Putin’s Secret Police Prevent 2 Million From Leaving Russia The Kremlin is making it harder and harder for millions of Russians to travel to other countries—especially employees of its security and intelligence agencies.
Anna Nemtsova
08.01.18 5:04 AM ET
MOSCOW — Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, is preventing millions of Russians from going abroad. Its own officers have been told “nevyezdnye” (no foreign travel), and earlier this year it announced stricter border controls for those who want to leave the country, citing the “changed geopolitical situation.”
Several million Russians currently are banned, specifically, from travel to the United States, and more than two million cannot leave the country at all. The number of Russian citizens on so-called “stop lists” and state employees obliged to stay put after signing secrecy agreements ia growing rapidly. So is concern among Russian elite that a new Iron Curtain, reminiscent of travel restrictions during Soviet times, has begun to descend.
“It’s a sign of increasingly extreme paranoia.”
— Former KGB officer Gennady Gudkov
Gennady Gudkov, a former officer with the Soviet KGB, predecessor of Russia’s FSB, blames a combination of wildly overblown security concerns and worries about the massive, ongoing brain drain. That the Kremlin would ban travel for millions of personnel from the army, the police, and anyone who might have access to secret information “is a sign of increasingly extreme paranoia,” Gudkov told The Daily Beast on Monday.
“I realize that a huge number of countries want to recruit Russian specialists today, but I am sure that nobody wants to recruit some little police sergeant or some worker, like one of my relatives, who is working at an aviation enterprise producing small insignificant parts. He recently was banned from traveling.”
Gudkov spent his youth behind the post-war Iron Curtain, which Communist leaders created to block citizens of Soviet republics and the USSR’s satellite states from any direct contact with the West. Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed the Iron Curtain, Gudkov noted, “to change the nature of international relations, to end the ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.” But three decades later the Kremlin is reconstructing this new version of the Iron Curtain while its agents working all over Europe speak about ideological confrontations with the West.
In 1987 the KGB assigned the then 31-year-old sergeant-major Gudkov to collect intelligence in the United States. Gudkov spent more than two months in Washington D.C., New York, Florida and other American states collecting information about American engineering and cultural progress.
“I performed so well, that they even offered me [a promotion] when I got back to Moscow,” Gudkov said. “But by then, I already felt uncertain about the regime, the corrupt party that dragged my country down the hill.”
In April, the FSB presented to President Vladimir Putin new regulations, describing threats for Russia’s national interests, sovereignty, natural resources. Since the beginning of the conflict with Ukraine in 2014, authorities have banned more than three million state employees from traveling to the United States and other NATO countries.
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Poster Comment:
Back to the drawing board.