The irony is, I doubt Andropov would be as keen on Putin. He was a complex figure and certainly no bleeding heart – he sent dissidents to mental hospitals and presided over the crushing of both Hungary’s 1956 uprising and Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968 – but he was also an ascetic and a realist. Putin likes to pretend to be tough on corruption, but in practice it has become central to his whole style of rule, as I will discuss in Chapter 4. He also lives a life of opulent comfort, with palaces outside Moscow and on the Black Sea, and even exercises in a £2,500 tracksuit. Andropov, by contrast, lived an austere lifestyle, keeping the same flat even as he rose through the system; as a Russian television documentary put it, he had ‘one suit, one overcoat and his children and grandchildren rode the metro’. He also oversaw a bloody anti-corruption campaign that saw fifteen ministers sacked and embezzlers and profiteers tried and shot. Although he was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist, time and again he demonstrated an unwillingness to swallow propaganda unquestioningly and be satisfied with the comforting lies subordinates would feed their bosses. While he was an outstanding head of the KGB, he came to the agency as an outsider, a Party loyalist who would tame and modernise the thuggish murder machine the Soviets had inherited from Stalin. He never let himself be house-trained, and his experience meant that he knew how his people would attempt to doctor what they told him, even when they thought they were doing it in his own best interests.
By contrast, Putin appears both politically and psychologically dependent on his spooks, even though he never acquired the kind of insider knowledge required to understand how they work (and when they don’t). Russia has a number of intelligence and security services, four of which are the most significant. The FSB, a domestic counter-intelligence agency that seems more devoted to crushing political opposition than anything else, is the closest successor to the old KGB. Although corruption is something of a constant in Russian officialdom, the FSB is especially infamous for it, thanks to its virtual freedom from the law. Putin ran the FSB in 1998–9 and still treats it with the greatest indulgence. The SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, is essentially the KGB’s First Chief Directorate – it has a different acronym but the same role and even the same headquarters at Yasenevo in southern Moscow. The SVR specialises in human intelligence, planting deep-cover moles abroad and recruiting foreign agents. The GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, is military intelligence – technically it has simply been the GU, or Main Directorate, since 2010, but everyone in Moscow still calls it the ‘Gru’ and Putin has suggested restoring the old name. They are a much more gung-ho agency, doing everything from running spies and hacking computers to controlling Russia’s
As with every aspect of the adhocracy, whatever their official roles, in practice the activities of these agencies overlap. The political policemen of the FSB also run missions abroad; the SVR sets up commando teams; the GRU does political intelligence; and the FSO snoops on them all. The result, at least in theory, is that they have an incentive to be aggressive and imaginative, as they compete for Putin’s favour. It should also help him control them by playing them off against each other, and double-check the information from one with that from the others.
Of course, it often doesn’t work like that. Like so many authoritarian leaders, Putin has over time become less and less willing to listen to alternative perspectives. As one former Russian spy told me, the intelligence agencies have learned that ‘you do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table’. As with everything under Putin, politics around intelligence is competitive to the point of cannibalism. In 2003, the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information (FAPSI), Russia’s electronic snooping agency comparable to Britain’s GCHQ or the US NSA, was eaten up by its rivals, divvied up between the FSB, FSO and GRU. So they all compete to tell Putin what they think he wants to hear, to flatter his prejudices and to reassure him that everything is going well. Officials I have spoken to at the Russian foreign ministry, for example, gloomily admit that Putin turns to FSB assessments of what’s happening abroad before their own – this would be like the British prime minister asking MI5 about the latest news from Germany.
