Sergei Shoigu

IRINA BOROGAN is an investigative journalist and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru. She is a co-author, with Andrei Soldatov, of The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad . Leading this transformation is one of the most ambitious members of Putin’s inner circle: Sergei Shoigu. Although he has received relatively little attention in the West, Shoigu is a longtime Kremlin insider who became the defense minister in 2012. Moreover, in contrast to the FSB, which has suffered a series of setbacks and embarrassments in recent years, Shoigu’s military has enjoyed almost unbroken success going back to the capture of Crimea in 2014 and the intervention in Syria a year later. Anyone seeking to understand why Putin was willing to unleash Russian troops, tanks, and planes in a hugely risky invasion of Ukraine must look first at the transformation of the Russian military under his powerful defense chief. For nearly two centuries, the Russian military, despite its importance in Russian society, was rarely involved in political decision-making. Under Soviet rule, the streets in some districts of Moscow and in other big cities were dominated by men in green uniforms. Military service in Russia traditionally conferred a degree of social prestige. In the later decades of the Soviet era, the Kremlin promoted a mythology about the armed forces shaped around Russia’s heroic defeat of the Third Reich in World War II. Yet through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the military never enjoyed much of a voice in government. The last time the Russian military played an independent part in politics was probably in 1825, during the failed Decembrist revolt against the tsar in which several elite regiments tried to start a revolution. During the Soviet era, the government was wary of the danger of the military gaining too much power, and the KGB kept it under a watchful eye. A veteran member of Russia’s political elite, Shoigu has had a notably durable career among the highest echelons in Moscow. Arriving in the capital from Tuva, the region on the border with Mongolia, just in time for the breakup of the Soviet Union, he rapidly rose to prominence in the early 1990s as an all-around troubleshooter, becoming the minister of emergency situations, a cabinet-level position that he himself invented. For Putin, Shoigu’s successful record and large public profile made him a natural ally, and he quickly found him useful to the Kremlin beyond his emergency missions. In 1999, Putin picked Shoigu to be one of the leaders of his party, United Russia, giving him the opportunity to tour the country and build a political base. More surprising, however, was Putin’s decision in 2012 to make Shoigu the minister of defense. An engineer by training, Shoigu had never served in the army, and he did not have a reputation among the military hierarchy. Nor did his blunt leadership style endear him to the old guard. Consider Shoigu’s approach to uniforms. According to sources in the military, shortly after he became the defense minister, Shoigu was walking along the corridors of the general staff headquarters in Moscow on Arbat when he spotted a colonel in a gray suit. According to the old tradition, the officers of the general staff wore suits, not military uniforms, but the practice irritated Shoigu, who felt that officers should dress for battle, not for the office. He confronted the colonel and told him to report for duty the following week in a regiment in Siberia. Only good connections saved the colonel, but everybody got the point: Shoigu was serious about uniforms and the suits had to go. Nor did he stop there. In 2017, Shoigu changed the army dress uniform to make it resemble the Soviet uniform of 1945—known in the military as the winner’s uniform. The new design became his uniform of choice when he inspected military parades on Red Square; it also, not coincidentally, made him look like Georg