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

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    The FSB ended up a very rich landowner. Although the KGB’s dachas on Rublyovka were officially state owned, they had been managed by state security for so long that they were considered to be entirely at the FSB’s disposal.
     
     
    ONE OF THOSE who witnessed the advent of pricey mansions on Rublyovka was Viktor Alksnis, a onetime colonel in the Soviet Air Force whose grandfather had been a founder of the Red Army air force. Alksnis had served in Latvia, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the military was forced to leave and Alksnis came to Russia, where he lived in a small village outside Moscow. At the time Russia was steamrolling toward democracy and free markets under Yeltsin, Alksnis was a voice from the past, steadfastly opposed to what the new Russia was attempting to become—a capitalist democracy. Alksnis, with wavy grey hair and a calm, self-confident manner, served in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet parliament that was elected in 1989, as one of the leaders of Soyuz, a parliamentary group formed with the goal of preserving the Soviet Union at all costs. Later, he twice served in the new Russian parliament, where he openly criticized the West, capitalism, and liberal ideas. In 2003, he was elected to the State Duma from the district that included the Rublyovka, and he never ceased to be outraged by the rise of the million-dollar mansions.
     
    In 2006, Alksnis discovered that in 2003 and 2004 the state had doled out about ninety-nine acres of its land in Rublyovka to private citizens. These lands consisted of eighty allotments, thirty-eight of them taken from the funds of the FSB Directorate of Material and Technical Support with the consent of the service’s leadership.
     
    The land was given outright to former and current high-ranking FSB officials. According to Alksnis, land was granted by the simplest of mechanisms: A letter of request, followed by a letter of approval, was all it took for land to change hands.
     
    For example, he said, Alexei Fedorov, a deputy chief of the FSB’s Economic Security Service, sent an application to the top official of the Odintsovo district, including with it a request from Semenenko, the deputy chief of the FSB division for lands and property, asking for land to be granted to Fedorov. Alksnis added that the land was under state ownership and that Semenenko had no right to relinquish it. The top official of the Odintsovo district just rubber-stamped the decision, Alksnis said. By law, he told Borogan, the land should have been transferred to a federal property agency for sale.
     
    In researching the records of property transactions, the authors noticed that the FSB generals listed were not denoted by post or rank. For instance, major generals were merely called “servicemen who have served more than fifteen years.” But the authors discovered that a number of high-ranking FSB officials were on the list of those who had been given free land. They included Alexei Fedorov; Mikhail Shkuruk, chief of the Control Department in the FSB Border Guard Service; and Boris Mylnikov, head of the Antiterrorist Center of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a post equivalent to first deputy director of the FSB. Mylnikov was given his land for the nominal sum of $5 for 100 square meters. 3
     
    Others who received property free of charge were Yevgeny Lovyrev, the FSB’s main personnel officer; Vyacheslav Volokh, former chief of the FSB Antiterrorist Center, who had by then left the service and become assistant to the Minister of Agriculture; and Sergey Shishin, then the head of the Internal Security Directorate of the FSB. Lovyrev, Volokh, and Shishin were all granted allotments in the village Gorki-2. b
     
    In the late 1990s Gorki-2 became a fashionable part of the Rublyovka area, and the neighbors of the three FSB generals were captains of the new Russian capitalism: David Yakobashvili, chairman of the board of food-processing giant Wimm-Bill-Dann, and