There is a comfortable way to talk about the FSB, and almost everyone uses it. In this telling the agency is Vladimir Putin’s instrument — his sword and shield, the loyal apparatus through which a single man projects his will across eleven time zones. He commands; it obeys. Frighten the dictator and you frighten the service; remove the dictator and the service goes slack. I want to argue that this picture is not merely incomplete but inverted. The FSB is not Putin’s tool. It is a mafia operating at the scale of a country and reaching across the world, and Putin is one of its assets rather than its owner — the most valuable asset it holds, but an asset all the same. The relationship is not master and servant. It is a partnership between a frightened man and the organization that profits from his fear, and the organization is the senior partner.
This is not a figure of speech. A mafia has certain recognizable features: it extorts tribute, it grabs assets, it settles disputes with murder, it buys and intimidates the institutions that are supposed to constrain it, it cultivates loyal muscle in the streets, and it expands its territory wherever it can reach. Measure the FSB against that list and it scores on every line. What follows is the case that the country’s chief security service is, in plain fact, its largest criminal organization — and that the events of recent years have not weakened this reading but confirmed it.
The near-death of the 1990s
The organization did come within reach of death once, and the date is not 2023 but 1991. In August of that year the KGB threw its weight behind the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and when the coup collapsed in three days the service collapsed with it — its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, arrested as a plotter, the crowd toppling the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky outside the Lubyanka. For one brief window dissolution was genuinely on the table. The political-police core was cut apart: the notorious directorate that hunted dissidents, the guard service, the headline organs of the monolith were abolished, and the structure was split into separate agencies. This was the moment to finish the work — to liquidate the apparatus outright and bar its officers from power, as Germany would do when it opened and broke up the Stasi.
The work was not finished, and that failure is the hinge of everything that followed. The reformers abolished the famous directorates but left the real body intact — the dense web of territorial directorates sitting in every province and every town, the network that actually does the work. The root was never pulled. The democrats of the early 1990s then compounded the error at the level of the state itself, building a super-presidential constitution in 1993 that vested near-tsarist power in a single office: an instrument engineered for autocracy that they naively assumed they could wield for good. And the mass movement that might have insisted on finishing the job, Democratic Russia, dissolved itself, its activists draining away into the new executive vertical. An instrument built for evil cannot be picked up and used for good; an apparatus built to suppress its own people cannot be left half-buried and trusted not to grow back. The 1990s left it in the ground, with its roots in every town.
The comeback: embedding into everything
From that uneradicated root the apparatus regrew, and this time it did not wait to be handed power — it took the commanding heights and then spread sideways into everything. The man who became president in 2000 had himself directed the FSB the year before; the service had, in effect, delivered one of its own to the throne. Its district offices already sat in towns that have never seen a spy or a saboteur, staffed by majors and colonels who must justify their salaries somehow, and under their own man that latent presence hardened into a doctrine: be present in every institution that matters, so that no single shock can ever again find the structure absent, as it nearly was in 1991.
It is present in the ministries. Putin’s very first move on taking power in 2000 was to subordinate the Interior Ministry to the FSB by gutting the MVD’s leadership; the principle has only deepened since. It is present in the universities — after the best professors fled the Higher School of Economics, a serving FSB officer was installed among its vice-rectors, a security minder in the gown of an academic. It is present in business, where the agency does not regulate companies so much as own them through fear: the cluster of Lukoil executives who fell from windows or were found dead in their offices marks the violent absorption of the country’s fuel sector by the FSB-rooted circle around Gazprom and Alexei Miller. It is present in occupied territory, where Moscow no longer trusts improvised local turncoats and replaces them with vetted cadres — the occupation administration of the Kherson region was handed to Sergey Yeliseyev, a career security man imported from Kaliningrad. And it has colonized the digital economy as a family business: the firms that supply the state’s internet-blocking equipment, a market worth tens of billions of rubles, run through the relatives of FSB brass, so that the same clan profits from the censorship it imposes and from the platforms onto which the censored are herded. This is not a security service guarding a state. It is a racket distributing its own people across every revenue stream the country produces.
A racket, not a shield
Strip away the iconography and the FSB’s actual line of business is racketeering, asset-seizure, provocation and contract killing, conducted by officers who are dollar millionaires and, at the top, billionaires. Its advertised purpose — protecting the country — is hollow where it is not profitable. The proof came in March 2023, before the mutiny, when a few dozen fighters of the Russian Volunteer Corps walked across the border into Bryansk region, filmed themselves on Russian soil, issued a statement, and walked back out without a firefight. The border that the FSB’s border service exists to defend turned out, in practice, not to exist. An agency that cannot keep an armed band of several dozen men from strolling in and out of the homeland has no serious security function. What it has instead is a business model.
The business requires a steady supply of enemies, because enemies justify budgets, ranks and medals. So the apparatus manufactures them. The same logic that lets a Klimovsk munitions plant be quietly owned by an ex-FSB colonel sitting safely abroad governs the whole structure: it is a corruption network wearing the mask of an inquisition. And a network that lives on producing enemies will produce them whether or not any real ones exist.
The case factory and the 99-percent courts
This is where the racket fuses with the judiciary, and it is the part that touches ordinary people most directly. Russian criminal courts convict at a rate of well over ninety-nine percent; acquittal is statistically almost impossible. A figure like that does not describe justice. It describes a conveyor, and the FSB stands at the head of it. The confessions that feed the conveyor are extracted by torture — the world knows this because Sergei Savelyev, a convict-programmer, smuggled out an archive of more than a thousand videos filmed by the prison service itself, of its own torture sessions, kept as proof-of-work. The state’s response to his disclosure was to put him, not the torturers, on its wanted list: a confession, in effect, that the torture is policy.
On top of that base the FSB fabricates the headline cases that win its officers promotion. A physicist publishes in a foreign journal and becomes a “traitor”: Dmitry Kolker, dying of pancreatic cancer, was dragged from his hospital bed in Novosibirsk to a Moscow remand prison, where he died within days, so that some officer could pin a star to his shoulder. A sixteen-year-old, Nikita Uvarov, was sent to a penal colony for five years because he and his friends had blown up a virtual FSB building inside the video game Minecraft. Theatre-makers Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk were imprisoned on the testimony of an in-house “expert” who certified that their play was dangerous — the agency now keeps its own tame specialists to manufacture whatever finding a case requires. And the legal ground for all of it was pre-laid: the FSB’s own 2021 decree under director Alexander Bortnikov reclassified dozens of categories of perfectly open information as material whose collection could brand a citizen a foreign agent or a criminal.
The tell of fabrication is always speed. When a high-profile killing is “solved” in a day or two with a conveniently foreign culprit, the speed itself is the confession: the murder of Darya Dugina was pinned within forty-eight hours on a Ukrainian woman, Natalya Vovk, said to have slipped in and out of the country with her young daughter, while the murders of real journalists go unsolved for decades. None of this is improvisation. It is a forty-year-old method, modernized. The same structure that began Putin’s reign by blowing up apartment blocks and was caught planting its “explosives” in a Ryazan basement under the cover story of a training exercise has simply industrialized the technique.
The street, the screen, and the leak-tank
A serious mafia owns more than courts and companies; it owns the means of mood-making. The FSB cultivates and funds organized football-fan networks as deployable street muscle — disciplined young men who can be pointed at a protest or a rival on command. Domestically these networks are an unmarked reserve of force, financed and steered, available when batons in uniform would look too much like the state.
It owns the screen as completely. The most-followed political channels on Russian Telegram are, top to bottom, the voices of the regime; independent broadcasting was strangled at the source decades ago and replaced, where useful, with lavishly funded official substitutes built specifically to displace the inconvenient. And the agency runs a whole genre of “leak-tanks” and false insiders — channels and pundits who pose as daring sources of secret knowledge but in fact launder controlled leaks, asserting facts rather than offering analysis, predicting palace intrigues that never come true, and somehow never arrested. The point of all of it is the same: to keep the population’s attention inside a managed enclosure where every exit is watched.
The world is its territory
A mafia does not respect borders, and neither does this one. Assassination abroad is institutionalized as ordinary statecraft, with an unbroken pedigree — the man who killed Trotsky was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union and lived out his days honored, and the line from him to today’s operatives is direct. In 2019 an FSB-linked killer, Vadim Krasikov, shot a Chechen émigré dead in a Berlin park in broad daylight; when Germany convicted him, Russia spent years engineering his release, finally extracting him in the 2024 multi-country prisoner swap. The message to every operative was unmistakable: kill for us abroad and we will bring you home. Alongside the gun comes the poison — a wave of émigré opponents, several of them women who posed no operational threat at all, fell mysteriously ill, among them the journalist Elena Kostyuchenko in Munich and the Free Russia Foundation’s Natalya Arno, struck down by what looked like a nerve agent.
The same reach runs through softer channels. The agency plants long-term agents inside European democracies and lets them sit for decades: the Latvian member of the European Parliament Tatyana Zhdanok was reporting to her St. Petersburg handlers for some twenty years before the correspondence surfaced. It runs sexual entrapment on an industrial scale — the released Epstein files revealed streams of women routed from a string of Russian cities to compromise Western notables, the kind of honey-trap operation only a security service of this size could mount, and one that the man who once ran the FSB could hardly fail to know about. And it leans on client and dependent states to do its catching: Serbia’s security service wiretapped an opposition seminar in Belgrade and handed the take to Nikolai Patrushev, after which one of the participants, Andrei Pivovarov, was pulled off a departing aircraft at Pulkovo; Central Asian governments now extradite the exposed straight into FSB hands, as they did to the Crimean-born Ukrainian Aleksandr Kachkurkin, arrested on arrival in Moscow. The territory of this organization is, in principle, the planet.
It even manufactures the dictator’s fear
Here is the subtlest part of the partnership, and the one that most cleanly disproves the master-and-servant story. The FSB and the guard service do not merely serve Putin’s fear; they manufacture it, because they are its chief beneficiaries. An apparatus whose budget, headcount and indispensability rise in direct proportion to the threat level it claims to be guarding against has every incentive to keep that level high. The more terrified the principal, the more valuable the guards. So the threats multiply, the bunkers in the south get modernized, the public appearances thin out, and the protected man retreats ever further into a world his protectors curate for him.
They curate his information, too. The propaganda apparatus broadcasts the regime’s own inventions; then the guard service and the FSB clip those same broadcasts into the folders they place on his desk and serve his lies back to him as fresh intelligence. He announces a fantastical number of destroyed enemy vehicles — more, on one occasion, than the United States ever built — and the figure returns to him as confirmed analysis, free to inflate, because no one will ever contradict it. The fortress paranoia that drives the whole system is partly a product the system sells to its own boss: an old fabricated quotation about the West coveting Russia’s resources, traceable to a security general’s lurid tale of “reading minds,” is recycled at the highest level as proof of a plot. And when the apparatus told him in early 2022 that Ukraine would collapse in days and greet his soldiers with flowers, he believed it and acted on it — after which the officers who had fed him the fantasy, the men of the FSB’s foreign-intelligence service, were arrested for the failure. A structure that manufactures the ruler’s worldview, and then purges itself for the consequences, is not a tool he wields. It is an environment he lives inside.
Therefore it could remove him
Add the columns up. An organization that is embedded in every ministry, city and major company; that owns the courts and the screen and the street; that kills and entrapps and extorts on three continents; that manufactures both the dictator’s enemies and the dictator’s fear — such an organization is not an instrument. It is a power centre in its own right. The deepest fault line in the system does not run between imaginary “liberal” and “hardline” towers of the Kremlin. It runs between criminal castes — the thieves’-world ethos and the badge-carrying chekist ethos — and it runs straight through Putin himself, who is a fusion of both. The mutiny of 2023 showed that this fault line can open, and that when it does, the throne is suddenly, frighteningly empty.
It is sometimes objected that Putin still sacks and jails FSB generals at will, and that this proves his mastery. It proves nothing of the kind. A boss who can discipline a captain has not thereby become larger than the organization; he is performing the routine internal violence by which any mafia keeps its lieutenants in line. The arrests are clan management, not ownership. What they cannot touch is the structure itself, which regenerates every officer it loses and has outlived every purge.
So I will state the conclusion the evidence forces, without softening it. The FSB does not exist to keep Putin in power; Putin exists, for now, because the FSB finds him useful — a guarantor of its impunity, a name to act behind, a frightened figurehead whose terror keeps the budgets flowing. He has become, in the precise sense, superfluous: he can no longer guarantee victory to his commanders, safety to his collaborators, or stability to his own elite. The day the organization decides he has become a liability rather than an asset — that he draws more danger than he deflects — it has every means to end him, and an instructive recent memory of how nearly it was done from the outside by a single mutinous clan. That is the real architecture of power in Russia. Not a man with a service at his command, but a mafia at the scale of a country, with a man at its disposal.