The day the police state triumphed in Russia

December 20th is marked in the Russian calendar as a day dedicated to the workers of the “security organs”. However, these are not just any “organs” that have security in their job description. In this case, the term “security organs” emphasises exclusively the importance of foundation of political police in the emerging Soviet Russia. On December 20, 1917, the Russian Communist Party established its own security and intelligence agency, the VChK, an “extraordinary commission” (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) to promote its political interests and suppress the opposition in the country. This commission, known by its Russian abbreviation as the “Cheka”, instead of being an extraordinary one, became a permanent repressive force, and its brutality gave rise to the infamous term “Chekism”.

The “organs” were later reformed several times, and the “Cheka” evolved into, for example, the NKVD, the MGB, and the KGB. Despite the tragic signs of this Soviet legacy, Russian state security workers still proudly call themselves “Chekists.” The Bolshevik Revolution, which took place a month and a half before the formation of the “Cheka,” marked the emergence of the first globally significant state based on the dictatorship of a single political party and a single permitted political ideology. Other similar one-party dictatorships—Italian fascism and German Nazism—followed shortly thereafter. But in terms of duration, they were not nearly as successful as Soviet communism. Nor did their political security forces develop anything that could be described by such a specific term as Chekism (for example, a specific “Gestapism”).

The Cult of “Effective Control” When the head of the current Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, was asked by Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 2017, on the centenary of the Cheka’s founding, why his service celebrates its “birthday” on the day of the “Cheka’s” founding and not on the dates of the founding of the much older tsarist security forces, he replied that it was only in 1917 that a “unified system of state security under centralized leadership” was established in Russia, while the intelligence services that existed before 1917 were unable to “control and defend” Russia with the same efficiency. In the Soviet case, that “efficiency” included, for example, the Red and Great Terrors, the Gulag concentration camp system, a massive man-made famine and the persecution of virtually all opposition views and positions. Last year, however, a statue of Dzerzhinsky was installed in front of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service building on the anniversary of the birth of the Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. The head of that intelligence service, Sergey Naryshkin, praised the founder of the Soviet political police for his “crystal-clear honesty,” loyalty to duty, and devotion to “the ideals of goodness and justice.” In the early 1990s, it seemed for a short time that the tradition of violence in Soviet and Russian post-Soviet society and its glorification of high-ranking officials would change significantly after all. Top politicians spoke of democratization, and the KGB was abolished and divided into several smaller organizations.

From oppressors to patriots However, fundamental reforms and controls over those who had previously committed injustices never took place, and after the conflict between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament in the fall of 1993, state security began to be centralized again. This was not due to any ingenious conspiracy from within these bodies, but above all because the presidential system needed a new type of “Chekist” to secure its interests. According to their own modified narratives, the workers in the “organs” have become “patriots” rather than former oppressors of their fellow citizens. And thanks to their regained self-confidence, they were able to place their share of the blame for the repression and collapse of the Soviet Union exclusively on politicians, especially reform-minded politicians. After all, according to the “Chekist” version, it was reforms, and not terror and repression, that meant the collapse of “order” and led only to “chaos.” Yeltsin restored the celebration of December 20 as “Chekist Day” in 1995 and enshrined the role of the president as the undisputed pinnacle of power in fundamental laws.

In the name of the highly problematic “democratization from above,” Yeltsin thus recentralized the system, which his chosen successor, Putin, now benefits greatly from with completely different goals. An extraordinary centralization It is not at all true that Putin is just a “former agent” of the Soviet political police. According to laws from the mid-1990s, later adapted to the new dictatorship, Putin has been the supreme head of both the KGB’s main successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), throughout his presidency. The FSB, the political police, whose former predecessor the Cheka was described as the “shield and sword” of the Communist Party, is now the de facto shield and sword of the power of a single person: President Vladimir Putin. Anyone who opposes this power is described and condemned, as before, as an agent of a foreign power, a traitor, an enemy of the Russian people, and a pest.

In his first speech to the “Chekists” as president on December 20, 2000, Putin emphasized that the primary task of the Russian “special services” is to protect the constitutional rights of the citizens of the Russian Federation. However, his speech during the recent celebrations of the same “holiday” presents a completely different aim: the point is to protect the Russian state, represented by the power of the president, from its inconvenient citizens in the name of the Russian people. The holiday of December 20 no longer belongs to the system of Soviet communism, which Putin, himself a former communist, opposes in certain fundamental respects. It is a reminder of the emergence of the cult of the police state, which is even more important for contemporary Russia than all the political ideologies that exist today.