The Russian hybrid intelligence state: reconceptualizing the politicization of intelligence and the ‘intelligencization’ of Politics

ABSTRACT

On the case of present-day Russia, this article proposes a novel way to conceptualize the intelligence-politics nexus, or else, the mutual politicization of intelligence and ‘intelligencization’ of politics. Recognizing the importance and salience of intelligence in Russia, the author criticizes the paradigm of the ‘KGB state’, arguing that rather than the FSB’s penetration and subsequent capture of the state, we see a symbiosis at work. Inspired by cognitive theories of conceptual integration, the article highlights qualitatively new phenomena that do not stem from either intelligence or state, but are hybrids consisting of more than the sum of the constituent parts. Rather than representing an anachronism or an aberration from the Western norm dictating a strict division of labour between intelligence and politics, the Russian hybrid intelligence state emerges as a postmodern phenomenon. As such, it can carry lessons for the analysis of intelligence-politics relations in other countries, too.

Introduction

Since Tsarist times, intelligence¹ has been a crucial element of Russian domestic politics, foreign and security policy, and warfare, but also of Russian society, culture, and mentality at large.² By many accounts, its significance has grown since the more liberal, or at least more chaotic and pluralistic, 1990s, when the intelligence services’ position was weaker. Under Vladimir Putin, many former intelligence officers have found prominent positions in governance and business.³ Intelligence activities such as covert information gathering, ubiquitous surveillance, collection of compromising material, blackmail, disinformation, covert action, and special operations, including assassinations, are nearly everyday features of the power struggle within the political elite as well as of the regime’s governance of society and economic life.⁴ In 2017, intelligence methods landed incumbent minister Aleksei Uliukaev in prison, and in 2021, opposition leader Aleksei Naval’nyi narrowly escaped getting killed by an FSB murder squad. These are just the most prominent examples. Increasingly, since the mass opposition demonstrations in 2011–12, the regime has sought to contain and marginalize oppositional organizations, media outlets and even individuals by stigmatizing them as ‘foreign agents’.⁵ Surveillance cameras with facial recognition are used to identify and detain protesters, target journalists, and hunt down draft dodgers. A culture of suspicion is fostered, in the elite and society alike – enemies are allegedly everywhere; even teachers are urged to report oppositional schoolchildren. The cult of state security and ‘the chekist’⁶ as a heroic figure have been revived.⁷

But although much impressive empirical work has been done; in overarching and theoretical terms, this development – the (close) relationship between politics and intelligence – is poorly understood. In part coloured by the Western/Anglophone normative theory of intelligence positing the separation of politics and intelligence, the English-language body of research on this nexus in Russia often portrays it in terms of intelligence ‘capturing’ politics, economy, and society. To a significant extent, such a logic implies an active, powerful, deceptive, and manipulating entity (the FSB) subjugating an unsuspecting and/or weak and passive entity (the Russian state in the 1990s). Hence, it diminishes agency and active contribution on the part of politics as regards the intelligence-politics relationship, despite evidence to the contrary.⁸ Taking the latter insights into account and drawing inspiration from the cognitive theory of conceptual integration,⁹ this article will conceptualize the Russian politics-intelligence nexus in a novel way. It proposes a theory of the ‘Russian Hybrid Intelligence State’, a perspective that will acknowledge the particularities of the Russian context through the liberation from the normative theory of intelligence that was in essence developed in the US in the mid-20th century, reflecting the realities, requirements, and Weltanschauung (of a specific socioeconomic stratum)¹⁰ of that time and place. The Russian hybrid intelligence state, although reminiscent in some respects of the characteristically Russian maximalism¹¹ and the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, may nevertheless serve as an instructive example of the symbiosis of intelligence and politics in the postmodern world.

Below, I will discuss relevant problems associated with defining intelligence before offering a definition suitable for the purposes of this article. I then briefly present the dominant Western scholarly view of the politics-intelligence nexus in democracies and authoritarian states, respectively, zooming in on the Soviet Union and Russia. Here, I present the ‘penetration thesis’ that has become widespread in the relevant literature on post-Soviet Russia and explain how it can be theorized as a conceptual metaphor. Criticizing the ‘penetration thesis’ and the view of Russia as a ‘KGB state’, I argue that the theory of conceptual integration is more suitable, since it highlights new and unique features that do not fit easily into the categories of ‘politics’ or ‘intelligence’ but result from their interaction. This argument is backed up with examples of hybrid actors, hybrid activities, and hybrid culture, in addition to a brief discussion of whether Putin can be regarded as a ‘KGB President’.

Defining intelligence

Before discussing the relationship between politics and intelligence, we need to clarify what is meant by the term intelligence in this article, as there is no scholarly consensus of how intelligence should be defined or even conceptualized. The post-9/11 spread of practices originally confined to the sphere of state security¹² further complicates this. Some authors operate with a narrow understanding, focusing on the production of knowledge. Thus, Sherman Kent characterized intelligence as three distinct ‘things’ ‘devotees’ think of when using the term, namely a kind of knowledge, the type of organization that produces that knowledge, and the activities conducted by that organization.¹³ Concentrating on epistemological and cognitive issues, Hatlebrekke defines intelligence as ‘secretly generated wisdom beyond the limits of formal reasoning that makes uncertain estimates less uncertain, and that consequently generates political, strategic and operational advantages over adversaries’.¹⁴ Other authors include covert action – after listing a host of other scholars’ attempted definitions, Warner offers his own: ‘Intelligence is secret, state activity to understand or influence foreign entities’.¹⁵ The criterion ‘foreign’ is problematic, as it excludes, obviously, domestic entities. Further, in the Russian context, there are at least two services – FSB and its military counterpart GU (GRU) that operate abroad as well as at home.¹⁶ In addition, for Russian intelligence services, the operational distinction between home and abroad is rather loose, in the sense that they may practice at home what for other countries’ services may be acceptable only abroad or against foreigners.¹⁷ FSB’s assassination attempt on Aleksei Naval’nyi is a case in point, as it happened not very far from Russia’s geographical centre.

Some scholars also include the execution of policy among intelligence’s tasks.¹⁸ Notably, the distinction between intelligence as a tool to inform policy and as a tool of execution of policy is not always clear – consider the concept of ‘agent of influence’. The many and changing (both core and peripheral) tasks of intelligence agencies have made Stout and Warner propose that ‘“intelligence” is what intelligence agencies do’.¹⁹ In the Russian context, this would include (as peripheral activities) facilitating smuggling,²⁰ handing out art awards, sponsoring films,²¹ organizing beauty pageants, and, previously, supporting pig Olympics (!),²² not to mention assassinating perceived enemies abroad and even at home.²³ The state intelligence monopoly posited by Warner²⁴ has become eroded in the postmodern world, where not only the threats have become fragmented,²⁵ but also where functions, practices, and discourse previously associated almost exclusively with state intelligence agencies (securitization, systematic surveillance, data analysis, threat assessments) have spread to domains far beyond that of the state.²⁶ Then there is the ‘revolving door’ between intelligence agencies and private businesses, as well outsourcing and contracting of intelligence, that has gone particularly far in the US,²⁷ where, already in 2005, 70 per cent of the country’s intelligence budget went to private actors.²⁸

A particular problem in the post-Soviet Russian context is the amount of former and not-so-former (‘active reserve’) employees, both of whom may draw actively on their professional experience and networks,²⁹ and who are expected to stay loyal to the service for the rest of their lives.³⁰ Further, the informal practices constituting sistema, as theorized by Ledeneva,³¹ arguably have much in common with Russian intelligence culture, for instance secrecy, extra-legal measures, and tight-knit networks.

Taking these difficulties into account, I will focus on what can be termed state-centred intelligence, understood as covert activity to generate knowledge, influence foreign and domestic entities, and eliminate security threats, for the purpose of regime and state security (as well as power) and national interest. This activity is conducted by specific actors (intelligence agencies, formal/informal contractors, or volunteers) and must be understood in the context of Russian intelligence culture, i.e., its history, cultural references, mentalities, and identities, which in turn only make sense when seen in relation to the wider Russian political and cultural context.

Hence, this working definition is informed by ‘traditional’ Western intelligence studies, but also critical, even ‘transversal’³² intelligence studies, and takes into account Russian, especially post-Soviet, developments. However, it deliberately diverges from the traditional Russian distinction between razvedka and state security. In Russian, the term razvedka roughly corresponds to the narrow understanding of ‘intelligence’, meaning the covert collection of information (mainly abroad) and analysis thereof to produce knowledge in support of decision-making, whether it concerns global strategic questions or military issues, including minute details on the battlefield. The foreign intelligence service SVR is primarily tasked with the former, whereas GU is primarily tasked with the latter. This is reflected in their names (GU is still colloquially known under its old name GRU), with the R standing for razvedka. The suppression of domestic dissent and foreign influence inside Russia, on the other hand, is FSB’s main domain, which is also reflected in its name – the Committee for State Security. SVR employees, and to an even greater extent alumni of its Soviet predecessor, the KGB First Chief Directorate, often distance themselves from the less prestigious or even ‘dirty’ business of their colleagues tasked with state security in the narrow sense.

Not denying these organizational and identity-related differences, I will argue that a sharp distinction between intelligence (narrowly understood) and state security is tantamount to wishful thinking, and/or taking the sources’ assessments at face value – both of which are cardinal sins for the intelligence analyst and scholar alike. The organs tasked with what is normally regarded as state security also use what is commonly referred to as intelligence methods, even in the narrowest sense, that is covert collection of information and analysis thereof. Conversely, in increasingly autocratic Russia, ‘everything’ has become an issue of state security. And what is the overarching task of SVR and GU if not the security of the state? The various services also have partly overlapping responsibilities. For instance, FSB, GU, and SVR all do political intelligence, and they are all involved in ‘active measures’ of various sorts.³³ All three carry out covert assassinations abroad, even the SVR, despite its ‘clean’ self-image.³⁴ In addition, as I have already noted, in the Russian context, the distinction between foreign and domestic intelligence is not clear-cut, with FSB and GU operating at home as well as abroad. Putin himself traversed the boundary between state security and razvedka, and although he has denied his involvement with the former, it is an open secret that he served there for years.

The definition employed in this article does not grant intelligence/security agencies a monopoly on intelligence activities, although as the biggest and most influential organization, the FSB (and its predecessor KGB) will naturally be paid due attention. Nor do I go into much detail about the difference between the various organizations, which would go far beyond the scope of this article. This does absolutely not mean that I regard Russia’s intelligence community³⁵ as a monolithic entity. It is even a stretch to call it a community, as the services are engaged in an almost existential infighting. The individual services (and even some departments within them) have distinct cultures, budgets, and tasks; with secrecy, competition, and compartmentalization as the norm.³⁶ However, they are all part of Russian intelligence, as defined above. Therefore, and in harmony with the macro perspective and purposes of this article, I will analyse them together.

Politicization of intelligence as exception and as norm

‘Traditional’ Anglo-American intelligence studies posit a strict division of labour between intelligence and politics, at least as an ideal.³⁷ Beyond general direction in the form of issuing information requests, getting intelligence in return whereupon they use it to inform their policies and in turn to adjust the information requests (the intelligence cycle), decisionmakers should not interfere. Intelligence agencies should be free to find the untainted ‘Truth out there’, which they should fearlessly present to decisionmakers. The intelligence services often take great pride in ‘speaking truth onto power’. Undue interference by politicians into the work of intelligence agencies is referred to as politicization of intelligence, either by decisionmakers’ giving directions about not only what to look for, but what to find. Politicization can also go the other way – ‘intelligence to please’ the decisionmakers, as a result of being exposed to carrot, stick, or both. Either way, pieces of intelligence that support the preferred views may be (ab)used while those that contradict them are disregarded (cherry-picking), or pieces of collected information can be presented without proper context (stovepiping). A prime example would be the George W. Bush administration’s misuse and abuse of intelligence in order to plan and justify the invasion of Iraq, making it ‘the Mother of all intelligence failures’.³⁸ Finally, even in democracies, intelligence services may themselves intervene in politics,³⁹ sometimes claiming to represent the ‘Truth’, as opposed to the lies of politicians such as Donald Trump.⁴⁰ Obviously, such cases of politicization of intelligence have been identified and criticized by Western scholars. More to the point, scholars have also acknowledged that the image of clear and distinct roles is a far cry from how things really work in most cases,⁴¹ perhaps especially in the post-Cold War world. But the crucial point here is that Western intelligence failures and instances of politicization of intelligence, of which there are numerous examples, are seen as exceptions to the rule, or else, aberrations from the standard. Major instances of politicization are regenerative scandals in the Baudrillardian sense⁴² – by being defined as precisely scandalous aberrations, and generating token reforms, they contribute to upholding the illusion of the strict division (at least of labour) between politics and intelligence.

By contrast, in the literature on intelligence in authoritarian and totalitarian states, politicization of intelligence is seen as the rule not the exception.⁴³ Much research on intelligence in non-democratic states has focused on its role as an indispensable mechanism of repression and social control⁴⁴ and such agencies are therefore regarded as qualitatively different from those of democratic states.⁴⁵ However, while this is a valid observation on its own terms, it is undoubtedly strongly coloured by the Western/Anglophone view of intelligence. The problem is not this observation per se, but the normative perspective employed: Paradoxically, these authors still analyse and evaluate the intelligence in authoritarian states using Western theories and concepts and end up with basically regarding authoritarian countries’ intelligence services as deficient (as well as brutal and immoral) versions of Western ones.⁴⁶ This serves to construct a distorted mirror where authoritarian intelligence, thanks to its failures to live up to Western standards, reflects back on Western intelligence, which in this light appears rational, functional, and moral.⁴⁷ The aim of this article is to break this mirror: Instead of measuring the Russian politics-intelligence relationship (as it actually functions) against the Western (unattainable, even for Western countries) ideal, I will draw up a model that is useful to conceptualize how it actually functions.

Intelligence and politics in the soviet Union/Russia

To the extent that the politics-intelligence nexus in Russia or the Soviet Union is theorized, there are two strands. In what I have termed the ‘intelligence-as-a-tool perspective’, the KGB, for instance, is not to be regarded an independent actor, but merely a government department, which is reflected in its name from 1954 to 1978; ‘KGB under the Council of Ministers’. Though powerful and well-funded, it had a defined and delimited role within the Soviet system, as the party’s tool to reach its ideological goals and to enhance the regime’s security.⁴⁸ It was under the control of the Communist Party. For instance, Yuri Andropov was the only General Secretary hailing from the KGB, and he was not even a trained KGB officer, but had come to the post of KGB head precisely from a party career,⁴⁹ in harmony with the post-Stalin unwritten rule that the KGB should be led by civilian party functionaries.⁵⁰ More to the point, 41 per cent of those appointed to executive office in the KGB during the Soviet Union’s last three years were civilian party functionaries.⁵¹ Writing about the Soviet period, Dziak sees the relationship between the KGB (and its predecessors) and the party-state as similar to that between mathematics and physics,⁵² or a combined holy office and temple guard and the priesthood. The secret police was the guarantor of the Soviet system, the ‘principal guardian of the party’.⁵³ Hunting for internal enemies, the KGB permeated all societal (and military) institutions, except the claimant to monopolistic power – the Communist Party.⁵⁴ Similarly, Pringle sees the goal of the KGB under Andropov’s leadership as protecting the Soviet state, not capturing it, although the methods used of course left a heavy imprint on state and society.⁵⁵ Writing about the early Putin period, Pallin espouses a similar view, looking upon ‘the power ministries’ as the regime’s tools of policymaking, political control, and regime security. Warned against ‘[d]emonizing their influence’ and against ‘exaggerating their representation in Russian politics […]’, she makes the point that there are other, more pressing problems and that manifest abuse of power does not automatically translate into control.⁵⁶

A different perspective, which arguably has become dominant in the study of the role of intelligence in post-Soviet Russian politics and society, is the ‘state-within-a-state thesis’, where the FSB, the main intelligence service, is deemed to have captured or even become the state⁵⁷ or at least become a key political actor.⁵⁸ As the avowed sword and shield of the Communist party, the KGB was in a sense political by definition. But in the final years of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s partial democratization, the KGB officially and actively involved itself in politics, defying the democratic movement’s demand that the organization be ‘depoliticized’. KGB officers stood openly as candidates in both the 1989 union-wide elections for the newly established legislature and in the 1990 union republic and local elections, and many of them were successful: Twelve were elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, and 2756 to republic, regional, and local soviets.⁵⁹ After a brief interlude with reorganization, budget cuts and outflow of personnel in the early 1990s, Boris Yeltsin came to form a close relationship with the security services, and his last three prime ministers all had a KGB past.⁶⁰ There was no official lustration, and many employees who had served in the KGB, rank-and-file personnel as well as top brass, continued their service in its successor organization. The mentioned cult of the chekist was to a certain extent revived already under Yeltsin.⁶¹ The last of Yeltsin’s prime ministers was of course a young Vladimir Putin, who came directly from the post of FSB director. As Prime Minister and later President, he brought with him, among others, former KGB colleagues to fill important positions.

Since then, observers have noted how these people have come to dominate Russian political and economic decision-making at the highest level.⁶² Writing in 2008, Schneider warned that there was a risk of the FSB becoming a state within the state.⁶³ Already in 2006, Anderson characterized Russia as a ‘chekist state’, or else, an ‘FSB state under the absolute control of the chekists.⁶⁴ By 2005, Anderson writes, ‘chekists held a clear majority of key and important posts throughout government’ and ‘exclusively dominate[d] the direction and substance of political-economic change processes in the country’.⁶⁵ Hence, they had subjugated the legislature, regional governments, and the judiciary. In economic life, they have collaborated with organized crime, and a pattern emerged where chekists gained control ‘of key industries across sectors, through actions (often through myriad machinations, intrigue, and extra-legal means)’,⁶⁶ gaining the upper hand over oligarchs as well as organized crime. Moreover, intensifying espionage efforts abroad, the FSB state has revived the practice of assassinations abroad. It has clamped down on independent media and restored the ‘informer society’.⁶⁷ Thus, present-day Russia has been characterized as a neo-KGB state,⁶⁸ a KGB state,⁶⁹ a state within a state,⁷⁰ or a militocracy with the FSB-ization of power.⁷¹

The penetration thesis or the ‘intelligencization’ of Russian politics

In the above-mentioned literature, the vocabulary and logic of the intelligence term ‘penetration’ are often used. In this sense, penetration refers to the act of successfully infiltrating an entity in order to not only acquire information, but also influence its behaviour and ultimately controlling it completely – in short, an ordinary if difficult operation for any intelligence service, at least abroad.

The term ‘penetration’ is used to describe the relation between the agency and the society, again incorporating considerations of information, power and law. Albeit a ‘masculinist’ term, it does convey a sense of internal security agencies attempting, sometimes against resistance, sometimes unheeded, to gather information and exercise power within a particular context of law and rules which facilitate the state’s efforts to maintain security and order.⁷²

However, the massive penetration described by several authors differs from ‘normal’ intelligence work in at least two respects: first, the process described by these authors takes place within Russia, and the targeted institutions and organizations are those that the intelligence services in principle are tasked with protecting – Russia’s own political institutions, organizations, and economic enterprises. Second, there is a huge difference in proportions, as almost any institution or organization apparently could be subject to such penetration and thus be prevented from acting independently. According to Walther, in the late Soviet period, the KGB’s penetration was deep and wide-ranging, as ‘[…] the KGB penetrated the highest political office for the first time in the 1980s when Yuri Andropov became General Secretary of the CPSU’.⁷³ Thus, ‘[a]t the beginning of the Gorbachev era the KGB’s penetration of state and society in the Soviet Union was profoundly and extensively [sic] due to the history of the Soviet Communist dictatorship’.⁷⁴ However, according to Hosaka, from then on, during the perestroika period, the KGB started penetrating new spheres, such as emerging pluralistic political life as well as the transition economy.⁷⁵

One might assume that this came to a halt with the collapse of the communist system, but in the early 1990s, that is after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Waller even claimed that the splitting up of the former KGB, designed to weaken its influence, would in fact do precisely the opposite: ‘Like a cluster bomb which spews large numbers of tiny bomblets, the KGB, when broken into smaller parts, penetrates all aspects of life’.⁷⁶ Waller also stated that the chekists were penetrating the political process,⁷⁷ and that the Procuracy was ‘penetrated and co-opted by state security […]’.⁷⁸ In 1998–1999, according to Walther, ‘even the office of head of government was penetrated by former directors of the state security apparatus’.⁷⁹ By the turn of the millennium, Amy Knight, the renowned expert on Russian security services, cited the fact that the ‘past three prime ministers and the current president all [had] close connections to the police and security intelligence organizations’ and referred to ‘legitimate concerns that a “KGB mindset” [would] penetrate Kremlin politics’.⁸⁰ Hence, penetration is also seen as a winning battle for hearts and minds.

According to these authors, the penetration reached the entire territory of the country and far down the hierarchy. Under Putin, ‘[…] the chekist penetration of political, economic, and military structures has become pervasive, reaching from Moscow centre to all of the vast country’s regions, and dominating all levels of government’.⁸¹ The chekists and other siloviki⁸² spread their tentacles to all sectors, also the traditional strongholds of civilians: ‘Beneath the top level of government bureaucracies and corporate boards, the siloviki have penetrated several institutions once considered redoubts of other factions’.⁸³ Nor is the foreign intelligence service (SVR) forgotten: ‘By permitting talented personnel to profit from career opportunities in the private sector, the SVR can penetrate that sector and make money as never before’.⁸⁴ In an article profuse with descriptions of penetration, Walther sums it up by recounting how ‘the massive penetration of the country’s politics, commerce, and society was maintained in Putin’s second presidential term’.⁸⁵ In short, the notion of chekist penetration seems to have penetrated scholarship on the state-intelligence relationship in post-Soviet Russia.

The ‘KGB state’ as conceptual metaphor

In the narrow sense, penetration means that agents have entered an environment in order to extract information and/or further their interests to the detriment of the object of the penetration. The next step, following a deeper penetration or permeation, would be a take-over: in this case, the state is wholly controlled by an essentially hostile entity. This is envisaged as a one-way development, where an active, strong (masculine) party takes control over a passive, weak (feminine) entity. The result is what many authors have called the KGB state, FSB state, or chekist state (see above). Using a less tabloid term, some have characterized post-Soviet Russia as a ‘counterintelligence state’.⁸⁶ Either way, the state remains a state, but acquires many of the properties of the KGB/FSB. In this connection, the FSB is seen as a ruthless, cynical, suspicious, manipulative, anti-democratic, anti-Western organization, subverting liberal democracies with ‘active measures’, assassinating perceived enemies abroad and at home, and imprisoning, harassing, or murdering oppositional elements in Russia. It is this image that is mapped onto the civilian state – we are getting used to think of the Russian state in terms of KGB/FSB. The mental operation creating these concepts is that of metaphor – simply conceptualizing one thing or phenomenon in terms of another.

Cognitive scholars Lakoff and Johnson⁸⁷ and others posit that metaphor is not only a figure of speech that we use for rhetorical or literary effect, but central to human cognition and thought: ‘Metaphorical language is a surface expression of conceptual metaphor’.⁸⁸ Conceptual metaphor is not about intended special rhetorical effect or expressing oneself in particularly poetic or fanciful terms. In this perspective, poetic metaphor is just an extension of metaphoric thought in general. In theoretical terms, metaphor is a projection (‘mapping’) from a source domain onto a target domain, or, more simply, to understand and experience (and therefore talk of) one thing in terms of another.⁸⁹ A much-cited example is the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, where journey is the source and life the target. Quite simply, the beginning of the journey projects to birth, while the end of the journey projects to death. Fellow travellers project to the people with whom one shares life, and the distance travelled projects to the time lived. This is a pervasive metaphor involving different types of transport; consider, for example, how it comes naturally to describe difficulties in life in terms of, for example, road obstacles, derailment, turbulence, or rough seas. ARGUMENT IS WAR is another conceptual metaphor that is entrenched (pun not intended) in Western culture. In arguments, strategies are made, weak points are attacked, arguments are shot down, parties win, lose, or even reach a truce. Some metaphors are universal, others are culturally specific. While it is hard for Westerners to think of arguments in other terms than war, one could imagine a hypothetical culture where argument is conceptualized in terms of a dance, which would of course be a more cooperative notion and would entail a completely different understanding of argument. War and dance are obviously very different activities, and thinking of an argument in terms of a dance would justify other kinds of interventions (pun not intended). In more theoretical terms, the mapping consists of a fixed set of ontological correspondences between the source domain and the target domain that when activated can project inference patterns from the source onto the target.⁹⁰

Hence, the mapping and the inference patterns are unidirectional, going from the relatively more concrete or at least more structured subject matter to the relatively abstract or unstructured subject matter.⁹¹ Although the characterization of Russia as a chekist or KGB state is not a conceptual metaphor that is entrenched in Western culture in the same way as the above-mentioned examples, it is widespread, even among scholars. Crucially, the concept of the KGB state is created through mapping from the conceptual domain of the KGB (source), onto the conceptual domain of the post-Soviet Russian state (target). This creates inference patterns; for instance, the Russian state is not merely expected to use its intelligence service, but the state itself is expected to be like the historical KGB, that is ruthless, cynical, violent, and conspiratorial both in worldview and its actions; and use similar methods, for instance extra-legal and non-democratic means such as blackmail and manipulation of individuals and entities, covert action, information operations, assassinations, and perhaps above all special operations as a widespread replacement of politics as such.

Against the penetration thesis and the KGB state concept

There are two major problems with the ‘penetration thesis’ and the notion of the KGB state. The first one concerns the purported lacking agency of the civilian state. While it is important to note that in the early Yeltsin period, i.e., the early post-Soviet period, the power of the state had been severely weakened, as the regions were becoming increasingly independent, tax revenues fell, and public order was under threat, the same period also saw a general decline of the ‘force agencies’. Not only was the KGB divided into separate agencies; its funding, recruitment, and internal discipline all took a nosedive.⁹² More to the point, as mentioned above, the emergent democratic state, led by Yeltsin, tried to use the intelligence services, seeing them as tools of control. Quite soon after his 1991 public disavowal of the KGB, Yeltsin began to use its successors against his political rivals, and installed ministers with a KGB past.⁹³ While distrustful of the KGB since his days in opposition, the president was disinclined to conduct substantial reforms of the service (as opposed to the economy, for instance), seeing it as the country’s ‘spinal cord’, since the ‘head’ of the country – the Communist Party – had been severed.⁹⁴ He even established a ‘mini-KGB’ headed by former KGB officer Aleksandr Korzhakov, who not only tapped phones and fed the president with compromising material on officials, but also formed an ‘analytical centre’ that wrote several political and economic proposals.⁹⁵

The second problem is probably more important. Though with a highly authoritarian and increasingly personalistic, repressive, and violent regime, contemporary Russia is postmodernist and complex, and neither the Russian intelligence services nor the Russian state exist in a vacuum but interact with society, business, and even criminal actors. Some adherents of the ‘penetration thesis’ seem to recognize this, at least to some degree. For instance, Hosaka observes that in ‘the 1990s Chekists, the mafia, and the bureaucracy merged in St. Petersburg […]’.⁹⁶ According to Anderson, ‘[t]he reality is that today’s Russian intelligence officer often engages in economic-industrial-technological espionage for the benefit of private business interests that he is personally associated with and profiting from, in partnership with organized crime when it suits him’.⁹⁷ In a 1999 US Congress hearing, former DCI (CIA director) James Woolsey stated:

I have been particularly concerned for some years, beginning during my tenure, with the interpenetration of Russian organized crime, Russian intelligence and law enforcement, and Russian business. I have often illustrated this point with the following hypothetical: If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian in, say, the restaurant of one of the luxury hotels along Lake Geneva, and he is wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company and wants to talk to you about a joint venture, then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organized crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement.⁹⁸

However, neither this notion of ‘interpenetration’ has the necessary explanatory power as regards the chaotic situation after the fall of the communist state and the demise of the KGB, with the introduction of market reforms and political pluralism, and the obsolescence of Soviet laws and communist moral norms. Everything was in flux, and many new (and persisting to this day) phenomena emerged that neither can be placed in the old categories of ‘KGB/chekist’ or ‘state’ nor be meaningfully seen as products of some ‘KGB state’.

Towards a new theory – the hybrid intelligence state

The notion of the ‘KGB state’ is in itself anachronistic. By using this term, we fail to capture the complexities of the relations between the Russian state (and society) on the one hand, and intelligence on the other. In addition, we risk neglecting or at the very least underestimating unique features that arguably are crucial to the understanding of Russian politics and society. Instead of the ‘KGB state’ perspective and the ‘intelligence-as-tool’ perspective, I propose a third, more nuanced and culturally sensitive model, which I have termed the Hybrid Intelligence State. ‘Hybrid’ in this sense goes beyond a mere combination of the two main parts, i.e., the state and intelligence, and includes new features. This proposal is inspired by the cognitive theory of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who observed that many concepts that we use in our thinking and speech can be regarded as the result of a mental operation that they call conceptual integration. This can be seen as a further elaboration of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphors. Whereas conceptual metaphor involves a unidirectional mental projection from source (journey, in the example above) to target (life), conceptual integration (sometimes called conceptual blending)⁹⁹ is arguably more sophisticated. This mental operation, of which we are normally not aware, but which is visible upon analysis, can be represented by envisaging at least four mental spaces. Instead of a source and a target, there are two input spaces which partially project onto a ‘generic space’, which consists of ‘the skeletal structure’ that they have in common. Crucially, some properties from the input spaces are projected to a ‘blended’ mental space, which will contain new structure that is not present either in the input spaces or, naturally, in the generic space.¹⁰⁰ To illustrate this, we may use the 1993 attempt by a modern catamaran (input space 1) to beat the record sailing time from San Francisco to Boston, by a clipper making the journey in 1853 (input space 2). The weather, the technology, and other factors were different, but the vessels were both sailboats and they followed the same route (generic space). But alone, none of the boats were racing. Only in the blend there was a race, which is an example of new structure.¹⁰¹

To apply this logic to the intelligence-state relationship in post-Soviet Russia, I will start out from the dominant Western understanding of the ideal relations between the state and the intelligence services. I envision two ideal-typical domains, or else – imagined categories: the covert (intelligence) domain and the overt (political) domain. Note that these are not existing, historically separate domains but theoretical constructs (that nevertheless seem to be taken for granted in Western normative intelligence theory, as outlined above):

• The covert domain is inhabited by actors (intelligence and security agencies) conducting activities using their distinct methods (covert information gathering, special operations, and covert action) to generate knowledge (intelligence) and influence other entities, and are guided by their mentalities and internal cultural and moral norms (input space 1)

• The overt domain is inhabited by political institutions, its officials and decisionmakers, guided by written laws and established norms, using intelligence they get from the covert domain as a tool (input space 2)

I imagine the Russian hybrid intelligence state as a third domain where the overt and the covert domains meet and overlap. Hence, this third domain contains many of the same elements as the two respective ideal-typical domains: real politicians and civilian officials, and specialized intelligence officers and services, political institutions and laws as well as intelligence agencies with their more or less distinctly defined tasks, and so on. Using the concepts of Turner and Fauconnier,¹⁰² this would be the generic space. But the encounter between the overt and the covert domain also generates a unique structure of its own, a ‘blended space’. In the remainder of this article, I will briefly sketch out some examples of these new features that not only do not fit squarely into the categories of ‘state’ or ‘intelligence services’, but that also cannot simply be explained as part of a ‘KGB state’. In other words, they cannot be properly understood in the ‘state-within-a-state’ or the ‘intelligence-as-tool’ perspective, and certainly not within either of the two imagined domains described above. It is only when intelligence and politics meet, in the particular historical, cultural, and political context of post-Soviet Russia, that these phenomena and their consequences can be meaningfully explained. The aim is neither to provide an exhaustive overview, nor to fully explain the selected phenomena, but to exemplify and demonstrate the hybridity of certain actors, activities, and cultural peculiarities, before ending with a brief discussion of whether Putin himself can be seen as a ‘KGB president’.

Hybrid actors: active reserve, werewolves in epaulettes, and silovarchs

Infiltrating civilian institutions and entities is part of intelligence work and does not necessarily lead to the creation of ‘hybrid actors’. However, in Russia, there is a particular category of intelligence service employees who go from infiltration to integration – the so-called ‘active reserve’, which consists of officers who are essentially seconded to positions outside their organization of origin while being required to compile monthly reports, and in return keeping their officers’ salaries and other privileges, such as immunity from prosecution.¹⁰³ Although established already under Yuri Andropov’s KGB leadership, the active reserve institution was drastically expanded after the fall of the Soviet Union and with the ensuing diversification of economic and societal life.¹⁰⁴ Some ‘former’ officers move in and out of government service, proudly using their KGB background as an asset. More to the point, from the 1990s, it has become difficult to distinguish between chekists and ex-chekists as some officers who had resigned continued to work more or less as consultants for their former employers or at least maintained business ties with their former colleagues.¹⁰⁵

Russia’s transition away from the planned economy in the early 1990s and the parallel weakening, not only of the intelligence services but also the state, created a new situation, with problems as well as opportunities. The restructuring and downsizing of the military and the security agencies made thousands of officers leave active service. Many found a job or established a business in the nascent private sector, particularly in the security sector.¹⁰⁶ Not only did they, especially former KGB officers, possess skills that were particularly suitable for this competitive and dangerous environment. Their remarkable attractivity also stemmed from the fact that the majority of them kept contact with their former colleagues still in active service, as well as with their fellow early retirees, making up alumni networks that quickly expanded to become a kind of fraternity, as opposed, paradoxically, to the narrow and siloed networks from their years in active service.¹⁰⁷

From the 1990s, many officers still on active duty would moonlight in more or less shady business dealings or outright criminality. This is of course not a uniquely Russian phenomenon. However, towards the end of the 1990s, the term ‘werewolves in epaulettes’ emerged, and it has become increasingly common under Putin. It alludes to the temporary but repeating transformation happening when an officer – who during the day performs his official function – at night turns into the very opposite of his day self. Enjoying the benefits of a government job, he can nevertheless don the lifestyle of successful private businesspeople. This could of course be dismissed as corruption plain and simple, which takes place across the globe. However, that would be to reduce a complex phenomenon to a question of fulfilling personal material demands, which would ignore the power dimension.¹⁰⁸ While the werewolves can profit immensely (and illegally) from their positions, they must nevertheless do their jobs.¹⁰⁹ More to the point, being a werewolf in epaulettes does not have to do with the time of day (or depend on the full moon) but implies the ability to navigate back and forth across the public-private divide to such an extent that it becomes meaningless to think of these individuals as simply corrupt officers. Instead, they should be considered a new, hybrid category. In fact, the werewolves in epaulettes phenomenon has itself been analysed as an instance of conceptual integration.¹¹⁰ Further, while it is easy to expose and criticize the lavish lifestyle of the werewolves as illegally obtained, their rise is often closely connected to the state’s (re)capture of important businesses that were originally acquired through highly dubious privatization. Hence, while violating the right to private property, such capture can to some extent be seen as a public good. As Ledeneva formulates it,

It is indeed difficult to distinguish between a corporate raid and the recovery of state assets from a corporate raid. Correspondingly, while the lawful means of reiderstvo do not necessarily pursue public interests, the unlawful means do not always pursue the wrong target. Such ambivalence originates in the double standards of officials (‘for friends we have everything, for enemies we have the law’) and in the double-edged functions of power networks. As particular officials benefit from belonging to a power network, so the networks benefit from those particular officials – they serve as channels for advancing progressive pieces of legislation, for modernising the economy and for pursuing public interests.¹¹¹

A related phenomenon are the silovarchs coined by Treisman, as a combination of ‘oligarch’ and ‘silovik’.¹¹² The silovarchs cannot meaningfully be seen simply as siloviki-cum-oligarchs, although their luxury consumption seems indistinguishable. Both original oligarchs and Putin-era silovarchs display obscene levels of personal enrichment. However, whereas the oligarchs have acquired ownership of private businesses, the silovarchs do not own the assets themselves, but manage them for the state. Thus, they fill an important function for the state in controlling ‘the commanding heights of Russian economy’.¹¹³ For instance, Sergei Chemezov has served as CEO of the military-industrial behemoth Rostec since 2007, whereas Igor’ Sechin has been CEO of oil giant Rosneft since 2012. This position, as well as their intelligence background, make them operate differently than the oligarchs, although the companies they lead are parts of the market. Crucially, in case of conflict or competition, they can deploy the resources of the state, including the intelligence services. Like the werewolves in epaulettes, the silovarchs must do their jobs, that is lead their companies with reasonable efficiency. However, the bottom line is by no means the only benchmark, as these companies are not only sources of revenue for the state, but also strategic and political tools. In sum, the silovarchs constitute a peculiar blend, or else – a hybrid.

Hybrid activities: political assassinations and special operations

The Putinite regime certainly uses many techniques and strategies that seem to be taken directly from the KGB playbook. For instance, the most troublesome opponents are spied on, sought intimidated, imprisoned or, as a last resort, assassinated. This goes for those residing abroad as well as domestic opposition activists. However, to take political assassinations, it is far from an invention or even a specialty of solely the KGB. Political murder has a centuries-long and strong tradition in Russia. Moreover, there have been several examples of killings that diverge from the KGB tradition if there ever was one. For instance, the murder of former FSB officer and political refugee Aleksandr Litvinenko in London must have been ordered from the very top of the political system, not least considering the choice of weapon, i.e., polonium 210, ‘a very expensive poison’.¹¹⁴ But the murderers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were not low-profile professionals such as the ones that were nearly successful in assassinating Aleksei Naval’nyi in 2020. Lugovoi, originally a KGB bodyguard,

[…] was one of those shadowy, opportunistic figures whose life was intertwined with the Russian security services and the bourgeoning ‘big business’ of the new Russia. […] Lugovoy earned a lot of money, apparently because wealthy and often corrupt Russians were willing to pay high prices for their krysha (cover or protection) and because of his connections with the FSB.¹¹⁵

Although eventually succeeding (on the second attempt), Lugovoi and Kovtun not only stood out with their gaudy swagger and flashy dress style, but also left traces of the radioactive poison everywhere, making it easy to reconstruct the chain of events and build a highly credible case in absentia. According to Ol’ga Kryshtanovskaia, ‘[m]y FSB friends told me that this [Litvinenko’s bungled poisoning] would never have happened under Andropov. […] They told me the KGB was much more efficient at murdering back then’.¹¹⁶ Some murders, such as the gunning down of opposition politician and former insider Boris Nemtsov in 2015 a short distance from the Kremlin, of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in the hallway of her apartment block in 2006, on Putin’s birthday, and of Central Bank deputy director Andrei Kozlov earlier that year, have stood out as particularly spectacular. Hence, in many cases, KGB-style efficiency seems to have given way to mafia-style ostentatiousness.

The special operation is a form of covert action. As a means to achieve tactical goals on the battlefield, it is as old as warfare itself, nor is Russia alone in using special operations to achieve major foreign policy aims.¹¹⁷ But the present Russian regime appears to have a particularly strong preference for special operations. The hitherto biggest and by far most ambitious special operation is the one whose kinetic phase was launched in February 2022, namely what is otherwise known as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Most often, Western and Ukrainian commentators regard the term ‘special military operation’ (spetsial’naia voennaia operatsiia, SVO) as a euphemism designed to minimize domestic outcry and give a sense of normality to the Russian population.¹¹⁸ In Russia, calling the invasion a war was quickly made a criminal offense. Also, characteristically failing to recognize or even fathom Ukrainian nationhood and sovereignty, the regime, in many respects, views Ukraine as an essentially Russian domestic issue.¹¹⁹ Of course, the war has long become one of attrition. In March 2024, even the Kremlin stated that Russia ‘is in a state of war’ (allegedly due to Western support of Ukraine),¹²⁰ although ‘SVO’ continued as a standard phrase in Russian state-controlled media. The propagandistic euphemization makes it easy to forget that the operation initially was envisaged as precisely a special operation – with, as Vandenbroucke defined it, ‘small parties of warriors, operating with limited resources and without hope of reinforcement, […] conduct[ing] sudden strikes – frequently deep within enemy lines – relying on shock, surprise, speed, and manoeuvre […]’.¹²¹ Plainclothes agents were sent to Kyiv to assassinate president Zelensky and other important Ukrainian leaders, and special forces deployed to capture the Hostomel airbase outside the capital.

However, Russian special operations are not limited to war or even war-like situations. Rather, the intelligence and security services have become a ‘multipurpose Swiss Army Knife of the Kremlin’¹²² to be used for what in other democracies would be reserved for ‘normal politics’, such as elections. According to a prominent former adviser, Putin and his regime have a particular predilection towards special operations, with Putin regarding not only the annexation of Crimea as an example of a successful special operation, but also his own succession of Yeltsin.¹²³ Of course, the latter was not a military but a political special operation, but it involved the same elements (covert action, targeted resources, surprise, speed, manoeuvre). But although the FSB seems to have participated in this operation,¹²⁴ a crucial role was played by civilian political technologists.¹²⁵ At that time, the latter came from a mix of former analysts from the KGB (from across the First, Second, and Fifth Main Directorates, that is foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and control with dissent, respectively) and Soviet counter-cultural intellectuals. There were even some former teachers of Marxism-Leninism.¹²⁶ While the political technologists’ core task was PR campaigning (in an expansive sense), the state’s administrative apparatus also made a concerted effort through various forms of manipulation, pressure, aggressive resource management, and outright electoral fraud.¹²⁷

Hybrid culture: conspiracies and gangster demeanour

Top members of the Putin regime have a strong tendency to regard virtually everything happening to the detriment of Russia’s interests as the results of hostile special operations on one, another, or multiple levels at once. In particular, this pertains to the ‘colour revolutions’ that have removed authoritarian leaders from office, such as the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine. This highly paranoid-conspiratorial mindset is easy to link to the very foundation of the Soviet secret police, whose whole raison-d’être was the allegedly omnipresent enemy.¹²⁸ However, it would be mistaken to see this as solely the product of the Soviet chekist background of the top members of the regime. Not only has the notion of a Western anti-Russian conspiracy been an important part of Russian intellectual life at least since the Crimean War (1853–56). The conspiratorial rhetoric under Putin owes much to ‘political technologists’ who used theories of Western anti-Russian conspiracies to rally political support in a non-totalitarian setting.¹²⁹ Pointedly, two of the regime’s arguably most important political technologists in its formative period (and until 2011), Gleb Pavlovskii and Vladislav Surkov, were by no means trained chekists. To the contrary, they came from oppositional camps. The former was a Soviet dissident (although becoming, at the very least, a KGB informer upon his arrest), whereas the latter in his youth was a long-haired beatnik and slacker, before becoming a PR consultant for Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s bank Menatep.¹³⁰ More to the point, they and many of their colleagues were well-read intellectuals, and combined ‘KGB-style dirty tricks’ with French postmodernism, dissident idiosyncrasies, and post-Soviet cynicism.¹³¹

In Soviet times, the KGB was, as regards culture, essentially tasked with maintaining conformity. After a brief period of experimentation in the 1920s, counter-cultural phenomena and their followers were met with deep suspicion from the Soviet regime. The secret police kept a close eye, and regularly cracked down on, not only political dissidents in the narrow sense but also jazz fans, rockers, punks, and others who transgressed the conservative norms. To keep society under control, the chekists saw themselves as standing above the law. In the first post-Soviet decade, by contrast, ‘everything’ was permitted, norms were in flux, and crime rates were high. Street gangs were regularly engaged in shootouts for control over territory.¹³² Oligarchs fought for control over not only state assets that were being redistributed, but also over the state itself.¹³³

In public discourse, this situation was characterized as bespredel (literally ‘without boundaries’ – a term originating from criminal subculture), as a complete lack of legal or moral order. Emblematically, criminal jargon spread to everyday language, as it seemed to represent the new realities better.¹³⁴ With the state rendered powerless, a new type of gangster emerged – the avtoritet, who characteristically had interests also in the legitimate economy and in politics. In some places, the avtoritety were the only ones able to establish order, engaging, paradoxically, in limitless violence to combat bespredel.¹³⁵ Also paradoxically, under Putin, who used the law-and-order agenda as an important part of his legitimation strategy, the state did not even try to annihilate organized crime networks, but reached an informal deal with the avtoritety, informing them that their future depended on recognizing the ‘biggest gang in town’.¹³⁶ More to the point, Putin himself has on strategic occasion used gangster-like antics and language in public.¹³⁷ In addition, such demeanour has not only been adopted by crude ‘violence specialists’ such as general Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard (Rosgvardiia) or Evgenii Prigozhin, the recently deceased founder of the private military company Wagner, but has also found users among top diplomats such as Sergei Lavrov and Maria Zakharova.¹³⁸ In short, the cultural repertoire of the contemporary Russian state is much wider than that of the KGB, but monikers such as kleptocracy¹³⁹ or even thugocracy¹⁴⁰ are also not adequate. For historical reasons, the resurgence of the cult of the chekist¹⁴¹ has been accompanied by a less overt but still influential cult of the avtoritet, with a regime resting on a paradoxical mix of transgression and conformity.¹⁴²

Putin – a KGB (p)resident?

Famously, American Senator John McCain characterized Putin as a KGB agent through and through,¹⁴³ and his ascent to power has often been described as part of a successful KGB plot to capture the state.¹⁴⁴ The power hunger and undeniable influence of the FSB and KGB alumni notwithstanding, this simplified narrative does not hold up to even rudimentary scrutiny. While from a young age aspiring to join the KGB, and having served there for at least 16 formative years, he remained to an extent an outsider, and never rose higher than to the rank of lieutenant colonel.¹⁴⁵ Unable to secure a prestigious post in the West, he initially had to tread the streets of his native Leningrad, serving for three years in the KGB’s dreary Fifth Department, monitoring and repressing dissidents.¹⁴⁶ One of his cases was an investigation of a piece of political graffiti.¹⁴⁷ Putin’s only foreign posting was in GDR, and then not even in the capital, but in Dresden, a backwater where the KGB sent its C-grade students.¹⁴⁸ His bureaucratic-political career started in the active reserve, as he was seconded to watch the liberals at Leningrad University under a thin cover as a functionary in the International Affairs Office. One of the main persons of interest was Anatolii Sobchak, the flamboyant professor and prominent democrat. Shortly after being elected Chairman of the City Council in May 1990, he hired Putin as an adviser – from the outside, a surprising move for a liberal with outspoken hostility to the KGB. Sobchak later claimed ignorance of Putin’s KGB background, but several testimonies indicate that the former actively sought for a KGB man, someone practical who could manoeuvre through the Soviet bureaucracy and get things done, thereby complementing his own quixotic eloquence. Putin may have been instructed by the KGB to try and join the team, but the initiative lay with Sobchak, who had considered at least two other KGB officers for the job.¹⁴⁹ There is some unclarity as to exactly when Putin left the service – in June 1991, or during the coup attempt in August 1991, or indeed whether he formally resigned at all. In a semi-official biography, he hinted that he had not officially left, but that his ‘moral obligations’ towards Sobchak had been more important than his ‘formal obligations’ to the KGB.¹⁵⁰

In 1993, as President Yeltsin was planning a sweeping reorganization of the KGB and speculations came up that Putin was considered for a leading regional position, even St Petersburg KGB appeared to be at ignorance about whether Putin was loyal to them or not.¹⁵¹ Other accounts also suggest that, despite his later categorical statements that he immediately decided against the 1991 coup plotters, in the period just before and after the Soviet collapse, the situation was highly dynamic, the ideals that made him join the KGB seemed lost, and reaching a modus vivendi between his loyalty to Sobchak and the necessity of keeping the channels to the security service open was not easy – for personal as well as pragmatic reasons.¹⁵² In 1997, when Putin was rumoured to be groomed to lead the service (now called FSB), he feared being typecast. And when he finally was appointed in 1998, he refused the promotion to general, preferring to be the first civilian director. The FSB generals, for their part, were discontent with taking orders from an officer several ranks their junior, seeing his past KGB career as laughable.¹⁵³ Moreover, their suspicions that he had been tasked with downsizing and reorganization proved correct: with dismissals of nearly 2000 officers and mergers of several directorates, Putin the FSB director was bad news for the chekists.¹⁵⁴

Putin the president has undoubtedly strengthened the FSB, for instance by transferring the formerly autonomous Federal Border Service, as well as parts of FAPSI, a communications and signal intelligence agency, to its jurisdiction.¹⁵⁵ However, the rumoured plans in 2016 that he was about to fold the SVR and the FSO (Federal Guard Service, responsible for the protection of particularly high-level officials and objects, including the president) into the FSB, and elevate the service to a Ministry of State Security with powers reminiscent of the KGB,¹⁵⁶ have so far failed to materialize. More to the point, even that proposal was part of a wider reorganization of the ‘power agencies’.¹⁵⁷ Most prominently, a few months earlier, in April 2016, Putin had extracted several units from the Interior Ministry, establishing a new agency called the National Guard (Rosgvardiia) and subordinating it directly to himself – hardly a declaration of confidence to any of the other power agencies, let alone the FSB. As Pallin emphasized years ago, Putin ‘would never allow the FSB to become an alternative power centre, thus undermining his own position and exposing himself to the danger of being ousted’.¹⁵⁸ In part as a result of Putin’s rule, Russia’s institutions, as compared to the Soviet ones, are much weaker and the formal constraints on the FSB are fewer than those of the KGB. Hence, he has continually made sure to balance its power by informal means, including cultivating inter-agency rivalry and using a divide-and-rule strategy against the various power agencies as well as within them.¹⁵⁹ This should not only indicate that he regards the FSB as a less loyal force than the KGB vis-à-vis the Soviet state, but also that the FSB, for all its importance, is only one of several tools he uses to contain or eliminate threats to his power.

In addition, while bringing in his old KGB colleagues to fill top positions and increasingly relying on them, Putin has also kept civilian technocrats in certain important positions. For instance, even after more than two years of war in Ukraine and increased repression in Russia, in May 2024, Putin installed the academic economist Andrei Belousov as Minister of Defence, replacing Sergei Shoigu, who also has no FSB/KGB background. Shoigu in turn succeeded former FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, an ingrained chekist, as Secretary of the Russian Security Council, a highly influential post where Patrushev had been serving for 16 years. Although such moves are likely caused by multiple concerns, they make it exceedingly hard to present Putin as a facilitator of an FSB takeover.

Conclusions

The theory of the Hybrid Intelligence State is not a catch-all explanation of every important political development in post-Soviet Russia. Rather, it is a novel perspective, a new way of taking into account the undeniable political importance of intelligence-related actors, activities, and culture without the sometimes crude and anachronistic projections of the ‘KGB state school’, at least in its tabloid version. Adherents of the latter might argue or at least imply that intelligence-related (or chekist) actors, activities, and culture are alien to the originally democratic spirit of the Russian Constitution and as such have been the main corrupting force leading Russia into authoritarianism. But while the brutality and undemocratic or even anti-democratic nature of Russian intelligence services are hard to deny, one cannot make sense of post-Soviet Russian politics by viewing it as a one-way ‘KGB capture’. This is not to say that Russian intelligence services – their intrusive activities, the political clout of their networks and the pervasiveness of their cynical culture – should not be taken seriously as security threats to foreign countries or indeed to the rights and freedoms of Russians themselves. Nor is it my aim to deny the influence of intelligence on Russian life and politics at large. Rather the opposite – the theory is an attempt to create a foundation on which we can analyse Russian politics and intelligence together, and as such, it is hopefully a means to raise the awareness of new phenomena (hybrids) resulting from this intelligence-politics nexus. Like hybrid weapons, a much derided but arguably still useful term, the Russian hybrid intelligence state takes its main strengths from being more than the sum of its constituent parts. This very hybridity enables it to conduct surprise attacks from unexpected angles, catching its victims off guard precisely thanks to its ability to defy categorization. At the same time, it is hard to deny that this hybridity is also a weakness, resulting in intelligence failures such as the decision to go to full-scale invasion of Ukraine.¹⁶⁰

In this article, I have attempted to look at the intelligence-politics nexus in Russia in a novel way, by judging it on its own terms and abandoning the Western normative vision of the separation of intelligence and politics as well as the Russian distinction between razvedka and state security. The analysis has shown how the Russian hybrid intelligence state is culturally and historically specific, and how the concept of the ‘KGB state’ and the attached ‘penetration thesis’, or else, the ‘intelligencization’ of Russian politics, prevents us from seeing unique and new features. Whereas the KGB had a designated institutional role and was subject to at least some political oversight, today’s picture is much more complex and fluid. Rather than representing a return to the Soviet Union, (epitomized by some authors’ insistence on using the anachronistic term KGB), Russia’s hybrid intelligence state is better regarded as postmodern. As such, it is not only a result of domestic developments, but also of the global technological, social, and geopolitical changes that have taken place since the establishment of modern Western intelligence theory and practice in the aftermath of the Second World War. The changes on the ground are a challenge to the normative separation of intelligence and politics. Admirable as this vision might be, it is perhaps not as relevant if one is to describe and analyse the function of intelligence in a postmodern world.¹⁶¹ It is therefore possible that the theoretical perspective presented in this article could be of some relevance for the study of the relationship between politics and intelligence (in the wide sense of both words) in other countries, too. But that would be a subject for future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by The Research Council of Norway, grant: 313626, Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa’ (AGOPOL).

Notes on contributors

Jardar Østbø

Jardar Østbø is Professor and Head of the Russia Programme at the Institute for Defence Studies, Norwegian Defence University College (Oslo). He is leading the international project RUSINTELSTATE (The Russian Hybrid Intelligence State), which is funded by the Research Council of Norway (2024-2027). Østbø is Deputy Editor of Journal of Extreme Anthropology and author of Luxury and Corruption: Challenging the Anti-Corruption Consensus (2024, with Tereza Østbø Kuldova and Thomas Raymen) and The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth (2016). His articles have appeared in journals such as Post-Soviet Affairs, Demokratizatsiya: Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Social Movement Studies, and Cultural Politics.

Notes

1. For an explanation of what I mean by intelligence, please see below.

2. Falkov, “Intelligence-Exalting Strategic Cultures: A Case Study of the Russian Approach.”

3. Kryshtanovskaya, Anatomiya rossiiskoi elity.

4. Meister, The Domestic and Foreign Policy Nexus: Politics, Threat Perception and Russian Security Strategy; Yakovlev, “Composition of the Ruling Elite, Incentives for Productive Usage of Rents, and Prospects for Russia’s Limited Access Order”; Treisman, “Putin’s Silovarchs”; Bremmer and Charap, “The Siloviki in Putin’s Russia: Who They Are and What They Want”; Soldatov and Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, ; Soldatov and Rochlitz, The Siloviki in Russian Politics, Hosaka, “Perestroika of the KGB: Chekists Penetrate Politics”; Hosaka, “The KGB and Glasnost: A Contradiction in Terms?”; Hosaka, “Repeating History: Soviet Offensive Counterintelligence Active Measures”; Hosaka, “Chekists Penetrate the Transition Economy: The KGB’s Self-Reforms during Perestroika”; Walther, “Russia’s Failed Transformation: The Power of the KGB/FSB from Gorbachev to Putin”; Anderson, “The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State”; and Taylor, “The Russian Siloviki & Political Change.”

5. Flikke, “Resurgent Authoritarianism: The Case of Russia’s New NGO Legislation.”

6. The first Bolshevik secret police was called Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissiia (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission), abbreviated VChK and commonly known as Cheka. Since then, KGB and FSB officers have taken pride in this heritage and called themselves chekisty (plural), often bypassing Stalin’s NKVD, which was responsible for the worst excesses.

7. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin.

8. Knight, Spies without Cloaks; Pallin, “The Russian Power Ministries: Tool and Insurance of Power”.

9. Turner and Fauconnier, “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression,”; Turner, The Literary Mind; Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities.

10. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961.

11. Berdiaev, Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma.

12. Jaffel and Larsson, Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards A New Research Agenda.

13. Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, xxiii.

14. Hatlebrekke, The Problem of Secret Intelligence, 2.

15. Warner, “Wanted: A Definition of ‘Intelligence’.”

16. Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services.

17. Scott, “Secret Intelligence, Covert Action and Clandestine Diplomacy,” 324.

18. Anderson, “The Security Dilemma and Covert Action: The Truman Years,” 404.

19. Stout and Warner, “Intelligence Is as Intelligence Does,” 517.

20. Galeotti, Crimintern: How the Kremlin Uses Russia’s Criminal Networks in Europe.

21. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin.

22. Soldatov and Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.

23. Knight, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder.

24. Warner, “Wanted: A Definition of ‘Intelligence’.”

25. Rathmell, “Towards Postmodern Intelligence.”

26. Jaffel and Larsson, Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda.

27. Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing; Puyvelde, Outsourcing US Intelligence: Contractors and Government Accountability.

28. Chesterman, “We Can’t Spy … If We Can’t Buy!”: The Privatization of Intelligence and the Limits of Outsourcing “‘Inherently Governmental Functions’,” 1056.

29. Knight, Spies without Cloaks.

30. Riehle, “Post-KGB Lives: Is There Such a Thing as a Former Chekist?”

31. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance.

32. Jaffel and Larsson, Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards A New Research Agenda.

33. Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services.

34. Knight, Orders to Kill, 53.

35. Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra.

36. For overviews, see, for instance, Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra; or Riehle, Russian Intelligence: A Case-based Study of Russian Services and Missions Past and Present.

37. Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy.

38. Fitzgerald and Lebow, “The Mother of All Intelligence Failures.”

39. Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: The United States, Israel, and Britain.

40. Gentry, “’Truth’ as a Tool of the Politicization of Intelligence.”

41. Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle”; Marrin, “Why Strategic Intelligence Analysis Has Limited Influence on American Foreign Policy.”

42. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

43. Scott and Jackson, “The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice”; Andrew, “Intelligence, International Relations and ‘Under-Theorisation’”; and Bar-Joseph, “The Politicization of Intelligence: A Comparative Study.”

44. Scott and Jackson, “The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice,” 143.

45. Andrew, “Intelligence, International Relations and ‘Under-Theorisation’.”

46. Hatfield, “Intelligence under Democracy and Authoritarianism: A Philosophical Analysis.”

47. Ibid.

48. Voslensky, Nomenklatura [ebook], 715; Knight, Spies without Cloaks; Anderson, “The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State.”

49. A party official and subsequently a diplomat, he was appointed KGB Director in 1967, and served on this post until he was elected General Secretary in 1982.

50. Hosaka, “Perestroika of the KGB: Chekists Penetrate Politics,” 4.

51. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Putin’s Militocracy,” 290.

52. Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, xvi.

53. Ibid., 2.

54. Ibid., 1–2.

55. Pringle, “Andropov’s Counterintelligence State.”

56. Pallin, ”The Russian Power Ministries: Tool and Insurance of Power,” 23.

57. Albats, KGB: State within a State; Walther, ”Russia’s Failed Transformation: The Power of the KGB/FSB from Gorbachev to Putin”; Anderson, ”The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State”; Belton, Putin’s people: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West.

58. Bateman, ”The Political Influence of the Russian Security Services”. This must not be confused with the related scholarly debate on whether Russia can be regarded as a ‘militocracy’. See Kryshtanovskaya and White, ”Putin’s Militocracy”. Here, officials of the military, intelligence and security services, and law enforcement are put together in one group termed siloviki (‘men of force’). In this article, this debate will be addressed only in passing, as my aim is more specific. On the definition of the silovik term, see below.

59. Hosaka, “Perestroika of the KGB: Chekists Penetrate Politics.”

60. Knight, “The Enduring Legacy of the KGB in Russian Politics.”

61. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin.

62. Treisman, “Putin’s Silovarchs,” 143.

63. Schneider, The Russian Federal Security Service under President Putin.

64. Anderson, “The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State,” 274.

65. Ibid., 240–241.

66. Ibid., 248.

67. Ibid.

68. Hollingsworth, Agents of Influence: How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies.

69. Marten, “The ‘KGB State’ and Russian Political and Foreign Policy Culture.”

70. Albats, KGB: State within a State.

71. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Putin’s Militocracy.”

72. Gill, Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State, 79–80.

73. Walther, “Russia’s Failed Transformation: The Power of the KGB/FSB from Gorbachev to Putin,” 667.

74. Ibid., 666.

75. Hosaka, “Perestroika of the KGB: Chekists Penetrate Politics”; Hosaka, “Chekists Penetrate the Transition Economy: The KGB’s Self-Reforms during Perestroika.”

76. Waller, “The KGB & Its ‘Successors’,” 7.

77. Ibid., 9.

78. Waller, “Russia’s Legal Foundations for Civil Repression”, 113.

79. Walther, “Russia’s Failed Transformation: The Power of the KGB/FSB from Gorbachev to Putin,” 670.

80. Knight, “The Enduring Legacy of the KGB in Russian Politics,” 3.

81. Anderson, “The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State,” 239.

82. ‘Silovik’ (in the singular) is derived from sila (force) and literally means ‘man of force’. It is a problematic but widespread term used to denote people from the military, the security services, and often also certain other state agencies, such as the Ministry of Emergency Situations. For a discussion, see Renz, ”Putin’s Militocracy? An Alternative Interpretation of Siloviki in Contemporary Russian Politics.”

83. Bremmer and Charap, “The Siloviki in Putin’s Russia: Who They Are and What They Want,” 88.

84. Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today, 140.

85. Walther, “Russia’s Failed Transformation: The Power of the KGB/FSB from Gorbachev to Putin,” 673.

86. Bateman, “The Political Influence of the Russian Security Services”; Skak, Russian Strategic Culture: The Generational Approach and the Counter-Intelligence State Thesis; Kuzio, “Old Wine in a New Bottle: Russia’s Modernization of Traditional Soviet Information Warfare and Active Policies Against Ukraine and Ukrainians”; Hosaka, Putin’s Counterintelligence State: The FSB’s Penetration of State and Society and Its Implications for Post-24 February Russia.

87. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

88. Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 244.

89. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 5.

90. Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

91. Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 245.

92. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Putin’s Militocracy,” 290.

93. Knight, “The Enduring Legacy of the KGB in Russian Politics.”

94. Colton, Yeltsin – a Life [ebook], 484–485.

95. Ibid., 628.

96. Hosaka, Putin’s Counterintelligence State: The FSB’s Penetration of State and Society and Its Implications for Post-24 February Russia, 3.

97. Anderson, “The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State,” 251.

98. Quoted in ibid., 279–280n54.

99. Turner, The Literary Mind.

100. Turner and Fauconnier, “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression,” 57–60; Turner, The Literary Mind.

101. Turner, The Literary Mind, 67–71.

102. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities.

103. Kryshtanovskaya and White, “The Formation of Russia’s Network Directorate,” 296.

104. Fel’shtinskii and Pribylovskii, Korporatsiia. Rossiia i KGB vo vremena prezidenta Putina.

105. Knight, Spies without Cloaks, 57–60, Riehle, “Post-KGB Lives: Is There Such a Thing as a Former Chekist?”

106. Riehle, “Post-KGB Lives: Is There Such a Thing as a Former Chekist?”.

107. Kryshtanovskaya and White, ”Putin’s Militocracy,” 301–302.

108. Kuldova, T. Ø., Østbø, J., & Raymen, T., Luxury and Corruption: Challenging the Anti-Corruption Consensus.

109. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance.

110. Pleshakova, “Werewolves in Epaulettes.”

111. Ibid., 197.

112. Treisman, “Putin’s Silovarchs,”142.

113. Treisman, “Putin’s Silovarchs.”

114. Harding, A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West, Knight,Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder.

115. Knight, Orders to Kill, 159–160.

116. Kryshtanovskaia, quoted by Harding, A Very Expensive Poison, 308–309.

117. Vandenbroucke, Perilous Options: Special Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy.

118. Seddon, “Year in a Word: ‘Special Operation’.”

119. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.

120. Tsepliaev, ‘“Rossiia nakhoditsia v sostoianii voiny, kazhdyi dolzhen eto ponimat’.”

121. Vandenbroucke, Perilous Options: Special Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy, 3.

122. Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services, 8.

123. Pavlovsky, “Russian Politics under Putin: The System Will Outlast the Master.”

124. Several authors have argued forcefully that the FSB top leadership, most notably its director, Nikolai Patrushev, ordered a series of false flag bombings of apartment blocks in Russia in order to promote an image of then Prime Minister Putin as a ‘tough guy’. See Felshtinsky and Litvinenko, Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within; Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999; Satter, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep.

125. Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World.

126. Ibid., 61.

127. Ibid., 72–88.

128. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin, 27.

129. Yablokov, Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World.

130. Pavlovskii (1951–2023) served two years in pre-trial detention and then three years of internal exile for anti-Soviet activities, having escaped prison by denouncing some of his fellow dissidents. Surkov served as a conscript in an intelligence battalion in Hungary. Surkov, V., ‘“Ya sluzhil v otdel’nom razvedyvatel’nom batal’one”’ [‘I served in a dedicated intelligence battalion’].

131. Krastev, “Les néoconservateurs de Poutine, par Ivan Krastev.”

132. Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: from the Streets to the Corridors of Power; Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism; Varese, The Russian Mafia.

133. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.

134. Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power, 223–238.

135. Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, 210–218; Fedorova, The Russia They Have Lost: The Russian Gangster as Nostalgic Hero.

136. Galeotti, The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia [Kindle ebook], loc 4566.

137. Gorham, “Putin’s Language”; Wood, “Hypermasculinity as a Scenario of Power: Vladimir Putin’s Iconic Rule, 1999–2008.”

138. Østbø, “Corrupt and Honorable, Gangster and Nobleman: Naval’nyi, Zolotov, and the Conflicting Moral Cultures in Russian Politics.”

139. Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?

140. Ries, ”Thugocracy: Bandit Regimes and State Capture.”

141. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin.

142. Østbø, ”Strategic Transgressions: Russia’s Deviant Sovereignty and the Myth of Evgenii Prigozhin”; Østbø, ”The Sources of Russia’s Transgressive Conservatism: Cultural Sovereignty and the Monopolization of Bespredel.”

143. Van Sack, J., ”McCain Puts Down Putin, Sees 'KGB' in His Eyes.”

144. Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West; Felshtinsky and Popov, From Red Terror to Terrorist State: Russia’s Secret Intelligence Services and Their Fight for World Domination from Felix Dzerzhinsky to Vladimir Putin.

145. Hill and Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, 114–115.

146. Short, Putin. His Life and Times, 71–72.

147. Meduza, “V 1976 godu na Petropavlovskoi kreposti ostavili 42-metrovuiu nadpis’ ‘Vy raspinaete svobodu, no dusha cheloveka ne znaet okov!’”

148. Fel’shtinskii and Pribylovskii, Korporatsiia. Rossiia i KGB vo vremena prezidenta Putina, 92.

149. Short, Putin. His Life and Times, 121–132.

150. Quoted in ibid., 178–179.

151. Ibid., 179.

152. Ibid., 178–181.

153. Fel’shtinskii and Pribylovskii, Korporatsiia. Rossiia i KGB vo vremena prezidenta Putina, 92.

154. Short, Putin. His Life and Times, 257–258.

155. Pallin, “The Russian Power Ministries: Tool and Insurance of Power.”

156. Operov, S., & Safronov, I., “Ministerstvo chrezvychainykh polnomochii.”

157. Ibid.

158. Pallin, “The Russian Power Ministries: Tool and Insurance of Power,” 21.

159. Reddaway, Russia’s Domestic Security Wars: Putin’s Use of Divide and Rule Against his Hardline Allies, Galeotti, Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services.

160. Riehle, “The Ukraine War and the Shift in Russian Intelligence Priorities”; Dylan et al., “The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox: Vladimir Putin’s (Mis)Management of Russian Strategic Assessment in the Ukraine War.”

161. Jaffel and Larsson, Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards A New Research Agenda.