In Putin's Russia, it's the spies that are handing out the awards for the year's best movies.
BY SIMON SHUSTER | MARCH/APRIL 2013
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... s?page=0,0The Federal Security Service, the KGB successor known as the FSB, has been ascendant in Russian society ever since its former director, Vladimir Putin, became president in 2000. Since then, the agency has been obsessed with finding ways to bring Russian movies and TV under its patronage. As early as 2001, the agency began financing Russian whodunits and spy thrillers; in 2006, it handed out the first FSB Awards -- glass statuettes embossed with its sword-and-shield insignia -- to the filmmakers, actors, and novelists who had "most accurately" portrayed the warriors of the secret front. The galas had all the pomp of a Western awards ceremony, except they were held at the FSB's notorious headquarters on Lubyanka Square, inside the hulking mass of orange stone that many Russians still associate with the KGB's interrogation chambers. That, of course, meant no paparazzi, red carpets, or pesky independent journalists -- just a few hundred Russian cinematic insiders packed into an auditorium with the country's top spies. By the time the sixth one was held in January 2012, the agency's mouthpiece newspaper, Granitsa Rossii, proclaimed that the ceremony had become a "platform for creative dialogue" between the art world and the security services.