State Building in Putin’s Russia

Putin presumably was joking when he made the statement quoted in the epigraph at a reception for secret police personnel on December 20, 1999, less than two weeks before he would become acting president when Boris Yeltsin surprisingly resigned on New Year's Eve 1999. But, as Russians like to say, in every joke there is an element of truth. And if Putin was joking, his close friend Cherkesov was deadly serious, arguing that Russia itself would perish if secret police alumni could not unify their forces.

During Putin's tenure as president, he relied heavily on officials who had made their careers in law enforcement and military agencies. State coercive bodies, referred to in Russia as the power ministries (silovye ministerstva) or power structures (silovye struktury), rose in stature. Russian citizens, for example, believed that Putin represented the interests of the power ministries – more than big business (“the oligarchs”), “ordinary people,” the state bureaucracy, or society as a whole. The increased prominence of personnel from these agencies throughout government led the Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya to dub Putin's regime a “militocracy.”