Siloviki

Silowiki ( Russian силовики ; singular: Silowik ; derived from the Russian word for power) is the name in Russian for representatives of the secret services and the military who came to important political and economic positions in the governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin .

role

The ministries led by the siloviki are traditionally the influential Ministry of Interior of Russia and the Russian Ministry of Defense .

Other influential siloviki were placed at the head of state-owned enterprises. At the beginning, in accordance with the informal requirements of the censorship, reports on the presidium of the supervisory board at Rosneft were not allowed when Igor Sechin took over this post. Nevertheless, news always leaked through about high-ranking officials of the presidential administration who reached the top of the supervisory boards of energy producers. Igor Sechin was the driving force behind the expropriation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 and played a decisive role in the Bashneft case in 2017. State-owned companies are responsible for 70 percent of the economic output in Russia.

Mostly the siloviki are opposed to the liberal democrats as a political force. The Siloviki prefer Great Russian conservative views and sympathize with the autocratic Slavophile tradition that dates back to the reign of Tsar Alexander III. going back. The Silowiki are pragmatic realists in the implementation of their goals. The siloviki differ significantly in their ideological orientation from ideological extremists such as the nationalist LDPR of Vladimir Zhirinovsky , the Pamjat movement or the tsarist Black Hundreds .

assessment

Opinions towards the siloviki are polarized in Russia . Some argue that the siloviki have grabbed Russia by the neck and threatened its fragile democracy. Their power is immense and they prefer a statist ideology at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. In a survey in 2017, 41 percent of those questioned (with possible multiple answers) believed that Putin represented the interests of the siloviki (15 percent also stated that he did not understand ordinary people).

Other Russians initially saw the siloviki as a suitable counterweight to the oligarchs who were gaining power in the 1990s and who were supposed to plunder Russia and infiltrate the government. In the 2017 survey, however, 31 percent of those questioned believed that Putin represented the interests of such oligarchs.

See also

• Alexander Bortnikov
• Sergei Ivanov
• Raschid Nurgaliev
• Nikolai Patrushev
• Sergei Shoigu
• Igor Sechin

literature

• Robert A. Saunders, Vlad Strukov: Historical Dictionary of the Russian Federation . Scarecrow Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8108-5475-8 , p. 530.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ S. Kuznetsov: Bolshoi tolkowyi slowar russkogo jasyka . Rossiiskaja akademija nauk, in-t lingwistitscheskich issledowanii, Norint, Sankt-Peterburg 1998, ISBN 5771100153 , p. 1185.
2. ↑ Margareta Mommsen, Angelika Nussberger: The Putin System: Guided Democracy and Political Justice in Russia , CH Beck, 2007, ISBN 9783406547904 , page 69
3. ↑ Jürgen Hartmann: Russia: Introduction to the Political System and Comparison with the Post-Soviet States, Springer-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 9783658001759 , page 116
4. ↑ Straws are not enough for Russia , NZZ, June 1, 2017
5. ↑ ^{a b} Eberhard Schneider : Russia: How did Putin come to power? , December 2017; Levada survey: https://www.levada.ru/2017/11/20/vladimir-putin-5/ ( Memento from November 21, 2017 in the web archive archive.today )