Last month, someone writing under the pseudonym Gleb Vlasov created a LiveJournal account and posted a single article with several revelations and accusations against FSB General Oleg Feoktistov.
Feoktistov, First Deputy Head of the FSB’s 9th Division, the Internal Security Directorate (or ‘USB’), earned his current position (according to Vlasov) by leading the 2007-2008 investigation of Aleksandr Bul’bov, the FSKN general who was arrested after wiretapping FSB agents in connection with the Tri Kita scandal. Feoktistov’s new role in Division 9 didn’t offer a significant pay raise, but it did better position him to collect bribes, Vlasov claims, allowing access to the police branch with zero oversight, but jurisdiction across all law enforcement.
The winner: the FSB's USB.
In the hierarchy of the Russian police, the job of identifying corrupt cops falls to the MVD’s DSB (its Internal Affairs division), which works alongside the FSB’s Division M. Feoktistov’s USB oversees Division M, but nobody oversees Feoktistov’s USB.
When he got to the FSB-USB, Feoktistov grew close to Andrei Khorev, First Deputy Head of the MVD’s DEB (the Economic Security Department). (Vlasov claims that Rostekhnologiia’s Sergei Abutidze made the introduction.) In the DEB, Khorev was involved in extortion on a massive scale, receiving kickbacks from “bankers, customs officials, smugglers, construction companies,” and so on. Vlasov claims that Khorev was soon sending Feoktistov roughly five-hundred thousand dollars in protection money every week.
When Feoktistov ran into some trouble with Division M officials Vladimir Maksimenko and Aleksandr Filin, he dispatched an old colleague from his days in Division 6 to gather kompromat. Once collected, Feoktistov confronted the errant FSB officers and won their loyalty. Feoktistov would later protect Maksimenko when Division M’s director, Aleksei Dorofeev, wanted to have him investigated on suspicion of ‘commercial activities.’ Only the FSB’s USB could take such an act, and Feoktistov dragged his feet.
As director of Division M’s ‘1st Service,’ Filin would come to play a key role in Feoktistov’s racketeering ring, as his consent was fundamental to approving and rejecting candidates for new appointments throughout law enforcement agencies. Vlasov claims that Division M’s stamp of approval for appointments to the MVD’s DEB, for instance, cost between twenty and two-hundred thousand dollars per head. (MVD-DEB appointments including Andrei Solodovnikov, Vladimir Sevast’ianov, Aleksei Kamnev, and others were all obtained for such prices.) Division M was also capable of arranging the dismissal of certain figures, if paid enough. Like Khorev in the MVD-DEB, Maksimenko collects protection money from a network of Investigative Committee regional officials. According to Vlasov, one such example is Investigative Department Director Yuri Popov, who sends fifty thousand dollars to Maksimenko weekly (for protection against investigation by other agencies, and for a blind eye from Division M).
Of Maksimenko’s team, V.Vasilevskii is rumored to be the most talented at ‘materializing’ kompromat ‘from nothing.’ He routinely collects kompromat on two categories of people: any candidates for high-ranking positions, and any investigators who dare to look into Maksimenko’s criminal allies. For his services, Vasilevskii has been rewarded handsomely, as he allegedly owns four expensive cars, and his own yacht and speedboat. He is also often spotted at a fancy restaurant that is frequented by colleagues of Andrei Khorev. Since July 2011, Maksimenko has apparently been waiting for Dorofeev to leave Division M. In order to take his place as director, Maksimenko will rely heavily on Feoktistov’s influence.
Vlasov blames the corrupt conduct surrounding the closure of Cherkizovsky Market on Khorev, who was apparently responsible for the illegal resale of the confiscated goods. While Sergei Deptitskii of the Investigative Committee was forced into early retirement for the scandal (which included the disappearance of three million dollars in cash), Vlasov claims that Khorev led the operation.
Vlasov describes the FSB-USB’s criminal protection racket as operating like this: Division 9 will free a defendant from jail on a legal technicality, then cooperate with him to produce an accusation of extortion against the lead investigator in the case against the defendant. The investigator is then disqualified by a judge, entering the defendant into state protection, and ultimately leading to the dismissal of the original case. These ‘zakaznye’ criminal cases are a common feature of the FSB-SK alliance. (Vlasov lists several Investigative Committee officials who are complicit in such schemes.)
The loser: Yuri Sindeev.
Vlasov concludes by addressing a recent conflict between Feoktistov and Yuri Sindeev, Head of the Organization Department of the General Prosecutor. Sindeev apparently refused to come to terms with Feoktistov, leading to a minor clan war. Vlasov argues that Feoktistov was totally unable to tolerate a powerful GP organ outside the FSB-USB’s control.
In September 2010, Feoktistov used falsified internal reports to justify a wiretap on Sindeev’s phones (and the phones of his colleagues). Khorev oversaw this project. By December 2010, Khorev had uncovered a gold mine of kompromat, most notably the existence of a GP-protected network of underground casinos. In what Vlasov claims to have been Feoktistov’s evil genius, the FSB-USB allowed the story to grow into a larger scandal between GP head Yuri Chaika and SK head Aleksandr Bastrykin, keeping quiet about his own rivalry with Sindeev.
Vlasov concludes by downplaying the kompromat against Sindeev, arguing that (a) the few incriminating photos collected by the FSB are probably altered, and (b) the profits and scale of the casino business were exaggerated by several magnitudes.
On September 26th, Novaya Gazeta’s Sergei Kanev picked up the Vlasov story, proposing four possible identities of the blogger: an FKSN operative, a MVD-DEB cop, a General Prosecutor official, or an FSB agent.
- Vlasov mentions the Bul’bov arrest scandal, making it possible that this online dissemination of kompromat is a belated attempt at revenge for attacks on the FKSN (the Federal Anti-Narcotics Service).
- The recent staff shakeup in the MVD-DEB (which has since adopted the new unfortunate acronym ‘GUEBiPK’) has likely disrupted existing patronage networks, perhaps creating some disgruntled, ‘cutoff’ cops, eager to bite the hand that (used) to feed them.
- Kanev also proposes that Gleb Vlasov could be Aleksandr Ignatenko, the former Deputy Prosecutor of the Moscow Region, who fled the country when the casino scandal exploded. Kanev points out that ‘Vlasov’ never utters an ill word against the General Prosecutor’s office, fervently defending Sindeev against Feoktistov. Ignatenko, it turns out, was widely considered to belong to Sindeev’s circle of friends.
- Finally, Kanev suggests that Vlasov could be an FSB agent himself. Even Lubyanka was not spared the torments and kompromat threats of Feoktistov and the FSB-USB. It is possible that Vlasov served in the FSB with Feoktistov, and was a victim of one of the USB’s incriminating reports.
For his part, Vlasov has yet to publish anything more to his LiveJournal. That said: the day after his only activity, Vlasov did comment on Aleksei Navalny‘s blog, posting a link to that one and only article. (Presumably, this was some kind of attempt to ‘spread the word’ among Russian oppositionists.)
Andrei Khorev: how does he fit in, now that he's been forced out?
Considering how prominently Andrei Khorev features in Vlasov’s story, it’s strange that he doesn’t address that fact that Khorev was removed from his post in the MVD-DEB on July 7, 2011, by President Medvedev. The (unstated) ostensible reason for that dismissal was a scandal raised by Duma Deputy Mikhail Babich about Khorev’s fraudulent status as a combat veteran (and the illegal benefits he received as a result). The General Prosecutor’s office used Babich’s accusations to lobby Medvedev specifically for Khorev’s removal, despite the deputy’s wishes that the GP pressure the MVD for wider investigations. Khorev was involved in several other scandals, most notably the disappearance of surveillance evidence against Vladimir Leshchevskii, who was caught on tape extorting businessman Valery Morozov for a fifteen-million-dollar bribe. More recently, Khorev has also been linked to former Police Chief Maksim Kagansky, who is suspected of extorting five million dollars in bribes from smugglers of medical x-ray machines. The arrest of MVD investigator Nelli Dmitrieva is reportedly related to this scheme, and there are indications that the FSB is pressuring Dmitrieva to testify against Ivan Glukhov, perhaps to spare Khorev involvement in the Kagansky affair.
All this begs the question, what is the state of Feoktistov’s team today? If Vlasov’s LJ piece can be interpreted as an attempt at revenge against a silovik who scorned people in the FKSN, MVD-DEB, GP, and FSB, then how do the recent cadre changes in the MVD-DEB and elsewhere reflect the Feoktistov-Sindeev battle? Is the landscape changed, now that Feoktistov’s supposedly closest ally (Andrei Khorev) has been replaced by Police Colonel Vitaly Skvortsov — a man considered to be outside the patronage of the Feoktistov clan?
Vlasov’s LiveJournal blog may raise more questions than it answers, but it remains an interesting window into the mechanics of Russian police infighting. Those following the underground casinos case would be wise to bear in mind Vlasov’s accusations.