Britain’s Cabinet Office Briefing Room is one of the most sensitive sites in government, a place where ministers, spies and top officials gather to handle emergencies. In October 2005 it hosted its first foreign leader as a visitor. That leader was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It seems extraordinary now but this was a time when the UK government was still actively courting the Russian leader as a figure who could bring stability to Russia and predictability to its relations with the West.

Putin was being briefed by senior British police and intelligence officials about the 7 July terrorist bombings a few months earlier. Putin was engaged throughout the presentations, taking notes and asking questions, an official note of the meeting reveals. He took a particular interest in how security services should take on threats. To defeat terrorists who are willing to die for their cause, security officers must also be prepared to die, Putin told his British hosts. He then had a tense exchange with one of those speaking to him. Eliza Manningham-Buller was then head of MI5. ‘He was clearly hostile to me,’ she told me recently. ‘He said something like: “It’s the duty of people like you to stand between the terrorist and their victim. And you failed.”‘

Other than her recollection of the Russian leader’s ‘rather sinister looking eyes’, what is telling about the exchange is how it reveals an essential aspect of Putin’s character. Putin was speaking to Manningham-Buller as one security service operative to another. But Putin’s definition of an operative does not mirror that of an MI5 or FBI officer. Putin was and always will be something different – a Chekist.

It is only by understanding what a Chekist is and the phenomenon of Chekism that you can truly understand the Russian leader. As he came to Britain in 2005, the one man who did understand what that means and who could see Putin clearly had just died, his warning unheeded.

Vasili Mitrokhin was the most significant chronicler of Chekism in its century long history. And that was because he had himself been a Chekist operative who became the archivist of the KGB before becoming disillusioned and copying down its deepest secrets and fleeing to the West, with the help of MI6.

Six weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, on 20 December 1917, Lenin created the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Committee to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its initials as the Cheka. Its extraordinary nature lay in the belief that the threats to the revolution required a body which, for a limited period, would lie beyond the restraints of traditional morality or the law. The Cheka was more than a secret police force. It was, in the words of those who founded it, a revolutionary terrorist organisation. Lenin was open in using the word terror to describe what was needed. How can you have a revolution without firing squads, he asked. Repression and violence were required to preserve the revolution. The Cheka was his sword and shield. Its job was not to collect intelligence but to find and destroy enemies. ‘We stand for organised terror – this must be said very clearly.’ These were the words of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the man whom Lenin entrusted to be the Cheka’s first head.

In an insurance building in the centre of Moscow known as the Lubyanka, Dzerzhinsky made his new headquarters. A mythology sprang up around the man. He became known as ‘Iron Feliks’, a knight of the revolution who slept under his desk.

Out of the mix of myth and reality, fear and violence, a powerful force would emerge which would outlast not just Feliks himself but even the Soviet Union which he served. This was Chekism. What did it mean to be a Chekist? It meant understanding you were the last line of defence, privileged with the special task of doing whatever was necessary to defeat the many enemies that conspired to destroy the party or the motherland. From Tsarism to Bolshevism and beyond, this world view remained constant.

The Chekists’ belief that they were servants of a higher historical purpose meant traditional notions of justice could be set aside. ‘The Cheka must defend the Revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent,’ said Dzerzhinsky.

The year Vasili Mitrokhin had been born, the Cheka died. At least officially. On 6 February 1922, it was renamed the GPU, the start of a cycle as it then transformed into the OGPU, the NKVD, the MGB, then, most-famously, the KGB. The name changes were often to expunge the stain of the past. But the truth that Mitrokhin would learn was that, even though it was supposed to have been an ‘extra-ordinary’ short-lived body to stabilise the revolution, the Cheka never died. As if to make the point, through all the various changes in name that would come over the next century, those who served it would always refer to themselves as the same thing: Chekists.

Mitrokhin would become one himself – joining the elite department that spied abroad in the late 1940s. But after a series of foreign postings went wrong, he was deemed not suitable for operational work and banished to be an archivist in the bowels of the Lubyanka. What he saw there would change him. He began to read the files and see the way in which the rhetoric of Chekhism masked a truth that it was a repressive force, expending its energies spying on its own people and hunting down its enemies at home and abroad. Watching Soviet tanks and his own employer crush the Prague Spring in 1968 tipped him over the edge. He began to see his enemy as a beast that had to be fought and he saw his own opportunity to slay it. Truth was a weapon that his enemy feared and he had unprecedented access to the secrets of the KGB, especially once it put him in charge of moving files in the 1970s to a new location outside of the city centre. So he began copying the darkest secrets of the Chekists. Over 12 years he obsessively noted down anything he felt could do damage and began compiling volumes in his dacha, his own parallel archive. He called them ‘In the footsteps of filth’ – an illustration of  the intensity of his own feelings. Mitrokhin could see that beneath the Chekist façade, with all its talk of defending the motherland, lay a system that encouraged deceit, petty ambition, immorality and betrayal. Claims of patriotism and ideology were covers for power, ambition and corruption by KGB officers and their agents. ‘The Cheka touched everything, be it great or small,’ he would say.

Not everyone saw the darker side that Mitrokhin witnessed. The same year the tanks destroyed the hopes of reformers in Prague, a 16-year-old walked towards a place known as the Big House in Leningrad, the imposing local KGB headquarters. ‘I want to get a job with you,’ he told the official who came out to speak to him. His ambitions had been fired by what he had been watching on TV. A four-part series called The Sword and the Shield – named after the emblem of state security – had been broadcast on Russian TV that summer. It was part of the KGB’s strategy to bolster its standing. A cult of Feliks was created to convince people that Chekists were guardians of the Russian people. Newspapers, magazines, cinema screens and the TV were increasingly filled with heroic portrayals of Chekist spies, especially from the Second World War. In The Sword and the Shield, a brave Russian spy goes under deep cover to infiltrate the Nazis. There was an earnest message that people owed a debt to the ‘soldiers fighting on the invisible front’ who tirelessly worked to keep the motherland safe.

The series was a sensation. Everyone watched it, including the boy. He would still sing the theme tune, ‘Where does the Motherland Begin?’, as a party piece more than 40 years later (the answer was: ‘From the oath that you swear to her in your youthful heart’). The teenager had originally wanted to be an airline pilot but the series helped change his mind. ‘I wanted to be a spy,’ he would say. ‘What amazed me most of all was how one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.’ Did he understand what the Chekists had been capable or? ‘My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of patriotic Soviet education,’ he would say. The man at reception patiently explained that the KGB did not accept volunteers. The boy was too young and would need to complete military service or higher education first. Vladimir Putin was on his way to becoming a Chekist.

Putin’s early role in 1970s Leningrad was chasing dissidents before a posting abroad in East Germany as the Berlin Wall fell. He returned to a collapsing Soviet Union. The dissolution of control also opened the way for Mitrokhin to escape with his archive via Lithuania in an exfiltration organised by MI6. His escape was secret and he continued to labour on his archives in order to get it published so the world could understand Chekism.

In the early summer of 1999, as Mitrokhin was preparing to go public with his book, Russia’s acting Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin went to his old workplace, the Lubyanka. A former head of the FSB, Stepashin joked with his former colleagues about being a former Chekist. The current FSB Director was accompanying him on the visit and offered a friendly retort. ‘There is no such thing as a former Chekist,’ he said. A few days later that current FSB Director, Vladimir Putin, was appointed Russia’s Prime Minister by President Yeltsin.

The Chekists had made themselves useful enough to Yeltsin that he could not live without them. Who else would keep tabs on your many enemies? When the domestic security service was renamed as the FSB in 1995 its symbol combined the sword and the shield of the Soviet KGB with the double-headed eagle of the Tsarist era. Yeltsin that year also established 20 December as a professional holiday to celebrate workers in the Security Services – known to everyone as Chekists’ day. Stamps and medals made a comeback followed by prizes for the best depiction of the FSB in literature or TV and film. The chaos of the 1990s meant there was a growing nostalgia for the past. And Putin was a man who seemed to offer an end to those dark days of humiliation. He would restore order. He had risen partly as he appeared a blank slate who other powerful figures thought they could manipulate and who would protect their wealth and power. But he had also cleverly played on his image as a Chekist. Who better to protect the motherland and restore the power of the state than a selfless follower of saint Feliks?

Putin would refer to himself as a Chekist and made use of its mythology. The TV series Seventeen Moments in Spring had been one of the KGB’s great propaganda triumphs under Andropov. First broadcast in 1973 it reached 80 million viewers with its stories of a deep cover illegal during the Second World War. It was rebroadcast every year and remained embedded in the public consciousness. Putin carefully associated himself with its hero, a spy called Stierlitz. When he was interviewed about his past on TV as early as 1991, he recreated a scene in which Stierlitz drove his car, all with the theme tune of the series playing in the background. In a poll in early 1999 Russians were asked who they wanted most as their leader. The fictional Stierlitz came second, after Marshal Zhukov, the real wartime general. His final ascent came as a series of terrorist bombings of apartment blocks in 1991 were blamed on Chechens. Putin’s projected himself as a man who could deal with the threat posed by terrorism.

One of Putin’s first acts as prime minister would be to restore a memorial plaque outside the Lubyanka to Andropov, the only KGB man ever to lead the country. Soon after, Yeltsin would make Putin acting-president. In 2000, Putin became the first president to attend Chekist Day celebrations personally. His successor as head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, gave an interview to mark the day. He spoke of how Feliks would have been proud of those who now toiled in the Lubyanka. ‘They are people with a commitment to the idea of service. They are, if you like, our “new nobility”,’ he had said. The description was telling. The modern Chekist was part of an elite, like medieval knights who served the ruler but also protected the people and kept order, acting in a selfless manner, an echo of the founding myths around Feliks.

There was talk of something called spiritual security and the need to protect Russia’s soul from dark forces. Putin’s ambition was to restore Russia to its glory, to put a stop to its disintegration.

American presidents would say they had looked into his eyes and seen his soul. British prime ministers would say that he was a man they could do business with. They were all to be proved wrong. Only a few could understand what his rise really signified.

Mitrokhin, in his exile, was one of those. He understood the Chekist roots from which Putin had sprung and he understood what his rise meant. ‘The Cheka is still in good shape,’ Mitrokhin would say. The officers of the new organisations like the FSB and SVR, which grew out of the KGB, still called themselves Chekists, he noted, although they had become the vanguard of nationalism rather than communism. Now they were serving ‘the nouveaux riches, the bankers, capitalists and exploiters, waiting hand and foot on the mafiosi clan of oligarchs’. At this time, he thought the Chekists were effectively a tool of the new elite. What would become clearer in the coming years was that under Putin, the Chekists were determined to not be their servants but their masters. They would force the oligarchs and businessmen of the new nomenklatura to bend the knee so they could rule unrestrained in a way they had never managed under communism.

On 23 January 2004, Vasili Mitrokhin passed away. It meant he was never able to see Putin, the Chekist, come to London to meet British spies. It is not hard to imagine what he would have thought. Mitrokhin’s last book was published posthumously in 2008 thanks to the help of his son – its title was Chekisms: Tales of the Cheka. In 1991, the statues of Dzerzhinsky outside the Lubyanka was pulled down. In 2023, outside Russia’s new foreign intelligence headquarters where Mitrokhin had also worked, a new statue to the founder of Chekism was erected.