A plaque inscribed ''Ya svoy'' (''I am not alien'') for sale in a Moscow souvenir shop as an ''FSB amulet''
Photo: Sergey Osmachkin
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The Shadow of the KGB
// Lithuania's Security Services Continue to Try Their Hand at Politics
Officially, the scandal that has engulfed the Lithuanian special services and the Department of State Security (VSD) was provoked by purported intentional leaks of secret information by two of its senior counterintelligence officers. However, the source of the scandal is much more serious and involves the problem posed by the role and place of the special services in the independent republics of the post-Soviet world.
When independent republics began to form themselves out of the wreckage of the former USSR, many of them called the omnipotent KGB, which was a kind of state within a state and which actively influenced all spheres of life in the former Soviet Union, one of the worse vices of the Soviet system. The KGB was completely dismantled in many of the new republics, and the new governments began to create their own national structures of state security from scratch. According to their organizers, these security organs would never under any circumstances come to resemble the Soviet FSB.
Now, however, a decade and a half after the Soviet Union's collapse and the downfall of the KGB, one of its key toeholds of power, it is becoming obvious that many of the USSR's successors have failed to emerge from the shadow of the KGB. It appears that the legend of the KGB's former omnipotence is not letting many of the security services in the new republics of the post-Soviet world sleep at night, tormented as they are by the desire to wield similar power, albeit with different ideological trappings, in their own countries. And since the shortest route to wielding serious power lies in politics, the temptation to meddle is fairly strong among the security services in the young republics.
The problems that have dogged the Lithuanian VSD in recent years are due in large measure to the department's involvement in politics. The Lithuanian special services played a significant part in the political discrediting of independent Lithuania's first prime minister, Kazimira Prunskiene, and had a hand in the impeachment of former President Rolandas Paksas in 2004. The VSD also undertook to make sure that Viktor Uspassky, the former economy minister and the ex-head of one of the largest political parties in Lithuania, made an early exit from the political scene. Some of these politicians had undoubtedly committed sins that justified their departure from their positions. However, the fact that the special services played what practically amounted to the key role in deciding their fate, as well as the fact that the special services either consciously or unconsciously – it doesn't really matter – made no secret of their participation, is probably not the most shining achievement of Lithuanian democracy.
The latest confirmation of the involvement of the Lithuanian special services in the country's politics is the story surrounding the mysterious death of one of the department's officers in Belarus and the arrest of a newspaper editor who had published a story about it. The story continued recently with the very public dismissal of two senior Lithuanian counterintelligence officers.
And that might not even be the highest price of the current scandal in Lithuania. If the investigations confirm that the VSB has been "toying" with politics, the next logical question will concern not only the effectiveness of reforms of the special services in independent Lithuania, but also the competence of the country's political system.
Gennady Sysoyev
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 26, 2006
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