There are no former CIA agents

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Many of you have probably heard that refrain before. To which I am now obliged to add: there are no former KGB agents. I have been saying for years that Putin showed enormous personal growth during his years in power, and those who harped on his career in the KGB were failing to see the changes in the man. Now, regrettably, I see that he is reverting to whence he came.

I say this because day by day it is clear that a crackdown on Russian society is proceeding under the false explanation that it is necessary to prevent drone strikes, to stymie assassination attempts by Ukrainians, and so forth. To that I say: nonsense. These measures are useless. The only way to ensure the safety of Russia and its citizens today is to decapitate the Zelensky regime by missile and bomb strikes on Kiev, on Lvov and other key cities in Ukraine: Everything else is make-believe.

Generally on these pages we talk geopolitics. Today I am talking politics, which is about who holds power. And today it is the successor to the KGB, the FSB, that daily acquires more power to monitor and control civil society. If you are not a Putin worshipper, watch out! The same vile oppression that Americans experienced after 7/11 under the Patriot Act is playing out here in Russia.

A day ago I called attention to the vicious words of journalist and talk show host Vladimir Solovyov when he denounced all those Russians who want to see the war ended very soon, calling them defeatists and agents of the enemy. Another straw in the wind was the announcement a couple of days ago that the internet platform that gives Russians direct interface with the government, Gos Uslugi, announced that it will be accepting and implementing requests from citizens that phone calls to them from abroad not be put through. The West may be basking in Russophobia. But the Russian authorities are now encouraging xenophobia at home..

I remain cut off from Substack, which appears to be blacklisted in Russia presently. And today I was cut off from an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on ‘Judging Freedom’ because the internet was dead – both mobile internet and cable internet – in the entire region of St Petersburg. I am told by friends and acquaintances that this occurs fairly frequently nowadays. This runs entirely counter to the notion of a country open to the world that Putin has claimed time and again.

*****

Yesterday I reported that the nearest Economy Class supermarket to me has reduced their product assortment and sacrificed quality to maintain prices compared to what I saw on my last visit in November 2025. Today’s visit to the upper middle class Perekryostok supermarket in my neighborhood showed a different picture. The product range has even grown since my last visit and quality is excellent. To be sure, on many items prices are approaching West European levels. Investment in technology is impressive, none more so than the scales that print price labels for fruits and vegetables that you choose to buy. The scales visualize the broccoli or pears that you put on them to weigh and ask you to confirm that it is indeed broccoli or pears. We have nothing comparable in Belgium or elsewhere in the countries of the EU that I visit.

On the other hand, that Perekryostok supermarket is short on labor. In their very large store, there was only one cashier on duty and she also had to look after parcels that had been preordered by customers and to assist the customers who were being directed to self service checkout machines but could not complete their purchases unaided. Simply, there are not enough workers to go around. This is reconfirmed by the sign I saw today on the side of a Yandex taxi – recruiting drivers with the promise of earnings of 2,000 euros a month. That figure is several times what it used to be before the Ukraine war and it comes not from some newfound generosity on the part of management.

I insist that apart from the several hundred thousand workers who left the private sector for the highly paid 6 months of service in the war zone, the labor shortage is also due to the vastly bloated bureaucracy that employs so many people doing what no one should be doing at all. During their 9 to 5 days, they are busy dreaming up new regulations and constraints on civil society. As I have said before, Russia badly needs its own Elon Musk to set things right.

Copyright: Gilbert Doctorow 2026

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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10 thoughts on “There are no former CIA agents”

  1. Dr. Doctorow, Musk’s DOGE was a sham and a fraud. It was cover for deconstructing the parts of the government that were investigating or regulating Musk’s businesses. When they had been neutered, Musk left, having ended all those investigations, and leaving incompetence and vandalism in his wake. Look at how many fired people had to be rehired! It was all a distraction, but it did expose the lack of fraud and waste in parts of the government. Now, the Pentagon…I’d love to see an army of forensic accountants let loose on the Pentagon.

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    1. I am speaking of a concept of DOGE, not its actual execution when it may well have been abused to serve the personal interests of Musk. As I have written in past visits to Russia over the question of registration of the arrival of a foreigner staying in private residences, the registration is handled by very well educated clerks, many with law or engineering degrees, which are useful since the paperwork is very complicated and is changed every fez months by those legions of bureaucrats in Moscow who have nothing better to do with their time. They all should be dumped onto the street to find normal jobs where they can create wealth, not destroy it.

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  2. Putin has no reason to get rid of Zelensky. The EU is forced to spend billions keeping him alive and in power. The EU would be delighted if Putin did the dirty work for them, IMO. Time is on Putin’s side. Furthermore the goals of the SMO are the same as when it started. Putin has not given an inch. He is watching as the AfD rises and all the feckless leaders of the EU slowly wilt. Things are not easy for sure but much of the reason has to do with how to keep things from spinning out of control. Europe has nothing to offer Russia other than Russiaphobia, which finds its source in decades of malicious propaganda.

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    1. I strongly disagree. Time is no longer on Putin’s side. The window of opportunity that he enjoyed in 2022 when he initiated the SMO is closing now that Europe is throwing hundreds of billions of euros into rearmament for a direct war with Russia in 2029. He must strike now, while Europe is still relatively defenseless.

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  3. If North Korea had not kept tight control of the populace and the country, they would not be here today to help Russia in its struggle for survival against the entire west. what needs to be done must be done in Russia, better times are ahead.

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    1. You are discussing the issue as seen from Outer Space. Here on planet Earth things look very different: Russia last was like North Korea under Joseph Stalin thanks to the Great Terror of 1937 and to the awful wartime conditions of WWII. All that ended in 1954 with Stalin’s death, and gradually at first under Khrushchev, more quickly under Gorbachev and Yeltsin; then at breakneck speed under Putin, Russians became a free people; free to lead their lives as they chose. Now it is speeding in reverse. But I ask you whether you are ready to become a slave for the sake of the Motherland and especially when officially your country is at peace, not at war?

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      1. Joseph Stalin inherited a Russia that was 100 years behind the West, they were still using wooden ploughs, On the death of Joseph Stalin Russia was a nuclear superpower and stood in the way of full spectrum subjugation of the planet by the colonizing West, without Stalin Mao would have failed and the full human intellectual potential of both China and Russia would have been syphoned off by the West.

        Russians would still be using wooden ploughs and the Chinese pulling rickshaws,

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      2. You are repeating Communist propaganda! There was serious industrialization in Russia in the 1890s when Sergei Witte was Finance Minister with major investments in infrastructure, the most notable being the Trans Siberian railway which opened up the eastern territories of the empire. Following defeat in the war with Japan Russia undertook dramatic political and economic reforms under prime minister Stolypin who was as important in this sphere as . Russia then had nearly universal elementary education and literacy. The Russian economy was destroyed in the Civil War which followed WWI so in that sense only there was a lot for Stalin to do to put the countryback on its feet. Shame on you for disseminating the views of Stalin and Co. on what they inherited.

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  4. I’m sorry that things are tightening up in Russia this year, and also that you don’t have internet access much of the time, and are specifically prevented from accessing Substack. I habitually check this site, which I keep as a tab since before you had a Substack.

    I must suspect that there is a lot of military and spy agency hacjing going on everywhere these days, with AI being so good at it. I see reports that AI is being used to hack into databases for various forms of robbery. It is the one application of AI that really holds promise to turn profits, for somebody… ;-/

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