A spy brought in from the cold
IF ANY doubt remains about what kind of people are ruling Russia, President Vladimir Putin's posthumous bestowal of Russia's highest civilian honor on George Koval ought to dispel it. Koval was the Stalin-era mole who penetrated the Manhattan Project. By honoring him as a hero of the Russian Federation, Putin was implicitly recognizing secret-police work as the highest value for the new order he has built in Russia.
This unapologetic inverting of liberal values is not merely an idiosyncrasy of Putin, the former KGB officer. Rather, it reflects the value system of the new ruling class he has empowered.
Russians call these new bosses "siloviki" - a cloudy constellation of officials and executives connected to branches of state security or the military. They run a political system rooted in authoritarianism, though with some limits. They control national TV but leave room for small independent papers and journals to publish. They make it hard for international nongovernmental organizations to function but, unlike their Stalinist predecessors, they do not prevent Russians from traveling abroad or receiving foreign news on the radio and Internet.
They allow commoners to enjoy these private liberties as well as trickle-down benefits from the oil and natural gas windfall that has come to the Kremlin-endowed owners of Russia's energy conglomerates.
Because government salaries and pensions that went unpaid in the Yeltsin years are now being paid, and have even been rising, Putin is strikingly popular. The public accepts his recipe for rescuing Russia from the chaos, poverty, and humiliations of the early post-communist years. That recipe calls for a highly centralized state; a convenient distinction, between the loyal and disloyal among the oligarchs who grew rich from state-controlled corporations; and the dissemination on state-run TV of an ideology that Putin's old KGB clique calls "sovereign democracy."
Another ingredient of the siloviki's recipe for Russian revival is the reassertion of Russia's big-power ambitions. This penchant can be seen in their selective - or sometimes punitive - pricing and delivery of natural gas to countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union or the Soviet sphere of influence.
Few things are better suited to the self-glorification of Russia's new siloviki ruling class than Putin's commemoration of Koval, who stole the engineering secrets of the A-bomb after being trained by Stalin's notorious military intelligence agency. Symbolically, Putin's gesture declares that Russia's spies are best able to preserve the country's status as a great power, and that the secret agent's devotion to clan and country is the best protection against Russia's enemies. This is a signal other countries will have to heed. 