Last week, following the results of Russia’s parliamentary election, Russian media run a story suggesting that the Kremlin is planning to implement far-reaching changes to the country’s intelligence apparatus. According to the Moscow-based daily Kommersant, the administration of President Vladimir Putin is considering merging Russia’s two major intelligence and counterterrorism agencies into one. Specifically, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, will merge with the FSB, the Federal Security Service, according to Kommersant. The merger will create a new amalgamated intelligence agency that will be named “Ministry of State Security”, or MGB, in Russian. The last time this title was used was from 1946 to 1953, during the last years of the reign of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. It was one of several agencies that were eventually combined to form the Soviet KGB in 1954.
If the Kommersant article is
accurate, Russia’s two main intelligence agencies will merge after an
institutional separation that has lasted a quarter of a century. They
were separated shortly after the official end of the Soviet Union, in
1991, when it was recognized that the KGB was not under the complete
control of the state. That became plainly obvious in August of that
year, when the spy agency’s Director, Vladimir Kryuchkov, helped lead a
military coup aimed at deposing Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The
two new agencies were given separate mandates: the SVR inherited the
mission of the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorates and focused on
collecting intelligence abroad; the FSB, on the other hand, assumed the
KGB’s counterintelligence and counterterrorist missions. A host of
smaller agencies, including the Federal Agency of Government
Communications and Information (FAPSI), the Federal Protective Service
(FSO) and others, took on tasks such as communications interception,
border control, political protection, etc.
Could these agencies merge again after 25
years of separation? Possibly, but it will take time. An entire
generation of Russian intelligence officers has matured under separate
institutional roofs in the post-Soviet era. Distinct bureaucratic
systems and structures have developed and much duplication has ensued
during that time. If a merger was to occur, entire directorates and
units would have to be restructured or even eliminated. Leadership roles
would have to be purged or redefined with considerable delicacy, so as
to avoid inflaming bureaucratic turf battles. Russian bureaucracies are
not known for their organizational skills, and it would be interesting
to see how they deal with the inevitable confusion of a possible merger.
It could be argued that, if Putin’s goal is to augment the power of the
intelligence services —which is doubtful, given their long history of
challenging the power of the Kremlin— he would be better off leaving
them as they are today.
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