A prisoner swap that portrays Putin’s Russia

The largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War sheds light on the nature of the regime led by Vladimir Putin and the solid fusion between a criminal world and a caste originating from the USSR security services, of which the president was a member.

Among the Russian citizens who returned home, convicted murderer Vadim Krasikov is at the center of the delicate swap. The reception he received confirms that the Russian system functions as an amalgamated structure around the so-called siloviki — the name for the set of defense, security and law enforcement bodies in the country — and their members.

Krasikov was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for shooting dead a former Chechen independence commander. The “Tiergarten killer” — in reference to the name of the Berlin park where the murder took place in August 2019 — was received at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport with a red carpet, an honor guard, and a hug and friendly greeting from Putin, who worked hard to free him.

Never before has Putin gone so far in publicly identifying himself with one of those figures who, inside and outside Russia, shoot and poison people who are perceived as dangerous enemies of the system.

Krasikov worked for Alfa, a special unit created in 1974 to fight terrorism, which was attached to the FSB (the federal security service, successor to the Soviet KGB). And he knew some of Putin’s active bodyguards, according to Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. What Peskov did not say is that Krasikov has a criminal record in Russia, after being accused, along with two others, of ordering the murder of a businessman in the Karelia region in 2007. Nor did he say that in 2014, he was wanted for the murder of another businessman in Moscow, according to data registered by Interpol from the Russian Interior Ministry.

In February, Putin referred to Krasikov as a man “who due to patriotic sentiments eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” Now the “patriot” will be decorated for it. To understand the system that hails him as a hero, one must go back to the great transformations that took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Perestroika political reform movement paved the way for the east and west blocs — which had been at odds for decades — to peacefully coexist. But this change severely affected key social sectors of the Soviet system: hundreds of thousands of siloviki were demobilized and returned from their garrisons in Eastern Europe, hundreds of arms factories were dismantled and converted to produce civilian consumer goods. The economic system based on the arms industry had collapsed, but the Russian model for a new peaceful world was still in an embryonic state and even receded.

In the early 1990s, many career officers discharged from the Armed Forces had to reinvent themselves after being made unemployed; they survived by working as pirate taxi drivers, bodyguards for the nouveau riche, arms dealers, mercenaries and volunteers in the still-smoldering armed conflicts, such as those between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh or the conflict between Abkhazia and South Ossetia against Georgia.

The mafia and power structures in Russia were formed in this breeding ground. They were staffed by people who simultaneously acted as guardians of order and as bandits. Some, the most clever, rose to the top in the economics, politics and administration of the state. Others were happy to earn their bread with guns in hand. All this coexisted in the same system.

Since Putin became president, siloviki have multiplied throughout the state structure, and today they are in ministries, public and private companies, banks and financial institutions. They are the ones who underpin and ensure the authoritarian and repressive character of today’s Russia. At least 13 of Putin’s bodyguards occupy important positions in Russian power structures. One of the best known figures is Aleksey Dyumin, who, after being governor of Tula Oblast, has returned to the president’s entourage as his assistant and as Russia’s state secretary.

After Stalin’s death, the siloviki were given a place in the structure of the USSR under the control and direction of the Communist Party. With the disappearance of the state, these services — combined with judges, prosecutors and politicians — became an uncontrolled caste that used the state for its own benefit. This phenomenon was discussed in 2007 by the insightful Viktor Cherkesov, then head of the Russian Drug Control Service. Cherkesov, a Chekist (veteran of the security services), was concerned about the way in which his fellow officers had evolved. According to him, they were the only ones capable of ensuring the unity of the state after the end of the USSR. In the newspaper Kommersant, Cherkesov urged his comrades to overcome their closed “corporatism,” to create binding state rules for all (rather than arbitrary regulations), and to move toward a normal “civil society.” He warned that the “privileged elite” of which he himself was a part risked turning into a “swamp” like the “worst Latin American dictators” if it delayed the pending transition. “The caste is destroyed from within when warriors become merchants,” he warned.

Soviet methods

Today, the siloviki set the tone for Russian politics with the methods they learned in the USSR and then perfected in a climate of resentment, greed and the lack of vision taking into account the challenges of modernity.

On the other hand, the arrival of the dissidents released in Russia in the West also highlights a reality that is perhaps little known and appreciated: it shone a light on the Russian citizens who, by their civic conscience, their courage and their sense of responsibility, are different from the majority that ignores the repression of their fellow citizens.

In his press conference after their release, politician Ilya Yashin said that while being transferred from one prison to another during his detention, he happened to meet “anonymous people” imprisoned for a comment or a phone call. “These are political prisoners who are outside our field of observation. There are huge numbers of these people. They have no hope because nobody knows about them,” he said. Memorial, the human rights organization banned in Russia, lists 1,532 political prisoners of various categories.

Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, another of the freed Russian dissidents, spoke of thousands. Pavel Kushnir, a 39-year-old pianist and pacifist imprisoned for criticizing the war who was accused of inciting terrorism, is the most recent case. Kushnir died on July 29 as a result of a hunger strike in a cell in the Russian Far East. He was an unknown; his philosophical and poetic reflections on social media only half a dozen followers. It is an opportunity to reflect on the deep Russia and on Yashin’s words.

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