Remember Mikhail Fradkov? The quietly loyal and possibly inept former prime minister who was shuffled aside in a startling move last year by Putin to appoint Victor Zubkov – throwing everybody “off the trail” to protect his preferred successor (acting within a Russian tradition, as it were…). His principle advantage was that he is not a silovik and is not a member of any of the clans, which Lilia Shevtsova says was the reason he was nominated so quickly as premier. We reported a while back on his interesting new post with the Foreign Intelligence Service – essentially making him Russia’s spy czar. Now people are starting to worry about Fradkov’s position – wondering why on earth someone with no security background, but rather economic and business experience, would be made head of foreign intelligence (see FT article after the cut). As Marshall Goldman pointed out in his podcast with Bloomberg the other day, Russia is increasingly under the thumb of former spies with immense personal business ownership – something unprecedented in world history. It therefore would not seem to be a stretch that the very nature of spying undergo a change in Russia – shifting from a focus on security and defense toward industry and corporation. Two observations: this has got to be the first time that someone actually would prefer a silovik to run foreign intelligence, and it seems that the famous Viktor Cherkesov’s prophecy is coming true: “We must not allow warriors to turn into traders.”