Murderous Regime

Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB agent who defected to Britain in 1985, still has many sources and contacts inside Russia. And they are telling him things about Russia today. In today's Washington Post, he shares that information. Murders are being carried out against Russia's enemies at a rather rapid pace. Alexander Litvinenko was only the latest.

There were no secret assassinations under Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin. But under Vladimir Putin, the militant element of the KGB (now known as the FSB) slowly began working to persuade the leadership to carry out such killings, according to my sources. "Too many enemies," they said.

Those members of the FSB have a different style than in the past, however. The Communist Party was cruel, but it had its rules. The current people are like bandits — no code, no rules, hard to distinguish from the Mafia. The gangster mentality started to spread after 2000; there were assassinations inside the country, of enemies of the regime. But there were so many contract killings at the time under Putin that it was difficult to tell which were the work of the FSB and which were not. In that atmosphere, it was easy to disguise an assassination.

The FSB has also become a protection racket. Some of those in business who are willing to go along with the FSB report everything to its operatives and also give 10 percent of their profits to the KGB's successor agency. And everyone is happy.

So in a way it's a big criminal state. The FSB has become like the Mafia in its methods and goals.

I've mentioned before that Russia more closely resembles an organized crime operation than a legitimate nation-state. There have been too many disquieting reports of Russian strongarm seizures of energy assets and too many suspicious deaths of opponents of Putin and his cronies. According to Gordievsky, the FSB has learned from one mistake the old KGB made: they no longer keep a paper trail of the hits they carry out. Too many of the old assassinations have been revealed as records surfaced. The FSB keeps it very, very quiet. Russia is becoming a problem once again.