page_title: Russia under Vladimir Putin
section_title: FSB influence
hierarchical_section_title: Russia under Vladimir Putin / Criticism / FSB influence
caption_attribution_description: English: MOSCOW. President Putin at an extended meeting of the board of the Federal Security Service. President Putin with Nikolai Patrushev, Director of the Federal Security Service.Русский: МОСКВА. На расширенном заседании коллегии Федеральной службы безопасности. С директором ФСБ Николаем Патрушевым.
context_page_description: Vladimir Putin has served three terms and is currently in a fourth as President of Russia and was Acting President from 1999 to 2000, succeeding Boris Yeltsin after Yeltsin's resignation. Putin was also Prime Minister for three months in 1999 and served a full term from 2008 to 2012. During Putin's presidency, he has been a member of the Unity party and the United Russia party. He is also affiliated with the People’s Front, a group of supporters that Putin organized in 2011 to help improve the public's perception of United Russia. His political ideology, priorities and policies are sometimes referred to as Putinism.
  Putin has enjoyed high domestic approval ratings and in 2007 was Time magazine's Person of the Year. In 2015, he was designated No. 1 in Time 100, Time magazine's list of the top 100 most influential people in the world. In 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, he was designated No. 1 on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People. The Russian economy and standard of living grew rapidly during the early period of Putin's regime, fueled largely by a boom in the oil industry.
context_section_description: According to some scholars, Russia under Putin has been transformed into an "FSB state".
  Shortly after becoming Russian Prime Minister, Putin was reported to have joked to a group of his KGB associates: "A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission".
  The former Securitate Lieutenant General and defector Ion Mihai Pacepa said in his interview for conservative FrontPage Magazine in 2006 that "former KGB officers are running" Russia and that FSB, which he called "the KGB successor" had the right to monitor the population electronically, control political process, search private property, cooperate with employees of the federal government, create front enterprises, investigate cases and run its own prisons.
  Various 2006 estimates showed that Russia had above 200,000 members of the FSB, or one FSB employee for every 700 citizens of Russia (the exact number of the overall FSB staff is classified). The Russian Armed Forces General Staff as well as its subordinate structures, such as the Russian Strategic Missile Troops headquarters, are not submitted to the Federal Security Service, but the FSB might be interested in monitoring such structures as they intrinsically involve state secrets and various degrees of admittance to them. The Law on Federal Security Service which defines its functions and establishes its structure does not involve such tasks as managing strategic branches of national industry, controlling political groups, or infiltrating the federal government.
  In 2006, political scientist Julie Anderson wrote: "Under Russian Federation President and former career foreign intelligence officer Vladimir Putin, an 'FSB State' composed of chekists has been established and is consolidating its hold on the country. Its closest partners are organized criminals. In a world marked by a globalized economy and information infrastructure, and with transnational terrorism groups utilizing all available means to achieve their goals and further their interests, Russian intelligence collaboration with these elements is potentially disastrous".
  Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky compared the takeover of the Russian state by the siloviki to an imaginary scenario of the Gestapo coming to power in Germany after World War II. He pointed out a fundamental difference between the secret police and ordinary political parties, even totalitarian ones, such as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, i.e. Russia's secret police organizations are wont to employ the so-called active measures and extrajudicial killings, hence they killed Alexander Litvinenko and directed Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts in Russia to frighten the civilian population and achieve their political objectives, according to Felstinsky.
  In April 2006, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), presented a list of those who had "mysteriously" died during Putin's presidency and wrote: "Vladimir Putin's Russia is a new phenomenon in Europe: a state defined and dominated by former and active-duty security and intelligence officers. Not even fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union – all undoubtedly much worse creations than Russia – were as top-heavy with intelligence talent. [...] There is no historical precedent for a society so dominated by former and active-duty internal-security and intelligence officials – men who rose up in a professional culture in which murder could be an acceptable, even obligatory, business practice. [...] Those who operated within the Soviet sphere were the most malevolent in their practices. These men mentored and shaped Putin and his closest friends and allies. It is therefore unsurprising that Putin's Russia has become an assassination-happy state where detention, interrogation, and torture – all tried and true methods of the Soviet KGB – are used to silence the voices of untoward journalists and businessmen who annoy or threaten Putin's FSB state".
  One of the leading members of Putin's ruling elit
caption: Putin and Nikolai Patrushev at a meeting of the board of the Federal Security Service
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