Cloned Boy
Professional
- Messages
- 1,059
- Reaction score
- 799
- Points
- 113
There are FSB agents in Russian state and private enterprises, organizations and educational institutions, city and regional administrations, in the media and other structures. They are called the "Apparatus of Seconded Employees" and sometimes "officers of the active reserve." This is a secret network of agents that controls government administration, finance, information, industry, trade and culture. It also creates insurance for the FSB in case of regime change. What do seconded security officers do? Why are they needed? When did the practice of sending agents to civilian structures begin? Why do they often merge with businesses, lobby their own interests, the interests of the FSB and oligarchs? And how deeply have they entrenched themselves in various structures? Let's look at them "Point by point."
There are thousands of large organizations in Russia, both state and private. Factories, energy companies, state corporations, municipal and state authorities, banks, universities, public utilities, retail chains, television companies, public organizations. Many of them, perhaps the overwhelming majority, have FSB agents. They are employed by these companies, go to offices, get paid there, chat with colleagues in smoking rooms and attend corporate events.
But at the same time, they work for the Federal Security Service, write reports there, go to presentations and carry out special assignments - collect incriminating evidence, recruit agents, conduct surveillance. And at critical moments, they can interfere in the work of civilian companies, protecting the interests of ... well, whose? Formally - the state, but in fact, probably the FSB itself, and in some cases their own.
There are thousands of them. We have a Legion, or rather the Apparatus of Seconded Employees or APS. This practice began at the latest in the 1950s under the KGB and, perhaps, helped the security officers maintain their influence despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is one of the most effective practices of the FSB, but also a source of problems for the special service.
Let's talk about everything in this topic. Here are the news from just the last few weeks. The Russian government has begun to slow down YouTube and may completely block it. The authorities will spend 60 billion rubles to combat VPN services. Spending on propaganda in Russia has grown to a record 137 billion rubles, which exceeds the budgets of some regions. The Discord messenger has been blocked. Russian authorities have managed to remove dozens of VPN services from the AppStore.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Kremlin’s offensive against the free Internet is in full swing. Right now, there is a battle going on over whether you will be able to watch YouTube, listen to podcasts, read independent media, and use Western social networks. I think the time is not far off when you will have to bypass blocking to listen to uncensored music or watch movies and TV series. Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that will allow you not to be afraid of state censorship.
First, a little history. In 1955, the state and party authorities of the USSR made several decisions that allowed secretly to introduce security officers into civilian organizations.
Perhaps such a practice had existed before, but then they decided to legalize it. In particular, a decision was made by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU on KGB officers working in other organizations, ministries and departments, and a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR entitled "On military personnel working in civilian ministries and departments."
In essence, a system of KGB agents was created inside Soviet enterprises. All of them were state-owned enterprises at the time, so the state, or rather the Communist Party represented by the State Security Committee, apparently considered it logical to introduce their own security agents into factories, plants, trade enterprises and other organizations, including defense ones, of course.
As Alexander Shevyakin writes in his book “The USSR Security System”, the implanted agents were given a wide range of functions, from searching for enemy spies at enterprises and collecting information to exposing ideological sabotage and fighting Zionists. According to historian Yuri Filishtinsky, the phenomenon acquired its final form and name of active reserve officers of the ODR already under Yuri Andropov. According to the historian, state security officers worked secretly in many ministries, departments and government organizations.
The appointment was secret, but was accompanied by a bureaucratic procedure. The KGB approached the Central Committee of the CPSU with a proposal to create a position for an active reserve officer in one of the government agencies. The Central Committee approved or rejected the proposal and gave instructions to the Soviet government. During Andropov’s time, this work was supervised by KGB General Filipp Bobkov, head of the 5th Directorate of the KGB, future First Deputy Chairman of the KGB.
On his initiative, as Felshtinsky writes, KGB spies even appeared in the Central Committee of the Party. In 1978, the deputy head of the 1st department of the 5th department of the KGB of the USSR, Yevgeny Ivanov, transferred to work there. Agent Leonid Veselovsky, who later became a figure in the investigation into the withdrawal of party money abroad, also worked there.
Gradually, Felshtinsky writes, the positions of officers of the active reserve were introduced in all more or less important objects, enterprises, institutions, institutes, businesses, starting with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and, of course, television. How was this practice organized? Judging by Felshtinsky's description, it was as follows. A KGB officer was enrolled in the active reserve. He remained in his unit, but was sent to work in a civilian institution.
Probably, according to the documents, he resigned from the KGB, according to public documents, for example, this was the entry in his work book, but in fact he became an agent of the State Security Committee in a new organization. According to the historian, it was then that the saying appeared that there are no former KGB agents. Let's give the floor to writer Leonid Mlechin. The Chekists sat in the personnel departments, in the first departments, in the departments of external relations, which were engaged in the registration of business trips abroad and receptions of foreign guests.
In the defense ministries, one of the deputy ministers represented the KGB. The KGB. They only formally reported to the head of the department, in reality they carried out the instructions of the head of the state security department and informed him about the situation inside the ministry. Felchtinsky believes that in this way the KGB was not just engaged in operational and investigative activities, but also prepared the rear in case of unforeseen developments in the country. He does not develop this idea in the book, but I will explain the meaning as I see it.
In the event of a regime change, defeat or dissolution of the KGB, officers of the active reserve, formally unrelated to the committee, would have preserved the secret structure and could then restore the shaken power of the KGB. Perhaps this is partly what happened. Today we know that many of the former KGB officers soon after 1991 surfaced in one or another state or business structure.
This was a significant difference from the Soviet era - agents were formed in private enterprises, not only in state ones. For example, KGB officer Yevgeny Ivanov, the same one who worked in the Central Committee of the CPSU, returned to the KGB in 1989, received the rank of lieutenant general and left the structure on January 30, 1991, 10 months before the official abolition of the KGB. He was again enrolled in the active reserve and a little later went to work for the MOST company to the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.
His boss, Filipp Bobkov, also ended up there, and became the head of Gusinsky's analytical department. After Gusinsky was expelled from the country, he became an adviser to the general director of RIA Novosti and remained a respected veteran KGB officer until the last years of his life. Here is his photo at the parade with Vladimir Putin.
As Yuri Felshtinsky writes in his book, another KGB officer, General Kondaurov, was sent as an active reserve officer to the former Komsomol leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky and headed the analytical department of the YUKOS company. Sociologist Vadim Volkov wrote, "The Law on the Federal Security Service Authorities allowed active FSB officers to be seconded to enterprises regardless of their form of ownership, with the consent of their managers. Thousands of active state security officers began working in private enterprises and banks as legal consultants, as this position was modestly called.
Using their connections in government structures and the FSB information resources, they performed protection functions, protected against extortion and fraud by criminal groups, and built relationships with the state bureaucracy. According to experts, up to 20% of FSB employees were involved in the activities of the Roofs as seconded employees.
Thanks to this, the security officers were quickly drawn into new economic realities, they found themselves close to large private funds and took part in directing financial flows. We can see a trace of the practice of the active reserve in the biography of Vladimir Putin. According to official published data, in the spring of 1990, he began working at the Leningrad State University as an assistant to the rector Stanislav Merkuriev on international issues.
Merkuriev recommended him to his friend Anatoly Sobchak. In May 1990, soon after Sobchak was elected chairman of the Leningrad City Council of People's Deputies, Putin became his adviser. At the same time, he wrote his resignation report from the KGB, according to his own words, only on August 20, 1991, and continued working with Sobchak, making a career as an official, which in the future would lead him to the top of Russian power.
If this is true, then for more than a year Putin worked simultaneously in the KGB and at the Leningrad State University, and then as an adviser to Sobchak. A typical picture for an officer of the active reserve. In their book "The New Nobility. Essays on the History of the FSB" journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Baragan write so. Returning to Russia from the GDR in 1990, he was enrolled in the active reserve and assigned to the Leningrad State University.
The following year he was transferred to the staff of the mayor of Leningrad, the famous democrat Anatoly Sobchak. That is, Putin was probably assigned to Sobchak as a KGB agent. And when the USSR collapsed and the KGB was no more, he used this place to continue his political activities. And a few years later, Putin and his KGB colleagues were able to effectively regain control of the country.
It seems that the institution of active reserve officers played a significant role in this.
But let's get closer to our times. The practice of the ODR has not gone away, it is just called differently now - the apparatus of seconded employees of the APS. The current law on the Federal Security Service directly states that "in order to solve the problems of ensuring the security of the Russian Federation, military personnel of the FSB bodies may be seconded to government agencies, enterprises, institutions and organizations
regardless of the form of ownership with the consent of their heads in the manner established by the President of the Russian Federation by compiling them in military service." The very existence of the apparatus of seconded employees is not a secret, it is recorded in the law, but few people imagine the true scale of this phenomenon. Such FSB agents are present in a large number of both state and private organizations, from government agencies, ministries and other departments to provincial universities or regional television companies.
In some cases, the presence of FSB agents is essentially not a secret. In some organizations, there is a so-called regime secret department, previously it was called the first department and in some places this name has been preserved to this day. Such a department must monitor the observance of state secrets. Formally, all organizations that obtain an FSB license to work with state secrets must have one, because only on its territory is it permitted to work with materials constituting a state secret.
Often, seconded FSB employees work in this department, who are formally listed as employees of the organization. In fact, they not only monitor formal compliance with state secrets legislation, but also act as intelligence agents. For example, when in 2018 students and teachers of Moscow State University fought against the appearance of a fan zone on Vorobyovy Gory, some of them came into conflict with FSB officers seconded to the university.
Here is a quote from a statement by a student initiative group: “A significant number of seconded FSB and other intelligence officers or people closely associated with them are constantly present at Moscow State University. Formally, they hold various administrative positions - assistant to the rector, deputy head of the dormitory department, and others. Due to the specifics of their activities, intelligence officers constantly accumulate incriminating evidence on members of the MSU administration, which they convert into personal influence on these people.
University intelligence officers have been repeating the practice of recruiting informers and provocateurs from among students and staff for many years. Seconded employees are present in many, if not all, Russian banks. This allows the FSB to control financial flows in the country and, if desired, track or stop any operation, even outside the usual instruments of state control.
The work of these employees is supervised by the KA Directorate — the Economic Security Service of the FSB of Russia. This is where FSB officer Kirill Cherkalin worked, who later became a defendant in a high-profile criminal case. Here is how the deputy editor-in-chief of Fontanka Evgeny Vyshenkov described the work of these employees. All employees of the apparatus of seconded employees in each Russian bank are subordinate to the head of the banking department of Lubyanka. For example, in Sberbank, a colonel general of the FSB sits in the form of an APS, but he is also built under the nomenclature of the head of the banking department of the colonel.
The case of Cherkalin, who was found to have 12 billion rubles, is a good example of how the FSB's desire to control finances in the country led to stunning corruption within the special service itself. Seconded employees are both in the capital and in the regions. I worked in Yekaterinburg for most of my life and have seen more than once examples of how one or another FSB officer was transferred to the post of head of the security service of some enterprise or received the post of advisor to the head of some organization.
In fact, an employee's affiliation with the APS is a state secret, but in many cases it is Paleshinel's secret. For example, one rather influential employee worked in the Yekaterinburg city administration for many years, who rose to the post of vice-mayor, and behind his back many said that he was seconded from the FSB in a fairly high rank.
Then he moved to the Ural Federal University and took a post there related to the prevention of extremism, probably remaining seconded. In many regions, there are deputy heads of the region who represent the interests of the FSB. For example, in my native Sverdlovsk Region, the governor has a deputy, Vasily Kozlov, a former employee of the special services, who has been called seconded to the regional government from the local FSB headquarters in the local media since the 2000s. Similar situations exist in other regions.
The Center-Dossier, however, clarifies that there is a difference between a seconded employee and an embedded employee. If the first one is sent to the organization officially and it is agreed at the ministerial or departmental level, then the second one is already top secret, and only a limited number of FSB employees know about his introduction. No one except the FSB leadership knows how many seconded and how many embedded employees there are in Russia.
As Irina Baragan and Andrey Soldata write in their book, there is a secret rule according to which a seconded employee cannot receive two salaries, and if his salary at the place of secondment is higher than the FSB, he must return the difference to the department. This caused discontent among some FSB employees with whom journalists spoke.
One complained that I was essentially working two jobs - in the organization where I was assigned, and in the evenings and even at night I met with agents, wrote reports and did other FSB work, so why was there only one salary? On the other hand, when such employees were assigned to business structures and chose a commercial salary instead of a state one, they could begin to perceive their civilian boss as their main employer. In such cases, assigned employees sometimes turn from FSB agents in an organization into lobbyists for the organization within the FSB, and an inevitable conflict of interest arises.
This was especially true for pre-retirement generals who understood that their FSB careers were ending and they needed to earn money for their old age. In order for FSB employees not to have to return part of their high salaries to their parent company, some of them in the organizations where they were assigned began to pay extra unofficially, in envelopes, which, one can assume, exacerbated the conflict of interest.
In parentheses, I will note that the rule about two salaries that cannot be received was probably not always applied. Putin himself said that for some time he received two salaries in Lentsovet and in the KGB, where he worked in parallel. There are also more complicated relationships with seconded employees. An interesting example is Rosneft, where a high-ranking FSB officer, General Oleg Feoktistov, was seconded in 2016.
In 2016, he formally resigned from the FSB, but, as The New Times magazine wrote, he remained in the apparatus of seconded employees and was sent to Igor Sechin. However, Sechin and Feoktistov were well acquainted, moreover, the sixth service of the FSB's internal security department, which Feoktistov headed, was called the Sechen special forces. The former head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, claimed that the sixth FSB service was created by Feoktistov at the instigation of Sechen, and for protection from Ramzan Kadyrov.
Be that as it may, Feoktistov continued to play a significant role in the power struggle even after moving to Rosneft. He actively participated in the arrest of the Minister of Economy Alexei Ulyukaev, who was arrested on suspicion of receiving a bribe from Igor Sechin. As it turned out, Feoktistov personally borrowed money for this provocation from his friend and supervised the entire operation. Forbes magazine wrote that the transfer of money and the arrest of the official were supervised by the legendary FSB General Oleg Feoktistov, who at that time was seconded to Rosneft as the head of the security service.
Feoktistov even had to appear in court, which, according to some, made him too public a figure and forced him to resign. After Rosneft, he worked at the Orthodox bank Peresvet, possibly also as a seconded employee. Of course, there are seconded FSB employees in all major state-controlled media.
A striking example here is the story of FSB General Alexander Zdanovich, who became deputy director of VGTRK in 2002. As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Baragan write in their book, it was initially declared that Zdanovich would be responsible for the security of the television company, but then it turned out that his powers were much broader. During the hostage taking at the musical Nord-Ost, he gave instructions to the channel's news service. In September 2004, during the hostage taking in Beslan, journalists met with Danovich near the school a couple of hours before the assault.
Then he supervised the release of programs glorifying the FSB on the TV channel. This is an example of how the FSB directly influenced the media through the apparatus of seconded employees back in the early 2000s. When asked by a correspondent from the Izvestia newspaper whether Zdanovich remained an employee of the active reserve, he answered: As is known, there are no former Chekists. But I would not like to specify the details. Of course, my colleagues will help me with the problems that I will solve out of a sense of solidarity.
This is what the former head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, who is now serving a 15-year sentence, said in 2018. Almost no one in Russia does not know that the FSB has such a form of work as seconded employees embedded in organizations, government agencies, and commercial structures. These are the so-called PS. Are you surprised? This is 100% true. The harsh reality of modern Russia. Seconded employees are in all large structures.
This is a total, not isolated case. According to researchers, there are at least thousands of seconded employees across the country. Most of them do not occupy public, quiet positions, but their influence can be extremely great. This is a secret network of agents that controls public administration, finance, information, industry, trade, and culture. If Vladimir Putin's regime were to falter, it is entirely possible that this safety net would survive another change of power and help the special service to be reborn, under some new name, but also ready to wait patiently to take revenge again.
There are thousands of large organizations in Russia, both state and private. Factories, energy companies, state corporations, municipal and state authorities, banks, universities, public utilities, retail chains, television companies, public organizations. Many of them, perhaps the overwhelming majority, have FSB agents. They are employed by these companies, go to offices, get paid there, chat with colleagues in smoking rooms and attend corporate events.
But at the same time, they work for the Federal Security Service, write reports there, go to presentations and carry out special assignments - collect incriminating evidence, recruit agents, conduct surveillance. And at critical moments, they can interfere in the work of civilian companies, protecting the interests of ... well, whose? Formally - the state, but in fact, probably the FSB itself, and in some cases their own.
There are thousands of them. We have a Legion, or rather the Apparatus of Seconded Employees or APS. This practice began at the latest in the 1950s under the KGB and, perhaps, helped the security officers maintain their influence despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is one of the most effective practices of the FSB, but also a source of problems for the special service.
Let's talk about everything in this topic. Here are the news from just the last few weeks. The Russian government has begun to slow down YouTube and may completely block it. The authorities will spend 60 billion rubles to combat VPN services. Spending on propaganda in Russia has grown to a record 137 billion rubles, which exceeds the budgets of some regions. The Discord messenger has been blocked. Russian authorities have managed to remove dozens of VPN services from the AppStore.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Kremlin’s offensive against the free Internet is in full swing. Right now, there is a battle going on over whether you will be able to watch YouTube, listen to podcasts, read independent media, and use Western social networks. I think the time is not far off when you will have to bypass blocking to listen to uncensored music or watch movies and TV series. Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that will allow you not to be afraid of state censorship.
First, a little history. In 1955, the state and party authorities of the USSR made several decisions that allowed secretly to introduce security officers into civilian organizations.
Perhaps such a practice had existed before, but then they decided to legalize it. In particular, a decision was made by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU on KGB officers working in other organizations, ministries and departments, and a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR entitled "On military personnel working in civilian ministries and departments."
In essence, a system of KGB agents was created inside Soviet enterprises. All of them were state-owned enterprises at the time, so the state, or rather the Communist Party represented by the State Security Committee, apparently considered it logical to introduce their own security agents into factories, plants, trade enterprises and other organizations, including defense ones, of course.
As Alexander Shevyakin writes in his book “The USSR Security System”, the implanted agents were given a wide range of functions, from searching for enemy spies at enterprises and collecting information to exposing ideological sabotage and fighting Zionists. According to historian Yuri Filishtinsky, the phenomenon acquired its final form and name of active reserve officers of the ODR already under Yuri Andropov. According to the historian, state security officers worked secretly in many ministries, departments and government organizations.
The appointment was secret, but was accompanied by a bureaucratic procedure. The KGB approached the Central Committee of the CPSU with a proposal to create a position for an active reserve officer in one of the government agencies. The Central Committee approved or rejected the proposal and gave instructions to the Soviet government. During Andropov’s time, this work was supervised by KGB General Filipp Bobkov, head of the 5th Directorate of the KGB, future First Deputy Chairman of the KGB.
On his initiative, as Felshtinsky writes, KGB spies even appeared in the Central Committee of the Party. In 1978, the deputy head of the 1st department of the 5th department of the KGB of the USSR, Yevgeny Ivanov, transferred to work there. Agent Leonid Veselovsky, who later became a figure in the investigation into the withdrawal of party money abroad, also worked there.
Gradually, Felshtinsky writes, the positions of officers of the active reserve were introduced in all more or less important objects, enterprises, institutions, institutes, businesses, starting with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and, of course, television. How was this practice organized? Judging by Felshtinsky's description, it was as follows. A KGB officer was enrolled in the active reserve. He remained in his unit, but was sent to work in a civilian institution.
Probably, according to the documents, he resigned from the KGB, according to public documents, for example, this was the entry in his work book, but in fact he became an agent of the State Security Committee in a new organization. According to the historian, it was then that the saying appeared that there are no former KGB agents. Let's give the floor to writer Leonid Mlechin. The Chekists sat in the personnel departments, in the first departments, in the departments of external relations, which were engaged in the registration of business trips abroad and receptions of foreign guests.
In the defense ministries, one of the deputy ministers represented the KGB. The KGB. They only formally reported to the head of the department, in reality they carried out the instructions of the head of the state security department and informed him about the situation inside the ministry. Felchtinsky believes that in this way the KGB was not just engaged in operational and investigative activities, but also prepared the rear in case of unforeseen developments in the country. He does not develop this idea in the book, but I will explain the meaning as I see it.
In the event of a regime change, defeat or dissolution of the KGB, officers of the active reserve, formally unrelated to the committee, would have preserved the secret structure and could then restore the shaken power of the KGB. Perhaps this is partly what happened. Today we know that many of the former KGB officers soon after 1991 surfaced in one or another state or business structure.
This was a significant difference from the Soviet era - agents were formed in private enterprises, not only in state ones. For example, KGB officer Yevgeny Ivanov, the same one who worked in the Central Committee of the CPSU, returned to the KGB in 1989, received the rank of lieutenant general and left the structure on January 30, 1991, 10 months before the official abolition of the KGB. He was again enrolled in the active reserve and a little later went to work for the MOST company to the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky.
His boss, Filipp Bobkov, also ended up there, and became the head of Gusinsky's analytical department. After Gusinsky was expelled from the country, he became an adviser to the general director of RIA Novosti and remained a respected veteran KGB officer until the last years of his life. Here is his photo at the parade with Vladimir Putin.
As Yuri Felshtinsky writes in his book, another KGB officer, General Kondaurov, was sent as an active reserve officer to the former Komsomol leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky and headed the analytical department of the YUKOS company. Sociologist Vadim Volkov wrote, "The Law on the Federal Security Service Authorities allowed active FSB officers to be seconded to enterprises regardless of their form of ownership, with the consent of their managers. Thousands of active state security officers began working in private enterprises and banks as legal consultants, as this position was modestly called.
Using their connections in government structures and the FSB information resources, they performed protection functions, protected against extortion and fraud by criminal groups, and built relationships with the state bureaucracy. According to experts, up to 20% of FSB employees were involved in the activities of the Roofs as seconded employees.
Thanks to this, the security officers were quickly drawn into new economic realities, they found themselves close to large private funds and took part in directing financial flows. We can see a trace of the practice of the active reserve in the biography of Vladimir Putin. According to official published data, in the spring of 1990, he began working at the Leningrad State University as an assistant to the rector Stanislav Merkuriev on international issues.
Merkuriev recommended him to his friend Anatoly Sobchak. In May 1990, soon after Sobchak was elected chairman of the Leningrad City Council of People's Deputies, Putin became his adviser. At the same time, he wrote his resignation report from the KGB, according to his own words, only on August 20, 1991, and continued working with Sobchak, making a career as an official, which in the future would lead him to the top of Russian power.
If this is true, then for more than a year Putin worked simultaneously in the KGB and at the Leningrad State University, and then as an adviser to Sobchak. A typical picture for an officer of the active reserve. In their book "The New Nobility. Essays on the History of the FSB" journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Baragan write so. Returning to Russia from the GDR in 1990, he was enrolled in the active reserve and assigned to the Leningrad State University.
The following year he was transferred to the staff of the mayor of Leningrad, the famous democrat Anatoly Sobchak. That is, Putin was probably assigned to Sobchak as a KGB agent. And when the USSR collapsed and the KGB was no more, he used this place to continue his political activities. And a few years later, Putin and his KGB colleagues were able to effectively regain control of the country.
It seems that the institution of active reserve officers played a significant role in this.
But let's get closer to our times. The practice of the ODR has not gone away, it is just called differently now - the apparatus of seconded employees of the APS. The current law on the Federal Security Service directly states that "in order to solve the problems of ensuring the security of the Russian Federation, military personnel of the FSB bodies may be seconded to government agencies, enterprises, institutions and organizations
regardless of the form of ownership with the consent of their heads in the manner established by the President of the Russian Federation by compiling them in military service." The very existence of the apparatus of seconded employees is not a secret, it is recorded in the law, but few people imagine the true scale of this phenomenon. Such FSB agents are present in a large number of both state and private organizations, from government agencies, ministries and other departments to provincial universities or regional television companies.
In some cases, the presence of FSB agents is essentially not a secret. In some organizations, there is a so-called regime secret department, previously it was called the first department and in some places this name has been preserved to this day. Such a department must monitor the observance of state secrets. Formally, all organizations that obtain an FSB license to work with state secrets must have one, because only on its territory is it permitted to work with materials constituting a state secret.
Often, seconded FSB employees work in this department, who are formally listed as employees of the organization. In fact, they not only monitor formal compliance with state secrets legislation, but also act as intelligence agents. For example, when in 2018 students and teachers of Moscow State University fought against the appearance of a fan zone on Vorobyovy Gory, some of them came into conflict with FSB officers seconded to the university.
Here is a quote from a statement by a student initiative group: “A significant number of seconded FSB and other intelligence officers or people closely associated with them are constantly present at Moscow State University. Formally, they hold various administrative positions - assistant to the rector, deputy head of the dormitory department, and others. Due to the specifics of their activities, intelligence officers constantly accumulate incriminating evidence on members of the MSU administration, which they convert into personal influence on these people.
University intelligence officers have been repeating the practice of recruiting informers and provocateurs from among students and staff for many years. Seconded employees are present in many, if not all, Russian banks. This allows the FSB to control financial flows in the country and, if desired, track or stop any operation, even outside the usual instruments of state control.
The work of these employees is supervised by the KA Directorate — the Economic Security Service of the FSB of Russia. This is where FSB officer Kirill Cherkalin worked, who later became a defendant in a high-profile criminal case. Here is how the deputy editor-in-chief of Fontanka Evgeny Vyshenkov described the work of these employees. All employees of the apparatus of seconded employees in each Russian bank are subordinate to the head of the banking department of Lubyanka. For example, in Sberbank, a colonel general of the FSB sits in the form of an APS, but he is also built under the nomenclature of the head of the banking department of the colonel.
The case of Cherkalin, who was found to have 12 billion rubles, is a good example of how the FSB's desire to control finances in the country led to stunning corruption within the special service itself. Seconded employees are both in the capital and in the regions. I worked in Yekaterinburg for most of my life and have seen more than once examples of how one or another FSB officer was transferred to the post of head of the security service of some enterprise or received the post of advisor to the head of some organization.
In fact, an employee's affiliation with the APS is a state secret, but in many cases it is Paleshinel's secret. For example, one rather influential employee worked in the Yekaterinburg city administration for many years, who rose to the post of vice-mayor, and behind his back many said that he was seconded from the FSB in a fairly high rank.
Then he moved to the Ural Federal University and took a post there related to the prevention of extremism, probably remaining seconded. In many regions, there are deputy heads of the region who represent the interests of the FSB. For example, in my native Sverdlovsk Region, the governor has a deputy, Vasily Kozlov, a former employee of the special services, who has been called seconded to the regional government from the local FSB headquarters in the local media since the 2000s. Similar situations exist in other regions.
The Center-Dossier, however, clarifies that there is a difference between a seconded employee and an embedded employee. If the first one is sent to the organization officially and it is agreed at the ministerial or departmental level, then the second one is already top secret, and only a limited number of FSB employees know about his introduction. No one except the FSB leadership knows how many seconded and how many embedded employees there are in Russia.
As Irina Baragan and Andrey Soldata write in their book, there is a secret rule according to which a seconded employee cannot receive two salaries, and if his salary at the place of secondment is higher than the FSB, he must return the difference to the department. This caused discontent among some FSB employees with whom journalists spoke.
One complained that I was essentially working two jobs - in the organization where I was assigned, and in the evenings and even at night I met with agents, wrote reports and did other FSB work, so why was there only one salary? On the other hand, when such employees were assigned to business structures and chose a commercial salary instead of a state one, they could begin to perceive their civilian boss as their main employer. In such cases, assigned employees sometimes turn from FSB agents in an organization into lobbyists for the organization within the FSB, and an inevitable conflict of interest arises.
This was especially true for pre-retirement generals who understood that their FSB careers were ending and they needed to earn money for their old age. In order for FSB employees not to have to return part of their high salaries to their parent company, some of them in the organizations where they were assigned began to pay extra unofficially, in envelopes, which, one can assume, exacerbated the conflict of interest.
In parentheses, I will note that the rule about two salaries that cannot be received was probably not always applied. Putin himself said that for some time he received two salaries in Lentsovet and in the KGB, where he worked in parallel. There are also more complicated relationships with seconded employees. An interesting example is Rosneft, where a high-ranking FSB officer, General Oleg Feoktistov, was seconded in 2016.
In 2016, he formally resigned from the FSB, but, as The New Times magazine wrote, he remained in the apparatus of seconded employees and was sent to Igor Sechin. However, Sechin and Feoktistov were well acquainted, moreover, the sixth service of the FSB's internal security department, which Feoktistov headed, was called the Sechen special forces. The former head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, claimed that the sixth FSB service was created by Feoktistov at the instigation of Sechen, and for protection from Ramzan Kadyrov.
Be that as it may, Feoktistov continued to play a significant role in the power struggle even after moving to Rosneft. He actively participated in the arrest of the Minister of Economy Alexei Ulyukaev, who was arrested on suspicion of receiving a bribe from Igor Sechin. As it turned out, Feoktistov personally borrowed money for this provocation from his friend and supervised the entire operation. Forbes magazine wrote that the transfer of money and the arrest of the official were supervised by the legendary FSB General Oleg Feoktistov, who at that time was seconded to Rosneft as the head of the security service.
Feoktistov even had to appear in court, which, according to some, made him too public a figure and forced him to resign. After Rosneft, he worked at the Orthodox bank Peresvet, possibly also as a seconded employee. Of course, there are seconded FSB employees in all major state-controlled media.
A striking example here is the story of FSB General Alexander Zdanovich, who became deputy director of VGTRK in 2002. As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Baragan write in their book, it was initially declared that Zdanovich would be responsible for the security of the television company, but then it turned out that his powers were much broader. During the hostage taking at the musical Nord-Ost, he gave instructions to the channel's news service. In September 2004, during the hostage taking in Beslan, journalists met with Danovich near the school a couple of hours before the assault.
Then he supervised the release of programs glorifying the FSB on the TV channel. This is an example of how the FSB directly influenced the media through the apparatus of seconded employees back in the early 2000s. When asked by a correspondent from the Izvestia newspaper whether Zdanovich remained an employee of the active reserve, he answered: As is known, there are no former Chekists. But I would not like to specify the details. Of course, my colleagues will help me with the problems that I will solve out of a sense of solidarity.
This is what the former head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, who is now serving a 15-year sentence, said in 2018. Almost no one in Russia does not know that the FSB has such a form of work as seconded employees embedded in organizations, government agencies, and commercial structures. These are the so-called PS. Are you surprised? This is 100% true. The harsh reality of modern Russia. Seconded employees are in all large structures.
This is a total, not isolated case. According to researchers, there are at least thousands of seconded employees across the country. Most of them do not occupy public, quiet positions, but their influence can be extremely great. This is a secret network of agents that controls public administration, finance, information, industry, trade, and culture. If Vladimir Putin's regime were to falter, it is entirely possible that this safety net would survive another change of power and help the special service to be reborn, under some new name, but also ready to wait patiently to take revenge again.
