National security

What’s going on at Russia’s KGB successor?

FSB generals are rarely relieved of their duties for something they've done. This is an ideological position that dates back to the late 1990s, that the security agencies needed to be strengthened after Boris Yeltsin's reforms, and dismissing someone for failures or mistakes (and least of all trying to learn from these mistakes) only got in the way. Throughout Vladimir Putin's entire time in power, only a few FSB generals have been dismissed for mistakes or failures. In the summer of 2004, the president removed a few security-agency heads for allowing Shamil Basayev to march on Ingushetia, which resulted in the federal government losing control of the republic for a day. [During the midnight hours on June 22, 2004, militants under Basayev's command seized and blocked off a number of major administrative and military facilities in Ingushetia. According to official reports, 97 people were killed during the attack.] And a few FSB department heads were sent into retirement in the mid and late 2000s for overreaching their authority.

The current series of resignations in the SEB—the FSB's Economic Security Service—doesn't likely fall into this category of personnel changes. The SEB is a special branch of the FSB. This branch doesn't conduct investigations or uncover crimes—its function is to monitor. SEB officers are embedded inside Russia's largest corporations, just as key units' names indicate: the Office of Counterintelligence Support to Industrial Facilities, the Office of Counterintelligence Support to Transportation, the Office of Counterintelligence Support to the Credit and Financial Spheres, and so on. In the language of 2000s-era Russian security forces, “counterintelligence activity” doesn't mean the fight against foreign spies in banks and businesses (like it did during the times of the NKVD's State Political Directorate), but just that the FSB has a free hand to do what it likes.