Silovik

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A Silovik (силови́к, plural: siloviks or siloviki, силовики́, from a Russian word for power) is a Russian politician from the old security or military services, often the KGB and military officers or other security services who came into power in the teams of Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.

The term derives from the fact that these people come from "power ministries", which under Yeltsin and Putin formed a de facto higher level inner cabinet. Sometimes the term is translated as "strongman". The drawback of this translation is that it obscures the particular career background of these persons, as described above.

While realists, the siloviki tend to favor a conservative "Great Russian" nationalism; an autocratic, Slavophilic, tradition that stretches back to the reign of Tsar Alexander III. However, the siloviki do not go to the ideological extremes of nationalist groups such as Pamyat, the so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky or the Tsarist-era Black Hundreds.

Opinions concerning siloviki in Russia are polarized. Some argue that the siloviki have Russia by the throat and threaten the 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 in Russia is that the siloviki are an appropriate counterweight to the Russian oligarchs, who might otherwise loot Russia and subvert its government. Adherents of this view compare siloviks to American law-enforcement figures like J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI (and had a disproportionately influential standing in US politics) for nearly half of the 20th century.

The above refers to the meaning of the word common in Western media. In Russian, it usually means officials in police, army or special services, regardless of their political stance. Political connotations do exist in some contexts, but are very rare.