Back in 2016, when Russiagate was rearing its head and before it was made into an almost religious movement that obscured very real misdeeds and disturbing trends, my friend Alex Hazanov and I wrote something for the Washington Post. Back then, I was a very cloistered grad student and didn't write much outside of classes and papers; when I did, it was about Russia. I think this was my first or second piece of public-facing writing. In it, Alex – who did significant work on the internal culture of the KGB – and I argued that the election hack, whatever its American meaning, showed that something had changed in Russian politics. Previously, such blatant interference in American domestic politics would have been unthinkable. Late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian diplomacy was conservative and professional. It was well understood that American domestic politics was off-limits, and stability was the overarching goal.

We argued that something had changed. The previous old guard of Russian foreign policy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, to some extent, the SVR – Russia's external intelligence service – was no longer in control. It was the spooks who were now in charge. Alex and I probably should have clarified what we meant here. The specific ex-KGB siloviks running Russian policy were not the refined, worldly aristocracy of the "first directorate" which spied on the West and later turned into the SVR. They were domestic counterintelligence people and agents who worked in the Eastern Bloc, like Putin himself.