Few people in Rostov-on-Don will weep over the news that a local FSB building in the city caught fire yesterday. Just the mention of the acronym for the Security Services (formerly KGB) was, when I lived there, enough to still and silence a room.
When a girl in one of my classes announced rather proudly that her boyfriend worked for the service, there was a ripple of discomfort in the room and, subsequently, fellow students once expansive got notably more guarded. At a local pipe club I attended, one of the members worked for them too, a well-built man with brushed back hair, a Stalin moustache, and a set – unlike the rest of us – of the most expensive Dunhill pipes (a decent income is just one of the job’s advantages). Everyone at the club deferred to him. Disagreeing with him one day about an out-of-favour Russian novelist, I got eyeballed with panic by a fellow guest, who mouthed at me, when the man turned away, that I should ‘just keep my mouth shut’.
Small wonder then that the service consider themselves a quasi-aristocracy in Russia 2023, or that the novelist Vladimir Sorokin viewed them in his Day of the Oprichnik as modern-day, Mercedes-driving descendants of Ivan the Terrible’s brutal cohorts. Yet, as shown by yesterday’s fire – which has thus far produced at least three fatalities – they are not infallible.
It’s been claimed by Vassily Golubev, Rostov’s governor, that the explosion and fire were accidents, the result of a short-circuit igniting fuel tanks on the property. Despite Ukrainian Presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak’s tweet that the fire was a ‘manifestation of panic’ in Russia, and that Ukraine, though uninvolved, was ‘watching with pleasure’, this seems just about plausible and certainly not out of tune with Rostov’s past.
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