Mark Galeotti (born October 1965) is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, [1] a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, [2] and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy. [3]
Born in Surrey, England, [4] Galeotti was educated at Tiffin School (grammar academy) in Kingston upon Thames and Robinson College, Cambridge, where he studied history. He then switched to the London School of Economics and completed his doctorate, supervised by Dominic Lieven, on the impact of the Afghan war on the USSR. [5]
He was a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague [6] and head of its Centre for European Security. [7] He remains a senior non-resident fellow with the IIR. Before moving to Prague, he was clinical professor of global affairs at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. [8] [9] Before moving to NYU, he was head of the history department at Keele University, [10] visiting professor of public security at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers–Newark (2005-6) and senior research fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1996–97). He has also been a visiting professor at MGIMO (Moscow) and Charles University (Prague). For the academic year 2018–19 he was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute.[ citation needed ]
On 14 June 2022, Galeotti was among 29 people from the United Kingdom banned by the Russian government from travelling to Russia. [11]
Between 1991 and 2006, he wrote a monthly column on Russian and post-Soviet security issues for Jane's Intelligence Review (formerly Jane’s Soviet Intelligence Review). He continues to write for various Jane's publications, as well as Oxford Analytica, for which he covers Russian security, transnational crime and terrorism issues. In July 2011, he started writing a regular column, Siloviks & Scoundrels, for the Russian newspaper The Moscow News, until the newspaper's closure in 2014. [12] Since the start of the Ukraine War he has written regularly for The Spectator and was sanctioned by Russia largely on the basis of these publications.[ citation needed ]
He writes on his own blog, In Moscow's Shadows as well as guest writing for Raam op Rusland, EUROPP, oD:Russia, the International Policy Digest, and other blogs. He also contributes articles to The Moscow Times and War on the Rocks and is a contributing editor to Business New Europe .
He is the Founding Editor of the journal Global Crime. [13] He is also a member of the international advisory board of the Mob Museum.
He has also worked on several Glorantha-related books and fanzines. [14] and wrote the Hero Quest-engined standalone RPG Mythic Russia. [15] He is also the author of 1991's Cyberpunk 2020 RPG expansion guidebook Eurosource.
The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet foreign policy that proclaimed that any threat to "socialist rule" in any state of the Soviet Bloc in Central and Eastern Europe was a threat to all of them, and therefore, it justified the intervention of fellow socialist states. It was proclaimed in order to justify the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia earlier in 1968, with the overthrow of the reformist government there. The references to "socialism" meant control by the communist parties which were loyal to the Kremlin. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated the doctrine in the late 1980s, as the Kremlin accepted the peaceful overthrow of Soviet rule in all its satellite countries in Eastern Europe.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is the president of Russia. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012. He is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin.
The Russian mafia, otherwise referred to as Bratva, is a collective of various organized crime related elements originating in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Any of the mafia's groups may be referred to as an "Organized Criminal Group" (OPG). This is sometimes modified to include a specific name, such as the Orekhovskaya OPG. The "P" in the initialism comes from the Russian word for criminal: prestupnaya. Sometimes, the Russian word is dropped in favour of a full translation, and OCG is used instead of OPG.
In the Russian political lexicon, a silovik is a person who works for any state organisation that is authorised to use force against citizens or others. Examples are the Russian Armed Forces, the Russian national police, Russian national drug control, Russian immigration control (GUVM), the Ministry of Justice, the Federal Security Service (FSB), former KGB personnel, GRU, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Federal Protective Service (FSO). This word is also used for a politician who came into politics from these organisations.
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev is a Russian politician, security officer and former intelligence officer who has served as the secretary of the Security Council of Russia since 2008. He previously served as the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1999 to 2008. Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin's inner circle, Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia's national security affairs. He played a key role in the decisions to seize and then annex Crimea in 2014 and to invade Ukraine in 2022. He is considered as very hawkish towards the West and the United States. Patrushev is seen by some observers as one of the likeliest candidates for succeeding Putin.
The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, known simply as Ichkeria, and also known as Chechnya, was a de facto state that controlled most of the former Checheno-Ingush ASSR.
Chekism is a term that relates to the situation in the Soviet Union where the secret police strongly controlled all spheres of society. It is also used to point out similar circumstances in post-Soviet intelligence states such as modern Russia. The term can refer to the system of rule itself, and to the underlying ideology that promotes and popularizes political police violence and arbitrariness against real and imagined enemies of the state.
Viktor Petrovich Ivanov is a Russian politician and businessman, former KGB officer, who served in the KGB Directorate of Leningrad and its successors in 1977–1994. He was the director of The Federal Narcotics Service of Russia from 2008 until 2016.
Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov is a Russian intelligence officer who has served as the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) since 2008. He is one of the most powerful members of the silovik faction of president Vladimir Putin's inner circle. A Hero of the Russian Federation since 2019, he also holds the rank of General of the Army, the second highest grade in use in the Russian military. According to some experts, it's likely Bortnikov played a key role in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine in 2022.
Sergei Mikhailovich Smirnov is a retired Russian intelligence officer whose career ended with a seventeen-year stint as First Deputy Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB). He was made a General of the Army in 2006.
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host.
Crime in Russia refers to the multivalent issues of organized crime, extensive political and police corruption, and all aspects of criminality at play in Russia. Violent crime in Siberia is much more apparent than in Western Russia.
The Internal Troops of the Ministry for Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation was a paramilitary force of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia from 1991 to 2016.
The United States of America has conducted espionage against the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation.
The Sarandoy or Tsarandoi were a militarized gendarmerie force of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1980s, during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Igor Dmitrievich Sergun was Director of GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, from 2011 until his death in January 2016. He was promoted to colonel general on 21 February 2015.
Andreas Umland is a German political scientist studying contemporary Russian and Ukrainian history as well as regime transitions. He has published on the post-Soviet extreme right, municipal decentralization, European fascism, post-communist higher education, East European geopolitics, Ukrainian and Russian nationalism, the Donbas and Crimea conflicts, as well as the neighborhood and enlargement policies of the European Union. He is a Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv as well as a research fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs in Stockholm. He lives in Kyiv, and teaches as an Associate Professor of Politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2005–2014, he was involved in the creation of a Master's program in German and European Studies administered jointly by the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Jena University.
Angela E. Stent is a British-born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is professor emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.
The Night Wolves or Night Wolves Motorcycle Club is a Russian motorcycle club that was founded around the Moscow area in 1989. It holds an international status with at least 45 chapters world-wide.
Putinism is the social, political, and economic system of Russia formed during the political leadership of Vladimir Putin. It is characterized by the concentration of political and financial powers in the hands of "siloviks", current and former "people with shoulder marks", coming from a total of 22 governmental enforcement agencies, the majority of them being the Federal Security Service (FSB), Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Armed Forces of Russia, and National Guard of Russia. According to Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th."
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