Putin wants to bring back the KGB

Valdimir Putin is nervous about his political future, says Andrei Soldatov. With presidential elections less than two years away, he’s been busy jailing officials and removing possible contenders from key positions. And to shore up his position, he may take a yet bigger step – bringing back the infamous KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet regime, the KGB was split into separate parts by then president Boris Yeltsin: he had its main intelligence arm, the FSK, pruned back to resemble something like Britain’s MI5. Unlike the KGB, whose role was essentially to sustain and protect the Soviet state, the FSK (later renamed the FSB) was tasked with fighting terrorism and corruption. But “like the liquid metal” of the killer android in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it began to retrieve its old functions – not least pursuing dissidents (branded “extremists”). Now, according to Russian paper Kommersant, Putin plans to reunite most of the divided strands in a supersized service called the Ministry of State Security, the name (familiar to all Russians) of the most feared of Stalin’s secret services. No doubt he thinks creating a monolithic security service with a fearsome reputation will instil fear into would-be dissidents. But it may not work out as he expects. The merged agency will be bogged down for years in “bureaucratic chaos” as it gets rid of duplication, finds new jobs for sidelined chiefs, and rewrites regulations. This could “paralyse” the security service just when Putin needs it most.