Siloviki

The Siloviki (силовики́, the word is plural and rooted in a Russian term for power) are Russian men from the old security or military services, often the KGB and military officers or other security services who rode into power on the coattails of Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.

Some think they have Russia by the throat and threaten their fragile democracy; their power is immense, and they tend to favor a statist ideology at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.

Another point of view, particularly popular in modern Russia, is that siloviki is an adequate counter-weight to the Russian oligarchs' 'individual rights and freedoms' to loot Russia and subvert her government. Adherents of this view contrast siloviks to American law-enforcement figures like J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI (and some believe, the country) for nearly half of the 20th century.

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