Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

More information emerged over the weeks following the tragedy. On the one hand, it was satisfying to be able to celebrate the heroism of men like the driver and his assistant, whose quick-thinking and cool nerves as they struggled to control their devastated train ensured that more lives were not lost. On the other, I was disgusted to watch rumours spread that sought to pin the blame for elements of the tragedy on either Russian Railways or the companies that built our equipment. As soon as news of the accident emerged, allegations were made on the Internet that Russian Railways was involved in some kind of conspiracy. They claimed that there had been no terrorist attack; we had just failed in our maintenance. It was suggested that the carriages were defective, or that the seats had not been attached to the floor with sufficient care. There was no truth in either smear, but nevertheless the bad feelings they created still linger; the stains caused by lies are hard to wash away. I did not know it then, but this represented the beginning of a campaign of information warfare against Russian Railways, and me personally, that continues to be waged to this day.

In time we learned that the derailment was in all likelihood the handiwork of fanatics operating on the orders of the separatist Chechen leader Dokka Umarov, an Islamist who had not long before proclaimed himself Emir of the entire North Caucasus region. The Nevsky Express was yet another in the long sequence of atrocities inflicted on the Russian people by terrorists with a range of agendas, dating back to the chaos of the Yeltsin era. Since well before 9/11, we have struggled with this threat, often fighting men who had been armed and funded by the very Western powers who would be sent into panic by the assault on New York’s Twin Towers. Beslan, Nord-Ost, the Domodedovo airport bombing, the repeated bombings of the Moscow Metro, and several others, each marked a devastating page in Russia’s recent history. [20] The Russian people have, generally speaking at least, supported their government’s engagement in Syria because they believe it will make them safer (it is not for them a question, as is sometimes suggested, of Russia flexing its muscles on the world stage once more). The idea of Russian citizens, hardened by experience on Syria’s battlefields, returning to wreak havoc in the cities of their own country, fills them, quite understandably, with fear, and they find it difficult to comprehend why Western nations have left the job of policing this failed state to Putin’s administration.

The tragedy of the Nevsky Express hurt me deeply. I found that everything changes once you have been confronted with the sight of soil stained with blood, and blanket-shrouded corpses lined up in a tidy row. As soon as I was back in Moscow, I introduced to the President and the government a whole raft of new security measures designed to do as much as possible to prevent a tragedy like that from occurring again. CCTV cameras were installed along the length of the St Petersburg to Moscow line, which was to be provided with extra protection by armed guards employed by the Ministry of Transport, and we also built metal detectors into the entrance of each of the capital’s stations (a task that the Prime Minister had decreed we should complete in four days, which somehow we managed).

There is, however, much in the world we live in now that is so frightening to me, I believe that no amount of security gates and armed guards would be enough to keep us safe. In fact, I feel more pessimistic about the world now than I did thirty years ago, when the prospect of a nuclear war felt like a live threat.

In the past decade, science and technology have penetrated our lives in a completely unprecedented, and likely irrevocable, manner. Sometimes this is a wholly good thing, sometimes wholly bad, but usually the newly developed technology contains within it the capacity for both. For instance, while nuclear power is a source of valuable energy, a nuclear bomb – as Nagasaki and Hiroshima proved – has a devastating destructive capacity. A gun is a lump of metal that is only as dangerous as the man holding it, but when one is familiar with the evil of which others are capable, this knowledge does little to reassure.

There is a story told about how, in ancient Rome, a man approached the emperor and told him that he had invented a devastating new weapon that could give his troops an unbelievable advantage. It was very simple, just a long cylinder studded with huge nails that, if suspended between two horses, could cause horrendous casualties. But rather than reward the man, the emperor ordered that he should be immediately arrested and executed before he had the chance to share his idea with anyone else. When the emperor’s shocked adviser asked him why he had passed up the opportunity to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, the emperor replied that he could not countenance employing something so inhuman.

I think of this when I read in the press that a new cold war has begun between Russia and the West, even though I am not sure that it ever really came to an end. President George H. W. Bush of the United States may have declared that the conflict had been won by the capitalist powers, but the struggle continued in the shadows. It could be said that a cold-war mentality persists to this day in Russia and the USA alike because the security services, diplomatic corps and civil services of both nations are still staffed by many people who lived through it. While it is easy (sometimes, at least) to reform institutions, it is far harder to reorient people’s minds. Certainly it would be naïve to think that in our divided world any country with substantial resources would ever stop its intelligence work, no matter how loyalties are realigned.

The development of technology has only accelerated this aggressive activity, and its potential reach and potency far exceeds anything I ever encountered during my career in the KGB. As a former intelligence officer, I would of course like to be confident that Russia could develop and employ the tools needed to fight back against the machinations of hostile powers, but as a civilian I’m extremely concerned about the complete erosion of privacy that the escalation of this cyber war (and what else could you call it?) would entail – that every email, every telephone call, every text message will be monitored, that information harvested from my conversations is relentlessly piling up somewhere, until such a time as someone deploys it to harm me or my family.

There always used to be a quid pro quo. In both the West and the Soviet Union, citizens exchanged certain rights in return for security. That was the (sometimes unspoken) deal that underpinned the preservation of our respective ways of life. But there was nothing then that could ever compare to the monumental power that now resides in the hands of those who are supposed to be protecting us. The kind of monitoring performed by the CIA and the KGB during the cold war now feels completely obsolete, even innocent; and we are moving towards a disturbing paradox: the more sophisticated the country, the less free the individual. It is a new kind of imperialism in which governments as well as criminals can colonise your private life.

We can now be menaced as we sit in our own homes by anonymous figures we will never even see. The wife of my younger son recently received a letter from a body describing themselves as ‘The Association of Hackers’. Its authors pretended that they had somehow got hold of her tax records, alleged that they showed she was guilty of fraud and said that if she would prefer that they didn’t publicise this information, then she’d better pay up. It was, of course, complete bullshit. My daughter-in-law, who was unsurprisingly somewhat rattled by this communication, went to see an IT specialist. She told him that she was planning to take the matter to the police. His reply shocked her: