Repression

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. ...

We are used to reading repression as a display of power. The arrests, the prison terms, the raided institutes, the criminal cases against people who have already fled the country — all of this looks, at first glance, like a strong state flexing its muscles, reminding everyone who is in charge. I want to argue almost the opposite. The repression now grinding through Russia is not the regime demonstrating its strength; it is the regime wounding itself. It destroys the very minds and talents a country needs in order to live. It manufactures, with its own hands, the people who will one day come to settle accounts. And it always intensifies at a particular, telling moment — not when the regime is winning, but when it is failing abroad and has nowhere else to put its rage. Seen this way, the machinery of fear is not armor. It is a slow poison the state keeps administering to itself. ...