Is Putin’s security service under attack?

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’.