On Nov. 15, the Russian Interior Ministry and Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, announced three new senior appointments. Oleg Safonov was named a deputy head of the ministry. Yevgeny Shkolov became head of its economic security department. And Valery Golubev was appointed a deputy chief executive at Gazprom.
All three men had something important in common beyond the timing of their promotions: backgrounds as KGB officers and experience working directly with President Vladimir Putin when he was a KGB operative himself in Germany or later, when he was a rising presence in the local government of St. Petersburg, his home town.
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"According to persistent reports, the FSB is responsible for running the computerized system that processes and reports elections results," wrote Mikhail Tsypkin, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, in the July issue of the Journal of Democracy. Control of the computerized election system had been a FAPSI function.
