KGB tightens grip on Russia.(Insider Report)

Nearly four years ago, this column described how Boris Yeltsin's appointment of career KGB officer Vladimir Putin to serve as acting Russian president facilitated a coup by Russian "chekists"--veterans of the KGB. (See "Russia's Chekist Putsch" in our February 14, 2000 issue). We cited a report in the January 12, 2000 Los Angeles Times describing the previous December's celebration of "Security Organs Day," an annual commemoration of the founding of history's bloodiest secret service, and most energetic promoter of international terrorism. At that event, Putin told a group of his associates in the FSB (the re-named KGB) that "a group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission." The Times explained that Putin's remark was "meant to be funny."

Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya isn't laughing. "For more than a decade," observed the December 30 Christian Science Monitor, "she's been Russia's premier expert on the political, business, and security elites. But even Ms. Kryshtanovskaya says she's alarmed by her own recent findings. Since Vladimir Putin came to power four years ago, she's been tracking a dramatic influx into government of siloviki--people ...