From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 7/23/2006 5:06 PM

Monday, July 24, 2006

The Sword and Shield
By Richard Lourie
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, is the organization that has for all intents and purposes replaced the KGB. The linkage between the two is open and explicit on every level, from symbolic to that of institutional memory.

The KGB's symbol in the Soviet era was a sword and a shield embossed with a hammer and sickle. That symbol, representing the workers and peasants, has been replaced by a two-headed eagle, the emblem of tsarist, and now, post-Soviet Russia. Systems change, but the sword and shield abide.

Oddly enough, even though the new Russia has reached back into its tsarist past for much of its regalia, the FSB doesn't go that far back when writing its own history. The article "On State Security Personnel Day," published on the FSB web site for the Dec. 20 holiday, traces its roots only to December 1917 and the founding of the Cheka, the abbreviation for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Espionage. The FSB could rightfully have claimed kinship with the tsarist Okhranka, or even Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, the granddaddy of them all, with its symbols of the dog's head and broom -- to sniff out treason and sweep it away.

Perhaps the FSB decided not to reach too far back because it has its hands full in defining itself in relation to its immediate predecessor. The ties are not only abstract and institutional, but involve living connections. President Vladimir Putin served in the KGB from 1975 to 1990 and was head of the FSB from July 1998 to August 1999. Less than six months later he became president. Putin's successor, Nikolai Patrushev, who is still head of the FSB, has worked in state security organs since 1974.

The FSB's relationship to its previous Soviet incarnation is complex. With Putin in the Kremlin it is now easier to accentuate the positive. FSB personnel point out that Soviet espionage warned Stalin of Hitler's intentions on the eve of World War II, but Stalin ignored them. By stealing atomic secrets from the United States and Britain, the article explains that Soviet intelligence, "having created an atomic counterweight, ... prevented a third world war." (Interestingly, the worst crimes and greatest successes are both, therefore, ascribed to the Stalin era.)

In addition to the state security agencies' positive contributions, there is also what might be called the neutral aspect. The agencies were only a reflection of the state they served. That's not much of a defense in a post-Nuremburg world, but historically true enough.

The FSB continues to recognize the millions of victims of the "cruel machine of state security," but not without adding that among the number were many security people themselves. Nearly all the top leaders -- Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria -- were executed.

The FSB cannot be accused of showing too much contrition. The article points out that the worst excesses ended with Stalin's death in 1953. In fact, some claim that tragedies like the massacre at Beslan in 2004 might have been avoided if the KGB people of the 1970s and 1980s had not been hounded as if they were responsible for the crimes of the Stalin era. As the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets quoted one journalist as saying just after the Beslan hostage tragedy: "You wanted to be rid of the KGB? Well, you're rid of them!"

But the KGB people of the 1970s and 1980s don't seem to be faring so poorly, considering one of them is running the country and another the FSB. The real problem is that the institutionalized paranoia of the security organs seems to have seeped from Lubyanka into the Kremlin. An Economist cover story published July 13, "Living with a strong Russia," even calls the Kremlin's creed "Chekism." The question about today's FSB is: What enemy is its sword poised to attack and just who is being protected by its shield?

Richard Lourie is the author of "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin" and Sakharov: A Biography."
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/07/24/006.html