RUSSIA: Men from the military and secret service are now believed to fill a quarterof Russia's top political posts, writes Daniel McLaughlin inMoscow.
Russians say there is no such thing as a former member of the mafia or the KGB. Once a member, always a member.
President Vladimir Putin, who spied for the KGB in Dresden, has said the same, at least as regards the old Soviet security service.
Now, having seen his former comrades endure a tough decade since Moscow's empire unravelled, he is making sure they benefit from having one of their own in the Kremlin.
Ms Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist and member of Russia's Academy of Sciences, says men from the military and secret service now fill a quarter of the country's top political posts, twice as many as held power under Mr Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Having quietly ousted most of Mr Yeltsin's old guard, these former agents staged a spectacular show of strength last week, when Russia's richest man was seized by special agents on his private jet and charged with massive fraud and tax evasion.
The arrest of Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who resigned on Monday as head of the Yukos oil firm, sent Moscow's stock market into a nosedive and prompted the resignation of Mr Alexander Voloshin as presidential chief-of-staff, the last holdover from a time when Russian business and politics were hand-in-glove.
In sending shockwaves through Russia's coterie of billionaires, and purging the Kremlin of the Yeltsin clique that created those "oligarchs", Mr Putin's political team showed its true face, and sent out a hardline message ahead of next month's parliamentary elections and a presidential vote in March.
"A model of power has been adopted to rule the country," said Ms Irina Khakamada, joint leader of the Union of Right-Wing Forces party. "A united team has been formed in the Kremlin."
This team is dominated by what Russians call siloviki - 'men of power' - alongside allies that Mr Putin brought from his hometown of St Petersburg, where he was deputy mayor.
The siloviki are led by Mr Igor Sechin and Mr Viktor Ivanov, men hardly ever seen in public but who have the president's ear on all matters of importance, analysts say. Both are KGB veterans and now deputy chiefs of the presidential administration.
Mr Sechin (43) was officially a translator in Mozambique, a role the Russian press calls a front for secretive duties with the Soviet Tekhnoexport concern. He joined Mr Putin in Moscow when he was appointed prime minister in 1999.
Mr Ivanov (53), worked in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1987-8, and later with Mr Putin in St Petersburg, after the KGB had been renamed the FSB. He was the FSB's deputy director in 1999-2000 before joining the presidential administration.
Dozens of men with similar backgrounds have joined them in the Kremlin, key ministries and regional administrations.
And with every deputy minister or local governor comes a team of people he trusts and who understand what he expects - usually more security services veterans.
This snowball effect is filling Russia's corridors of power with men like Mr Putin, who watched a few well-connected businessmen make billions in murky privatisations overseen by Mr Yeltsin, while they drew paltry wages in security departments that lost prestige and power with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"They combine old security service values with experience of early capitalism in Russia," said Mr Dmitry Trenin, director of studies at Moscow's Carnegie Centre.
"They want a piece of the pie on one hand, to rule the roost, and want the state - meaning them - to tell the oligarchs what to do, and how big a tithe to pay to the Kremlin. They are trying to recreate a feudal system."
Analysts say there are several reasons why the siloviki singled out Mr Khodorkovsky for legal attack. By crushing him, they would sound a warning to tycoons not to fund opposition parties or harbour personal political ambitions, as Mr Khodorkovsky has.
They would also have a chance to claim some of the huge wealth locked up in Yukos, Russia's biggest oil firm, and prosecutors have already frozen more than 40 per cent of the company's shares.
The siloviki may also have succeeded in preventing their old arch enemy, the United States, from seizing one of Russia's finest industrial assets.
US oil majors ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco were in talks to buy a share of Yukos, talks frozen since Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest.
Mr Putin chose a St Petersburg lawyer, Dmitry Medvedev, as his new chief of staff this week. Most commentators say he and his deputy, Dmitry Kozak, would help counterbalance the creeping takeover of the Kremlin by KGB stalwarts, and let Mr Putin play his favoured role - as apparently impartial referee in a battle between cliques.
"Putin is himself a silovik, and his thinking is close to theirs," said Mr Trenin. "But the siloviki are not a united front, they have their own interests and will split among themselves," he said. "That may let Mr Putin be the arbiter, and once more pursue a balance of forces."