In Moscow's Shadows 255: Chekistocracy? Or, Power and the Spooks in Putin's Russia
“Russia is run by the spooks” is a satisfying line, but it is also a lazy one. Despite talk of a 'Chekistocracy' run by the intelligence and security services, the FSB, SVR and GRU are better understood as competing institutional actors than as a single all-powerful caste pulling every lever in the Kremlin. In that context, "power" itself is a complex phenomenon, and I outline a framework of six different kinds of power: the ability to dictate policy, the court politics of access and trust, the quiet art of resistance, the deeper pull of conceptual dominance through briefings and narratives…
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