YELTSIN SACKS DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE.

President Yeltsin has dismissed Col. Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, deputy director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB) and head of the FSB’s Moscow and Moscow Region directorate. Yeltsin’s decree said Trofimov was sacked for "gross violations and dereliction of duty." (Interfax, February 20) No further explanation was given. The Moscow FSB’s press officer said that, although the security organs are supposed to know everything, he was as much in the dark as anyone else.

Russia’s Independent TV said no tears would be shed for the "odious" Trofimov by the surviving members Russia’s dissident movement. In the Soviet period, Trofimov worked for the KGB’s fifth directorate and hounded, among others, human rights activist Sergei Kovalev. But NTV said Trofimov’s ouster was probably connected not with his past activities but with reports that, since his January 1995 appointment as head of counterintelligence for the city of Moscow and Moscow oblast, Trofimov had been collecting compromising information about the financial dealings of presidential aide Anatoly Chubais and Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. (NTV, February 20)

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