They said the KGB was dead. The world cheered, the West opened champagne, and for a moment it looked like Russia would finally breathe free.
But in truth, the funeral was for show. The machine that spied on its own people, crushed dissent, and reached deep into foreign governments…never stopped breathing.
It simply shed its old uniform, traded the Soviet emblem for something new, and waited.
Thirty years later, the men who once served under its shield and sword now run Russia. They decide who gets rich, who vanishes into a prison cell, and who never comes back.
And at the very top sits one man — Vladimir Putin — who may have traded his KGB identity card for a presidential seal… but never for a moment stopped thinking like a KGB officer.
Today, I’ll take you inside the mindset that still rules Russia, a worldview forged in secrecy, suspicion, and raw power. A mentality that shapes every decision, every war, every life they touch.
And I promise you — once you understand how these men think, you’ll never see Russia the same way again.
The Secret Police: Serving the State, Serving Themselves
On Russian soil, the state has always specialized in suppressing its own people. And that required a special kind of servant — men willing to crush dissent and kill any attempt to change the system. Because reform means replacing bad leaders with better ones. And who in power would ever want that?
So one after another, the regimes created their own enforcers:
• Ivan the Terrible had the Oprichnina.
• Peter the Great had the Secret Chancellery.
• Catherine the Great had the Secret Expedition.
• Nicholas I had the Third Section. And so it went… until the KGB.
The mission never changed: preserve the existing order — the one where a privileged class controls state money, state appointments, and state violence.
When the Bolsheviks seized power, they imagined they could abolish the Tsarist political police. After all, in a “workers’ and peasants’ state,” there was no place for such a thing. But it didn’t take long for those very revolutionaries, once hunted by the old regime, to resurrect it in all its glory. What else could they do? Someone had to deal with the “enemies” — meaning anyone who thought the dictatorship of Soviet bureaucrats was… less than ideal.
To hide the fact that their new political police was simply the old one reborn, they rebranded. The Cheka would present itself not as the Tsar’s henchmen, but as a kind of revolutionary knightly order. And since the state was nearly bankrupt, working for the idea and food seemed noble enough.
Chekists — as secret police officers were called — had enormous power over the life and death of ordinary people, but almost no money. Salaries were legally capped, and even highly influential officers lived in deep poverty, borrowing for the bare essentials. I describe this world in detail in my historical novel, The Prince of the Soviets.
They stayed poor only as long as the people had nothing worth taking. Soon, they discovered a thousand ways around the rules. Those overseeing the industry took bribes from factory directors. Those who traveled abroad engaged in smuggling and black-market dealing. Those who hunted “enemies of the people” sometimes moved their search to more… profitable targets.
At first, Chekists served the Party leadership, executing its will. But when it became clear there would be no World Revolution, and the USSR would never build true communism, they turned to what elites everywhere do when there are no independent courts, no free press, no checks and balances: they began looting the country for themselves.
The high point of this redistribution came in the 1990s. Putin and his allies now curse that decade as if it were the work of some alien invaders. In reality, it was Chekists, along with their allies in government, organized crime, and business, who transferred former state property into their own hands.
After the fall of the USSR, it seemed the KGB could never come back. Too many lives had been destroyed, too much blood spilled — and with no real achievements to justify it all. No one could point to a single benefit these men, sitting for decades on the state’s back, had brought to the country.
But in the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin — desperate for stability after years of chaos — began filling top government posts with men from the security services. And when the time came to choose his successor in 1999, he picked a KGB man who promised to “put things in order.”
That man was Vladimir Putin. Sixteen years in the KGB. Rank of lieutenant colonel. And from the moment he took office, he began populating every level of power with his own appointees — men who either came from the secret police or served its interests.
Alongside them rose the rest of Russia’s siloviki — from silá, meaning “force” or “power.” The word covers the military, the Federal Protective Service, customs, police, prosecutors — anyone in uniform, with shoulder marks and a weapon.
By the early 2000s, this class had cemented itself as Russia’s new elite. They dictated the country’s policy — domestic and foreign alike. And at the top of this “militocracy,” as one sociologist called it, sat the secret police, more powerful than ever before.
The Silovik Career
If you want to understand why Russia acts the way it does, you have to understand the people who run it — and the principles that guide them.
What can you say about any silovik, no matter which agency he serves in? First of all, he is a man grown entirely inside the system. Russia’s security structures are closed worlds. You don’t just walk in and land a colonel’s rank. There are rare exceptions, but they’re exactly that — exceptions.
For most, the climb begins at the bottom. Their formative years — their professional growth, their social circles, their entire worldview — are shaped inside that agency. They carry the culture of the institution that raised them, from the foot soldiers to the top brass.
If they’re not military, they usually start out in their own home region — sometimes their own hometown. Step by step, they move up the ladder, becoming part of the local elite. In that circle, everyone knows everyone — from the mayor to the prosecutor — and they help each other in a simple, shared goal: making money at the state’s expense.
But the game changes at the governor level. The heads of regional security agencies are almost always outsiders, appointed from Moscow. Officially, they’re rotated to “prevent corruption.” In reality, it’s to prevent loyalty to the region itself. These men are never supposed to think of a province as “theirs” — and if a conflict ever arises between local interests and Moscow, they must side with Moscow. After all, Moscow gave them the job. And in their new region, they have no deep roots, no local support.
The Siloviki Mindset
The Russian silovik is shaped by a few core beliefs that guide everything he does. You cannot argue him out of them. He has spent his entire life among people who think the same way, and his lived experience reinforces his worldview at every turn.
- They don’t believe in objective knowledge. Siloviki don’t trust statistics, independent studies, or monitoring systems. They don’t believe an objective picture of reality even exists. Why? Because they’ve personally had to manipulate numbers. They’ve cooked the books to please their superiors. In their world, careers depend on the report, not the result.
If the boss demands a higher crime clearance rate, he’ll produce the numbers that make the boss happy — and arrest as many people as needed to back them up. He knows it’s fake. But that’s the game. And he assumes everyone else is playing it too.
So he relies not on “objective” data, but on his own instincts — or the word of trusted insiders. And this is why siloviki can wreck the economy without even realizing it: they don’t believe the numbers. They think the numbers are just another trick. - They explain everything through personal gain. By training and by instinct, they approach every situation with a single question: Who benefits? They don’t believe in goodwill. If someone protests or demands change, someone must be paying them.
That’s why they don’t believe Ukraine is defending its independence. Why they think environmentalists are just cover for someone’s business interests. Why they are certain Alexei Navalny and his allies fought corruption because they were on someone’s payroll. In their world, there is no such thing as acting on principle. - The people are cattle. They are the aristocracy. Through their work, siloviki spend their careers dealing with the most marginal, criminal, or fanatical parts of society. It shapes their mental picture of “the people.” Even if they try to distance themselves from it, that image resurfaces whenever “social issues” come up.
They believe they “know” people and “know” life because they’ve swum in this rough environment. And it leaves them with a built-in contempt for the public. They feel no obligation to cooperate with ordinary citizens.
Add to that a deep sense of privilege, and you get their self-image: the aristocracy, the nation’s elite. In their minds, they are the ones who have succeeded, the ones who have proven themselves. Ordinary Russians are second-class.
In their eyes, the state — and everything in it — is theirs to exploit. The opinions of ordinary people are irrelevant. Their lives and happiness can be sacrificed for siloviki ambitions. - There is no win-win. There is only victory. Compromise is weakness. And weakness is something to be crushed. They’ve missed out on a century’s worth of modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology. They’ve never been taught these ideas, and they see no reason to doubt themselves.
This is the root of their amorality. Or rather, their morality applies only to their own. Everyone else is something less than human. And this is why they can so easily start wars, persecute dissenters, jail the innocent, and seize businesses.
They declare their love for the Motherland. But they see no contradiction in the fact that every day, through their actions, they make their country poorer, more repressive, and strip its people of a future.
The Besieged Fortress
Everything the siloviki do comes wrapped in the slogan of “protecting Russia’s interests” and “keeping the country safe.”
But if we look at the facts… has Russia actually become safer in the last thirty years? With a war in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands dead, and drone strikes reaching deep inside its territory, “safety” isn’t the word that comes to mind.
And what about “Russia’s interests”? Those don’t look much healthier. The country has become a raw-material appendage of China, losing influence not just in the Middle East, but even on its own southern borders. Armenia and Azerbaijan now make deals without Moscow’s involvement. The economy keeps sinking.
Do the siloviki see this as a failure? No.
In their worldview, the Russian Federation is not its citizens. It’s them. They appointed themselves as Russia. Everyone else is just the service staff.
Their own influence has only grown. Their budgets have swelled. And their personal “security” is now the kind any dictator would envy. They can do almost anything, and nothing will happen to them.
If you accept their premise — that “Russia” means “the siloviki” — their actions start to make perfect sense. They’ve spent decades fighting anyone who might threaten their status: NGOs, independent media, grassroots movements of any kind. And of course, the “enemies of Russia” are the West — because the West has the bad habit of condemning their actions.
They see themselves as patriots. But not of the people. They don’t love the people. They don’t protect them. They don’t think they should.
They are patriots of themselves and their status.
Listen to their speeches and you’ll hear the same refrain: Russia is a “unique civilization,” always under threat, especially from the West. They see the country as a besieged fortress — surrounded, under attack, forced to be strong or be destroyed. And if by “Russia” they mean only themselves, then yes — that fortress mentality makes sense.
Their main grievance with the West? “It doesn’t respect our interests.” And by “ours,” they mean theirs personally. Relations only soured when the Magnitsky case exposed how the top echelons of the Russian state were funneling stolen fortunes into the West. Before that, there were no loud complaints.
They talk about NATO’s expansion as if they truly believe Estonia or Romania is planning to invade. But their “defensive” posture has a strange habit of turning into aggression: 2008 — Georgia. 2014 onward — Ukraine. Endless provocations in Moldova. Support for Hamas, Bashar al-Assad, and mercenary deployments in Africa to prop up cannibal regimes and eliminate inconvenient people without trial.
They want to project power so the free world will take them seriously — and look the other way when they commit crimes. The same way it often does with China.
And yet, for all their power, they add nothing of real value. They can’t point to a single concrete benefit they’ve given the Russian people. Instead, they’ve invented a false threat — that the outside world is plotting to conquer Russia and steal its riches. They present themselves as the only ones who can prevent this.
It’s a perfect trick. If nothing happens, they claim credit for preventing it. NATO didn’t attack — not because it never intended to — but because the “loyal Chekists” stood guard.
But make no mistake: they are no true nobility. Even their feudal-style hierarchy is fake. Real aristocrats, in the old sense, were those who wielded weapons, received resources for service, and were ready for sacrifice.
Siloviki are not ready to sacrifice anything. We saw that during the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin — the commander of the Wagner mercenary group who turned his guns not on Ukraine, but on Moscow.
His men seized a military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. They shot down Russian aircraft. They marched toward the capital. And Russia’s vaunted “power ministries”… did nothing.
For 36 hours, there was silence from the defense minister, the FSB chief, the National Guard commander. The same security state that could crush peaceful protesters in minutes seemed paralyzed.
The mutiny ended with a deal. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell from the sky.
But the damage was done. The uprising showed that siloviki loyalty wasn’t unbreakable — and that the system’s strength was, in many ways, a myth.
