Word: kgb
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...spate. Medvedev has also frequently railed against corruption in Russian public life. He has made a point of saying repeatedly that the country badly needs to protect newly emerging small businesses. His career is apparently devoid of any postings in the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), whereas several Kremlin leaders, including Putin himself, started their careers in the security agencies. He warmed the hearts of his audience at Davos this year: "We are well aware that there's one simple reason why no nondemocratic state has ever become prosperous: freedom is better than nonfreedom...
...President, Putin would be a lame duck at this stage. His second term of office expires four months from now, and the constitution prohibits him from seeking a third consecutive term. Still, nobody doubts that Russia's immediate political future will be decided primarily by the former KGB man now in the Kremlin. Some supporters have urged him to find a legal loophole to allow himself another term; others hope that, as the leading candidate of United Russia in Sunday's poll, he simply moves into the legislature in the job of Prime Minister, and inverts the constitutional relationship between...
...explanation for Putin's popularity may be found in certain similarities to the man often credited with helping to bring down the Soviet Union. It's not that the former KGB man has any policy preferences or even a political style in common with Ronald Reagan, the great icon of contemporary American conservatism. But in the sense that he has made Russians feel good once again about their country, his appeal is Reaganesque...
...regained his standing in Russia in recent years, becoming a frequent guest of KGB veteran Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Still, Vladimir Kryuchkov will be primarily remembered as the former KGB chief who, disturbed by liberal reforms, engineered the failed three-day coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. The brief takeover by hard-liners helped precipitate the final collapse of the Soviet Union four months later. Kryuchkov...
John Le Carre's novels, in which secret agents confound one another with twisted espionage games, may have taken inspiration from legendary, real-life Soviet master-spy Alexander Feklisov, the cold-war operative who ran some of the KGB's deadliest spies in the West. Feklisov's recruits included Julius Rosenberg, widely believed to have provided information on the Manhattan Project, and German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked at the Los Alamos lab. Feklisov was pivotal in his country's acquisition of the nuclear bomb, first exploded in 1949, some five years before U.S. agents expected...