A Silovik (силови́к, plural: siloviks or siloviki, силовики́, from a Russian word for force) 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.

Sometimes the term is translated as "strongman". The drawback of this translation is lost background of these persons, mentioned above.

Opinions about siloviks in Russia are polarized.

Some think siloviks have Russia by the throat and threaten their 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 popular in modern Russia is that siloviks are an adequate counter-weight to the Russian oligarchs' 'individual rights and freedoms' to loot Russia and subvert her government. Adherents of this view contrast siloviks to American law-enforcement figures like J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI (and some believe, the country) for nearly half of the 20th century.

External links and references

• One article on the Siloviki
• William Safire on the Siloviki