The National Interest
Spring 2002

The Higher Police: Vladimir Putin and His Predecessors

by Laurent Murawiec and Clifford C. Gaddy

 

So much has changed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union that it is easy to overlook some things that have not changed. One of the most significant of these constants is the continued importance of an intelligence elite that has existed within the Russian state for nearly 200 years, both as a corporate body and, more importantly, as a current of thought endowed with a distinctive identity and self-assured sense of national mission. This elite calls itself "the Higher Police" and, as things have turned out, it is largely in charge in today’s Russia.

As it happens, the historical continuity of this elite can be traced, its self-conception can be charted, and its impact on the actions of the Russian state, yesterday as well as today, can be assessed. Such tasks are critical to understanding contemporary Russia and Russian foreign policy. It is to such labors, at least in their preliminary stage, that this essay is directed.

Grafting the Roots

In 1997, the FSB (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service), the contemporary incarnation of the Russian intelligence service—most popularly known as the KGB—convened the first in a series of annual seminars on the history of the intelligence craft and intelligence organizations in Russia. Dubbed the "Historical Lectures at the Lubyanka"—since they were held at the old headquarters of the KGB—the seminars took place under the auspices of the Andropov Institute. In-house KGB historians and invited outside academics gave presentations on such subjects as "The Founding of the Cheka: A New View", "On the Intelligence Activity of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Beginning of the 20th Century", and "The Department of Police and Secret Agents (1902–1917)." Remarkably, KGB historians have been focusing on pre-1917 intelligence work and organizations. While they do not ignore entirely 80 years of Soviet intelligence history—that of the Cheka, the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB—their focus points to a continuous corporate identity harking back to pre-revolutionary predecessor organizations that defined themselves as a "Higher Police" transcending ideology itself.

The history of the Higher Police dates back to the early 19th century. After the Decembrist putsch of 1825 failed to overthrow the newly enthroned Nicholas I, the Czar established a new organization that soon "became the most powerful force in the country", the Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery. Designed not merely as a command center for repression of subversive machinations, it was also tasked with "the study of Russia’s condition." Gathering the best and the brightest of the nobility, its brief was virtually unlimited. It was subordinate to the monarch alone. Such was the vysshaya politsiya, or, in the French preferred by the aristocracy of the time, la haute police. Its chief was General Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benckendorff (1783–1844), a soldier who rose from the ranks of the Baltic-German nobility that had provided so many of the Czars’ servants.

Under Benckendorff’s stewardship, which stretched from 1825 through 1844, the Third Section devoted itself to social engineering on a grand scale. Far from being merely a political police, it conceived of its role as "eradicating abuse" wherever it might be found in Russian society. Its 1839 report to the Czar boldly stated: "All Russia impatiently awaits changes. . . . The machine requires to be reworked afresh. The keys to this necessity are to be found in Justice and Industry. . . . [The Section is] convinced of the necessity, even of the inevitability, of the liberation of the serfs." One could barely cite so explosive and sensitive an issue in the Russia of the time. Had such words been published in a journal, uttered in public, or even whispered in private—by anyone other than a member of the Third Section—it would have been cause for instant imprisonment or exile. Yet the Third Section regularly issued such reformist policy recommendations without fear. The 1838 report advocated the development of railways in Russia; the 1841 report called for special attention to public health; the 1842 report advocated lowering tariffs to foster economic development. The Section’s Annual Reports on the State of Public Opinion were the Czar’s eyes and ears. (While these extraordinary reports have in general been available to historians, their import has not been properly understood; as "police" reports, they are only of passing interest, but as traces of the Higher Police’s social engineering ambitions, they are of primordial importance.)

The Third Section represented the emergence of a technocratic elite that pursued its mission of serving the Russian state from within and with the use of "enlightened" methods of social control and engineering. They were not a gaggle of thugs, or the jackbooted shock troops of autocratic repression. They conceived of themselves as the best, purest and most loyal servants of "a certain idea of Russia", and it is a concept that set deep roots. Indeed, it recurred several decades later in the 1870s, when the reformist course followed by the "czar-liberator" Alexander II faltered and terrorists besieged the regime. In a desperate bid to regroup, re-organize and streamline the forces of counter-revolution to defend the tottering regime, the Czar chose General Prince Mikhail T. Loris-Melikov as head of the Third Section.

The prince, an Armenian warlord who had met signal success as commander of the Army of the Caucasus, applied liberal "techniques" to a difficult situation. He enlarged public liberties in the hope of rallying the enlightened segments of public opinion to the regime’s side. The slogan that inspired and symbolized Loris-Melikov’s policy was a call for a "dictatorship of the heart." (It seems that even in matters of the heart, Russians cannot do without dictatorship.) Loris-Melikov soon acquired and exercised sweeping powers, virtually controlling all aspects of government except foreign policy, to the point of being nicknamed the "vice-czar" by Russian society. But he still could not save the Czar’s life: Alexander II was brutally assassinated on March 1, 1881 and the short-lived "liberal era" came to an end. The Third Section was soon replaced by the "security section", the okhrannoye otdeleniye, or Okhrana.

In sharp contradistinction to the "enlightened" rule of Loris-Melikov, a powerful group of aristocrats advocating instead a regime of brutal repression organized their own form of support for the threatened autocracy, now in the person of Czar Alexander III. Representing a temporary abandonment of the social engineering ethos, and organized as a secret society, these families formed a quasi-military "volunteer guard" of more than 10,000 in the name of and for the sake of protecting the Czar. They called themselves the "Sacred Brotherhood" (svyashchennaya druzhina), an allusion to the medieval Russian lords’ and princes’ elite guards, or bands of companions, the druzhina. The Sacred Brotherhood also operated an international intelligence apparatus that later became the seed-crystal for the Okhrana’s own foreign department.

In a way, the Brotherhood was too successful for its own good. The ferocious policies it advocated were adopted in full by Czar Alexander III and his influential adviser, the Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who has been called, not without reason, the most influential reactionary in Russian history. But the Brotherhood’s independent strength bothered Pobedonostsev as the ideologue of a supreme Czardom, and as a result, the Czar dissolved it. The Sacred Brotherhood’s heritage nevertheless lived on in the later establishment of the violent, militantly anti-Semitic "Black Hundred" organization (the Chernaya Sotnya)—the forerunner of modern Russian fascism.

If the Sacred Brotherhood represents both the high nobility and the brutality of the Russian intelligence elite, the figure of Colonel Sergei Zubatov (1863–1917) stands for the return of social engineering of the highest sophistication. Himself originally a revolutionary student who was "turned", Zubatov rose meteorically to the head of the Moscow Okhrana where he applied refined methods comparable to "brainwashing" for turning younger revolutionists into Okhrana agents. In the end, his police apparatus controlled much of the Russian Left’s political organizations, even up to the leadership level. Father Georgi Gapon, the priest and labor organizer who led the early phases of the 1905 Revolution, was originally Zubatov’s agent.

Zubatov not only suborned the Left, he also strove to deflate its appeal. He single-handedly created Russia’s trade-union movement. As his biographer put it, "The idea of a pure monarchy . . . [as] the sole force working for the common good" guided him, the aim being the "taming of the bourgeoisie. . . [and] gaining the favors of the workers and the peasants." What mattered was "not so much the statics of autocracy as its dynamics." Zubatov’s inspiration in his effort to "re-educate Russian society"—re-engineer it, that is—was that "the free Russian people do not wish their country to become another France or United States." The innate desire of the Russians, he believed, was the fulfillment of "the Russian Idea." To that end, Zubatov advocated paternalistic governance over the working masses, to include better working conditions, healthcare, social security benefits, and so on—all to be gouged out of the industrialists. His doctrine, though not explicitly socialist, was strongly anti-capitalist. It was, in a way, a kind of coerced noblesse obligé.

World War I derailed Zubatov’s plan. It changed not only the rules of the game but the game itself. Once again, history overwhelmed the careful design of the enlightened intelligence elite. No amount of social engineering could contain Russia’s chaotic transformation. When news of the February 1917 Revolution reached the retired Zubatov in his Petersburg home, he committed suicide.

The Higher Police under Bolshevism

The new era posed the strongest challenge yet to the very survival of the upper-nobility elite notion of the Higher Police. How could their self-conception as the best and the brightest, the servants of Russia according to the druzhina ideal, the social engineers and master manipulators, endure under Bolshevik rule? Of course, many creatures of the old Okhrana did survive and prosper under the new regime. Many former agents—Stalin being most probably one of them—were now to be found in leadership positions in the Soviet Communist Party and the state apparatus. In addition, members of the "Black Hundreds" flocked into the Bolshevik Party; the anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-liberal outlook of proto-fascist mass movements easily accommodated itself to Bolshevik ideology, while the Bolsheviks welcomed the aroused masses into their ranks. As a result, the newly established Bolshevik secret police, the "Extraordinary Commission" (Cheka), was comprised of a mixed and motley crew.

It was clear that the functions ascribed by Lenin to the new Cheka had less to do with social engineering than with social deconstruction by means of the extermination of non-approved social categories. The Cheka’s incentive structure emphasized murder, torture, brutality and atrocities of all stripes, not sociological investigation. The Higher Police thus yielded to another current, which has also recurred throughout Russian history: the sheer violence exerted by the state against all, the war by government against society. Just as Ivan the Terrible’s personal guard, the oprichniki, had visited unspeakable brutality upon nobles and the general populace during the 16th century, Lenin’s oprichniki slaughtered millions of Russians with little regard for higher-police methods. "Cruelty is the Russians’ principal trait", Maxim Gorky once wrote.

Still, even in this most brutal chapter of the history of the Russian secret services, there is evidence of the less coercive, social-engineering approach to the intelligence function. Interestingly, the founder of the first Bolshevik security organization after Lenin’s putsch of October-November 1917 was not, as is often assumed, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Savonarola of mass-murder—it was rather Lenin’s old friend and confidante, V. I. Bonch-Bruyevich, a professional anthropologist. Although a shroud of secrecy still surrounds the inner workings of Soviet intelligence in its initial period (from 1917 through 1939), there was a full-fledged social science research department inside the NKVD, at least in the 1930s. Staffed by sociologists, economists, anthropologists and others, it was tasked to study and report independently—independently of both party and NKVD hierarchies—on the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, including the morale of the population. A very unusual freedom of thought reportedly prevailed within the unit.

A more critical development in the historical continuity of the Russian intelligence services took place in the 1940s. Dzerzhinsky and his ferocious successors, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who organized the purges of the 1930s that resulted in the death of millions, were primarily concerned with terror as the principal means of government. This changed when Stalin appointed his fellow Georgian, Lavrentii Beria, to head the NKVD in 1939.

Beria was no boy scout, to be sure, but neither was he the monster of Cold War lore. Indeed, his once execrable reputation has been thoroughly revised in Russia in recent times. The traditional portrayal of a bloodthirsty psychopath and monstrous sex maniac has been replaced by a "new Beria." The new narrative relies in large part on the memoir of Beria written by his son, missile engineer Sergo Beria. It is an extraordinary book whose center stage is the inner recesses of Soviet power under Stalin. The version of the elder Beria displayed there portrays a Georgian who is not a Communist, a senior party leader who loathes Communist ideology and a planner who places efficiency and rationality above all other values.

In truth, too, Beria did rescue many top Soviet scientists and technologists from Stalin’s crass repression. These included the nuclear scientist Igor Kurchatov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and many others who were often employed in the jail-laboratories—the "luxury" gulag for scientists, the famed sharaga. During World War II, Stalin entrusted Beria with leading the Soviet crash program to develop nuclear weapons. Beria delivered. He rallied the scientific and technological intelligentsia in part by effectively protecting it. Further, he created within his Ministry of the Interior (MVD) a string of research institutes. The mission of these think tanks was to elaborate full sets of policies, both domestic and international. As was later claimed, Beria wanted supreme power, and to that end he prepared alternative policies. A foreign policy proposing a neutralized Germany as the first step to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States is one of the best-known planks in Beria’s program.

"Enlightened" and pragmatic though he was, Beria lost out in the power struggles that followed Stalin’s death, and was executed by the Politburo. In all likelihood, Beria, who terrified all the other Soviet leaders, fell victim to a coalition of the frightened. Nikita Khrushchev, who ended up as the head of the coalition that eliminated Beria, reduced the size of the "organs"—the secret police in Soviet parlance—lest they threaten again to take over the system as a whole. But the ideas, plans, and programs that had been associated with Beria kept resurfacing in the Soviet Union for thirty years and more after his death: the debate over economic decentralization identified with economists Yevsei Liberman and Vadim Trapeznikov; the Kosygin policy of giving more power to enterprise directors; and the liberation of political prisoners (Beria had halved the number of concentration camp inmates, zeks, in the late 1940s). Beria protégés kept on rising, too; Dimitri Ustinov as defense minister was but one example.

The rise of KGB head Yuri Andropov under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, heralded a new era in the history of the Higher Police. Early in his reign, Andropov summoned Sergo Beria to his office and, according to the latter, told him: "Sergo, I’ve studied your father’s file, the materials and the policy: they’re good and I’m going to implement them." It was Andropov who turned to the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences, to the prestigious research institutes associated with it, and thus to some of the country’s brightest minds: Tatiyana Zaslavskaya of the Institute of Sociology in Novosibirsk, Abel Aganbegyan and his Institute for the Study of Industrial Organization, Leonid Abalkin and the Institute of Economics. He asked them, often personally, to devise new policies and new strategies to save the Soviet system. In effect, Andropov asked these scientists (who were generally not members of the KGB themselves) to do the think-tanking for the new course he was plotting—perestroika. The top-down transformation envisioned by Andropov was perhaps the apex of Russian hubris in matters of social engineering; not only was the country going to be turned upside down and its economy thoroughly restructured by a self-appointed leadership, but the country was not even going to be told about the plan.

Only Andropov’s unexpected death and the premature elevation of a leader who commanded little following and loyalty forced the matter into the open. Mikhail Gorbachev appended glasnost to perestroika as a substitute means to gain the authority Andropov could have wielded through the intelligence and security apparatus. The rest is, as they say, history.

The Post-Communist Higher Police

The Soviet Union crashed as soon as the regime center’s coercive resolve failed it. The Communist Party, which revealed itself as nothing but a coalition of rent-seekers leveraging power for its members’ own ends, crashed too. The once almighty State Planning Commission, Gosplan—that monument to artificial, arbitrary mismanagement—vanished. Deprived of their right to claim a permanent blood transfusion from the economy, the armed forces faltered. What survived amid all this wreckage, despite the shrinking of its perimeter and the escape and removal of whole areas of national life from its brief, was the intelligence service. Overcoming a brief initial period of shock and disarray from the old regime’s collapse, the intelligence elite has by all indications steadily regrouped throughout the 1990s, both within government and the newly-formed private sector.

By 1998, the intelligence elite emerged openly into positions of authority, especially in the presidential apparatus. To mention but a few examples, Sergey Ivanov, Putin’s Minister of Defense, spent 18 years in the KGB-FSB. Oleg Chernov (Deputy Secretary of the Security Council), Aleksandr Manzhosin (First Deputy Head of the President’s Directorate for Foreign Policy), Igor Sechin (Putin’s chief secretary and deputy chief of the Kremlin administration) and Viktor Ivanov (deputy head of the Kremlin administration in charge of personnel) are all long-time senior veterans of the KGB. In their view, the current circumstance is the fulfillment of their historical destiny. Listen to how it is explained by one of these proud contemporary upholders of the "true" Russia. Nikolai Leonov, a former deputy head of the KGB’s First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence), was for years the controller of all KGB terror and subversion networks in the Americas. In a recent interview he was asked why so many former and current KGB operatives have assumed positions of power in Russia today. Leonov replied:

First of all, the demand today is precisely for such tough, pragmatically thinking politicians. They are in command of operative information, they have a broad field of view, and they’re open to new ideas. But at the same time, they are patriots and proponents of a strong state grounded in centuries-old tradition. History recruited them [emphasis in original] to carry out a special operation for the resurrection of our Great Power [Derzhava], because there has to be balance in the world, and without a strong Russia the geopolitical turbulence will begin. Second, it was only representatives of the System that were prepared to carry out that task. It turned out to be too much for the others. But then again, what is a KGB officer? He is, above all, a servant of the state. . . . Experience, loyalty to the state, strong intellectual capabilities, an iron will—where else are you going to find cadres? So there’s nothing surprising about the fact that representatives of the System were demanded by Russia. The only people that can bring order to the state are state people [gosudarstvennyye lyudi].

With these remarks as the immediate background, the figure of Russian President Vladimir Putin acquires an interesting relief. Putin’s hallmark, his signature phraseology, has been associated first and foremost with "the Russian idea" and with notions of efficiency and pragmatism: greatness of the State (derzhava in traditional Russian political language) through competent management, but without totalitarianism and a centrally planned economy. But for those who know history, Putin also raises eerie echoes from the past. Prince Loris-Melikov spoke of a "dictatorship of the heart"; Putin talks of a "dictatorship of the law." Colonel Sergei Zubatov explained that "the free Russian people do not wish their country to become another France or United States"; Putin argues that "Russia cannot become the second edition of, say, the U.S. or Britain in which liberal values have deep historic traditions." The Higher Police are in charge.

In his landmark "Millennium Message", delivered via the Internet in the final days of 1999, Putin presented a comprehensive program for his administration. To date, it is the most far-reaching programmatic document to have come from the Russian presidency, and is therefore a source of considerable weight. Russians today, he asserted, must again become Servants of the Russian Idea: "The public looks forward to the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state to a degree which is necessary, proceeding from the traditions and present state of the country." They must work on behalf of

the greatness of Russia. Russia was and will remain a great power. It is preconditioned by the inseparable characteristics of its geopolitical, economic, and cultural existence. They determined the mentality of Russians and the policy of the government throughout the history of Russia and they cannot but do so at present.

Many questions remain to be studied. The relationship within the intelligence services between a Higher Police committed to managing Russia by means of social engineering, on the one hand, and those we have labeled the oprichniki, who rely on brute force and power, must be better understood. Their rivalry and interplay will shape much of the domestic sources of Russia’s future evolution. As crises strike and as key issues become more sharply defined, opposition between these tendencies will likewise become more focused. Diverging agendas will clash, and contending currents will be at daggers drawn.

Further, the version of Russia’s polity presented here is a stylized, ideal type. Shades and nuances must be added to bring the model closer to everyday realities in Russia. But there are means to test the validity of the hypothesis we present. For instance, what is the treatment meted out to Beria in documentaries and fiction, in film, television and literature, and the media? What kinds of heroes are presented for the adulation and identification of the masses in thrillers and other popular culture movies? Are the principal tenets of the Higher Police’s doctrines spreading in policy circles, among the contemporary manufacturers of ideology? From answers to such questions it may be possible to adduce the directions being taken by Russia’s ruling elite. It seems to be firmly on a Higher Police course for the time being. Where exactly that will lead, of course, no one can say.