A ‘Dark Lord’ Falls in Russia’s Growing Power Struggle

A veteran law enforcement official, the head of the regional branch of Russia’s version of the F.B.I., acquired such a fearsome reputation in the southern Russian city formerly known as Stalingrad that when he walked into a local restaurant last summer, the other customers got up and left.
“Within a few minutes, the place was empty,” said Vyacheslav Cherepakhin, a local entrepreneur and journalist. “Everyone in the city was afraid of him.”
Last month, however, the official, Mikhail K. Muzraev, was forced from his car at gunpoint near his home in the city now called Volgograd by a team of heavily armed men sent from Moscow by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor agency to the K.G.B. He was flown to Moscow and jailed the same day.

Mr. Muzraev’s arrest roiled an uneasy balance at the heart of President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule among the so-called siloviki — a vast network of security, intelligence and military officials whose power, resources and clan rivalries have grown steadily at a time when Russia is starting to ask what will happen when the president’s ostensibly final term runs out in 2024.

Since Mr. Putin came to power nearly 20 years ago, rival agencies like the F.S.B. and Mr. Muzraev’s organization, the Investigative Committee, have cooperated in persecuting the Kremlin’s critics. They are now increasingly at odds amid mostly hidden jockeying to influence a protracted and possibly unruly succession struggle. With the arrest of Mr. Muzraev, however, the infighting burst into the open.
Over 10 years as a senior prosecutor and then head of Volgograd’s Investigative Committee, Mr. Muzraev jailed two mayors and the chiefs of the regional police, the traffic police, the anti-narcotics squad and the emergency services, as well as a host of prominent businessmen in the Volga River city.
In interviews, several of those blamed Mr. Muzraev for destroying their lives with what they said were bogus criminal charges, and rejoiced at his unexpected downfall. But even they don’t believe the story put forward by the F.S.B. that their nemesis was involved in an assassination attempt against the regional governor, Andrei Bocharov, a former paratroop commander appointed by Mr. Putin to rule Volgograd in 2014.