the Evil Empire simply ceased to exist, just because we wished it to be so. Rather than ask ourselves hard questions about whether those in Russia would really just abandon their avowed hatred of the West and its democracy and freedom just because they lost the Cold War, and whether they would seek to reassert their authority, and seeking to block such measures, the West turned a blind eye to developments in Russia (here the Clinton Administration in the U.S. was particularly remiss) when there was an opportunity to avert the KGB takeover that we now see as fait accompli. We were assured by various Russophiles that Russia could “never go back again” to the dark days of the Soviet past, and hence lulled into a false but comfortable sense of security, just as we were when we chose largely to ignore the rise of the Bolsheviks to power in the first place.

Again, we will pay an awful price for our comfort.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.