Day of the Jackal
Chekist aggression drives global instability
Last Saturday was Chekist’s Day in Moscow. While December 20th nominally marks the ‘professional anniversary’ of the faceless, mendacious legions who toil in the field of ‘state security’ across Russia and in missions abroad, it is actually the closest thing this Kremlin has to a holiday highlighting its core purposes. Chekist’s Day epitomizes what today’s fascist Russian regime is about.
In narrow terms, it marks the day Lenin founded the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия по борьбе с контрреволюцией и саботажем) in 1917. In broader historical perspective, this was when Moscow dedicated itself to upending the established international order by stealth, subterfuge and war. Apart from brief pauses under Nazi occupation in 1941-44 and in 1991-95, when the old KGB was chaotically reorganized, they have never strayed from this path.
The Commission’s first chairman was Feliks Dzerzhinskiy, a Polish-born revolutionary who had spent years in exile, as well as in Tsarist prisons. Dzerzhinskiy was ruthless and fanatical, carrying out orders without question. From the start, his mandate was threefold — to win the civil war, destroy Bolshevism’s enemies and spread the communist revolution.
To do so, the VChK (ВЧK) instituted ‘organized terror’ as the coercive body on which the Bolsheviks relied to stay in power and defeat opponents. Known by its first three initials — ‘VChK’ — it came to be called the ‘Cheka’ and its officers were ‘Chekists’. Even after the VChK morphed into the GPU under the NKVD and (after the Soviet Union had been formed in 1922) into the OGPU directly under the Council of People’s Commissars, December 20th was widely known as ‘Chekist’s Day’.
The first apogee of Chekist repressive power was reached after Stalin integrated them in 1934 into the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), where grotesque villains such as Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria fought never-ending, nauseatingly internecine battles. After Stalin’s death, the NKVD was replaced by the KGB, which collapsed with the USSR in late 1991.
Yet Chekists retained enormous influence. President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree on December 20th, 1995 giving official status to the ‘day of the employee of the organs of state security of the Russian Federation’ (День работника органов безопасности Российской Федерации), which has been the official name for Chekist’s Day ever since. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) was founded that same year and remains, with hundreds of thousands of employees, the KGB’s principal successor.
Only a few years later one of these employees became president. The photo above shows Vladimir Putin — still Russia’s prime minister at the time — celebrating Chekist’s Day on December 20th, 1999. Only eleven days’ later, Yeltsin resigned and made Putin acting president. The people shown in this photograph have been Russia’s actual and near-absolute rulers ever since.
They include Putin’s cronies from his days in the Leningrad KGB, including his notorious alter ego Nikolai Patrushev (third from the right), who took over as FSB director from Putin on August 9th, 1999. Also shown are Sergei Chemezov (fourth from the right), an influential Kremlin power-broker to this day, and Sergei Naryshkin (far left), who is still director of the External Intelligence Service (SVR), which operates independently of the FSB.
At the event depicted in this photo they are celebrating their dark professional bond with Yevgeny Primakov (fifth from the left), an Arabist who operated in the Middle East under journalistic cover. Primakov was born in Kyiv but grew up in Tbilisi. He later became an academician, head of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of World Economy and International relations, since re-named in his honour.
Primakov was the SVR’s first director in 1992, when it was created out of the ruins of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Primakov was also foreign minister under Yeltsin. When this photo was taken, Primakov had only recently left the job of prime minister — on May 12th, 1999 — having served only eight months in that role. He is the only person in this group to have publicly voiced opposition to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukrainian Donbas. He died the next year.
In the photo, the vodka bottles have been carefully stowed away. All but Primakov are wearing shirts and ties. There is an air of quiet determination and restored discipline. This group is on its way to absolute power, but they do not yet fully have it.
Russia has always relied on harshly unscrupulous ‘secret services’ as core instruments of state power. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this apparatus cemented a Holy Alliance that championed absolute monarchy after Napoleon’s defeat. Up to 1917, clandestine Tsarist police infiltrated anarchist, nihilist and socialist groups, launching brutal disinformation campaigns, often to benefit one group over another. Vitriolic Anti-Semitic propaganda tracts produced by Tsarist secret police were instrumental in spreading belief in an international Jewish conspiracy.
After the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet VChK, OGPU and NKVD focused on eliminating dissidents and recruiting believers in Marxism-Leninism worldwide. When Marxist sympathizers became scarce during the Cold War, the Soviet KGB under Andropov turned to active measures and proxy wars using a combination of subversion, co-option, information warfare and military action to influence the decision-making of allies and adversaries alike.
Putin’s generation of Chekists were deeply steeped in Andropov’s doctrines of active measures and hybrid warfare. This photo was taken just over three months after the last ‘apartment bomb’ went off in Volgodonsk, Russia, killing seventeen people and injuring 69. It was part of an FSB-led false flag operation to stage incidents of domestic terrorism that would be blamed on Chechen militants, triggering a war that would make the little-known Putin famous and popular across Russia. By Chekist’s Day in 1999, the siege of Grozny was well underway — part of a pattern that would repeat itself over the next quarter century with deadly regularity in Aleppo, Homs, Mariupol, Bakhmut and elsewhere across eastern Ukraine.
Today’s Chekists combine authoritarian conservatism with imperialist nationalism. Thanks to pervasive, relentless domestic propaganda, the Russian population and most of the Russian diaspora abroad have been marinating in the juices of this dead-end ideology for a quarter century. Social media platforms have given their propaganda broad influence worldwide.
