Putin’s Bringing Back The KGB After Winning Big In Russian Elections

In September the Federal Security Service detained the deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s department for economic security on suspicion of receiving a large bribe.

Russian Federation is to create a new spy ministry that unites several agencies into one powerful structure reminiscent of the Soviet KGB.

The new agency will reportedly be called the “MGB”.

If the information is confirmed, the new superministry will also incorporate the Federal Protective Service of Russian Federation, which has the aforementione functions, and the foreign intelligence service, SVR.

The changes would also grant the new ministry powers to not only conduct criminal investigations but also give it oversight on cases ran by Russia’s other powerful law enforcement bodies.

“If before we were just providing support to investigation, then now we’re being tasked with managing their progress from the moment that criminal charges are brought to their transfer to court”, an anonymous FSB operative told Kommersant.

Quoting multiple unnamed sources, the Kommersant newspaper wrote that the reforms are scheduled for the nearest future and will be completed before the presidential elections of 2018.

Putin sees the governing party’s huge gain in recent parliamentary elections as a vote of confidence in his government, despite a low voter turnout which suggests broad public apathy and dismay with the political process. Following Stalin’s death, it was renamed the KGB, which it remained until its demise following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991.

Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany during the 1980s and headed the FSB in 1998-1999.

The security service, synonymous with spying and political repression, administered Russia’s police state, operating mass surveillance and persecuting dissidents, but also overseeing numerous country’s key institutions. The suggestion that the Kremlin is planning to restore it, nearly in name, will prompt alarm among some that Putin is preparing to re-establish the core architecture of the Soviet totalitarian state.