Free The New Nobility of the KGB by Andrei Soldatov Page A

comparable with Soviet practice. The Soviet police state tried to control every citizen in the country. The new, more sophisticated Russian system is far more selective than its Soviet-era counterpart; it targets only those individuals who have political ambitions or strong public views. Yet it’s hard not to draw a comparison between the two. Increasingly, Russia’s measures to closely monitor the lives of its citizens reflect an authoritarian hand—one less interested in the goals of civil society and more concerned with maintaining rigid control.
     

6
     
    LIVING OFF THE FAT OF THE LAND
     
    THE NEW ELITE
     
     
     
     
    I N SOVIET TIMES, loyalty to the secret police was enforced by fear. Stalin-era purges touched the secret police as well—many in the service and the leadership were executed or sent to jail. But service could be well rewarded. In the KGB, the rank and file received bonuses and free apartments, sidestepping long waiting lists. Generals enjoyed being chauffeured in official black Volgas—the roomiest Soviet sedan, used by the upper-echelon bureaucracy—and they qualified for country homes on the elite Rublyovka Road. But it was well understood by the recipients of these privileges that they were only good as long as one held on to one’s position. The real owner of the dachas and cars was the KGB itself. Agents, first and foremost, were servants of the state.
     
    In the years after the Soviet collapse, the servants of the state once again developed a taste for luxury. Old-fashioned Volgas were replaced by the largest, most prestigious black Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis, specially equipped with plates, lights, and sirens that allowed drivers to cut through Moscow’s enormous traffic jams. (The lights and plates also give the driver the right to roar down the wrong side of the road at high speed, and have become one of Russia’s most visible symbols of privilege.) In Moscow alone, the FSB has ninety-five such vehicles at its disposal, while Foreign Intelligence has only fourteen and the Ministry of Defense has nineteen. 1
     
    In the 1990s, with unconstrained capitalism in Russia, officers were more focused on money and perks than their predecessors had been. They wanted higher salaries and pensions, and they saw it as their right to benefit from the privatization of state property, including valuable lands along the gold coast of the Rublyovka. This corridor, a collection of villages along the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Road, has, since the imperial era, been a route for the elite. It was unofficially called the “Road of the Tsar” because Ivan the Terrible used it when he went falcon hunting. And in Soviet times, the pleasant summer homes, or dachas, were reserved for members of the Politburo and Central Committee of the party, famous artists, scientists, and people close to the Kremlin. But the socialist system demanded that these dachas be given to all of them temporarily, with no way of transforming them into personal property. Part of this land was set aside for the KGB’s dachas.
     
    After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian elite continued to occupy the area. The famous villages on Rublyovka—Barvikha, Zhukovka, Nikolina Gora, Usovo, and Gorki became a refuge for enclaves of the newly wealthy and powerful. Yeltsin’s family enjoyed a compound in the Rublyovka village of Barvikha. Vladimir Putin chose the state residence near Usovo; the former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin built their mansions in the village of Zhukovka; and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev preferred the state residence in Gorki-9.
     
    Construction in the forests surged in the 1990s, and accelerated in the Putin decade. Traditional wooden dachas were replaced by mammoth, columned brick-and-stone mansions. The Rublyovka turned into Russia’s refuge for oligarchs and powerful officials. One hundred square meters in a dacha in the Rublyovka was valued at around $200,000.