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C H A P T E R 5 Protecting the New Rome Byzantine Influences on Russian Intelligence Kristian C. Gustafson When we mentally picture Byzantinism, we see before us . . . the austere, clear plan of a spacious and capacious structure. We know, for example, that in politics it means autocracy. In religion, it means Christianity with distinct features, which distinguish it from Western churches, from heresies and schisms. In the area of ethics we know that the Byzantine ideal does not have that elevated and in many instances highly exaggerated notion of terrestrial human individual introduced into history by German feudalism. —Konstantin Leontiev, Byzantism and Slavdom, 1875 O ne of the great hopes of the last generation was that Russia, once freed from the bonds of communism, would rejoin the family of nations as an equal, free, and democratic state. Russia’s progress since the collapse of the USSR has of course not proceeded as some might have expected. As Dimitri Obolensky has commented, ‘‘There is much in contemporary Russia that seems unfamiliar and puzzling to the modern Western observer—ideas, institutions, and methods of government that seem to run counter to the basic trends of his own culture.’’1 With economic and demographic collapse followed by boom, and with the progress of democracy questionable at times, the early hopes of 1991 have long since faded, replaced with a realization that Russia would not / 67 / 68 / Kristian C. Gustafson ever be a mirror image of any Western state. Though Russia is presumably through the worst of its times, on many counts it strikes many in the West as not a reliable partner but still a potential enemy. ‘‘A new Cold War’’ has been detected by some.2 One matter that causes particular concern in the West is the behavior of Russia’s security services and their relationship with the central authority of the state. It is clear that the security services in Russia today are as critical and central as they were under communism. As an analyst at one American think tank has stated, Russia is ‘‘a state defined and dominated by former and active duty security and intelligence officers.’’3 One Russian researcher has noted that more than 25 percent of Russia’s current governing elites have backgrounds in either the military or security services, including former president and current prime minister Vladimir Putin as a former KGB and FSB officer.4 The question posed by several thinkers since the collapse of the USSR is if there has been any real change in the management of Russia and its security services.5 As Amy Knight commented in the mid-1990s, there had been cosmetic change in the security services, but they remained substantially the same structures because ‘‘Lubianka still stood and, although there had been changes at the helm inside, the longawaited reform of the security services had yet to happen. Indeed, by August 1995, the security services had recaptured much of the ground lost in the first days after the August 1991 coup.’’6 Part of the answer to the question of ‘‘why have the Russians not changed their political behavior significantly since the end of communism?’’—really the question that runs throughout the work of Amy Knight and, more recently, that of Edward Lucas—can be answered by saying that Russia’s political behavior between 1917 and 1991 did not seem peculiar to the West because it was communist but because it was Russian. Accordingly, if we want to understand Russia’s political behavior now, we must understand its cultural origins. Russia has political traditions that did not develop out of the Renaissance and Reformation in Western Europe, and before that from the political and religious traditions of Rome. Rather, Russia’s traditions originate from a source largely forgotten in the West: the Byzantine Empire. One can make more sense of Russia’s security and intelligence culture—as opposed to specific communist or postcommunist cultures—by tracing their common philosophical and historic roots back to their point of origin, between five hundred and a thousand years ago in Constantinople and its empire, the long-lived eastern successor of the Roman Empire. The Byzantines had a strongly bureaucratized and institutionalized intelligence and security culture, which formed the heart of their overall political system, and which strongly influenced the behavior of Tsarist and Communist Russia—and likely still influences it today. ‘‘There can be no doubt,’’ wrote the Russian Byzantinist Dimitry Obolensky...

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