In Moscow's Shadows 255: Chekistocracy? Or, Power and the Spooks in Putin's Russia

“Russia is run by the spooks” is a satisfying line, but it is also a lazy one. Despite talk of a 'Chekistocracy' run by the intelligence and security services, the FSB, SVR and GRU are better understood as competing institutional actors than as a single all-powerful caste pulling every lever in the Kremlin. 

In that context, "power" itself is a complex phenomenon, and I outline a framework of six different kinds of power: the ability to dictate policy, the court politics of access and trust, the quiet art of resistance, the deeper pull of conceptual dominance through briefings and narratives, the pre-emptive authority that makes leaders avoid a fight, and the transactional coalitions that get things done below the apex. 

In the second part, I look at three excellent journalistic accounts of covert operations:

• Shaun Walker, The Illegals. Russia’s Most Audacious Spies And The Plot To Infiltrate The West (Profile Books, 2025)
• Drew Hinshaw & Joe Parkinson, Swap, A Secret History Of The New Cold War (Harpercollins, 2025)
• Bojan Pancevski, The Nord Stream Conspiracy (Hutchinson, 2026)

The SSEES event I mention is here.

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