Alexei Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation he founded have given a great deal of their energy, and Alexei himself - and his life - to the fight against corruption in Russia. Apparently, they believed that this was the lever that could be used to turn the mood of the Russians towards the transformation of the country and ultimately achieve a better future for it.
But this is a mistake. And in today’s Russia, the fight against corruption means only the destruction of its economy, as many of its citizens realize, which is why they do not engage in active anti-corruption actions.
This conclusion is tragic, but it follows from the understanding that for the last 30 years in Russia corruption has been the basis of the market economy and the main ideology of the ruling elite. And the ideology is quite shared - as far as one can judge from the course of life in the country - by the majority of its and ordinary citizens.
Indeed, the main idea of the market economy is simple - limited goods should go to those who are ready to pay the highest price for them. Few people like this principle of the market in itself, but mankind has not invented anything better.
So in Russia the logic of the market economy is quite well observed, it’s just that some of the usual benefits go to those who were able to pay the highest price in the store. And part of it goes to those who were able to pay a higher price in the form of a bribe (kickback) to a government official.
It was not supposed to be like this and no one consciously designed such a mechanism when 33 years ago in Russia began building a market-type economy instead of a planned command economy.
But this model quickly emerged on its own, apparently in the first months of 1992 (I am afraid that Viktor Shenderovich’s words that the new Russian government was able to work without bribes for only a month and a half are not far from the truth - although some members of that government proved immune to corruption). And it turned out to be so adequate to the country and the people that it became ubiquitous and has been working quite successfully to this day.
Let us recognize, bitter as it may be, the obvious historical fact that in 1991 Russia (as a state and a people) was given a unique chance to build a completely new model of life and economy in peace, without external occupation and with the willingness to help from yesterday’s Cold War adversaries (and then also with large revenues from oil and gas exports). And what have the Russians built by realizing this chance?
Painfully familiar - a new edition of the Russian Empire as a country of total corruption, combining the staggering wealth of the ruling elite with the extreme poverty of the majority of the population, where private business exists to feed bribes to government officials and serve their needs, where human rights and freedoms (if they are not part of the ruling elite) mean nothing and are not protected in any way, where the power of the autocrat is not limited in any way. And - the cherry on the cake - again a country that tries to impose its will on the surrounding peoples up to their enslavement.
Why this happened is an interesting question. Some people answer it with one phrase: “Because Russians are like that and it is the most natural form of existence of a nation-state for them”. But I believe this is an oversimplification - the topic deserves at least a large monograph.
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For myself, I explain this somersault - from the USSR to the Russian Empire through revival along the path of total corruption - by the fact that:
- In 1991, power in Russia did not pass from the Communist Party to the people (all the stories about democratization and people’s power were just propaganda noise) - only the composition of the ruling top brass changed, which included the same members of the CPSU, just from another level of the party-state apparatus. And this apparatus was accustomed to the model of distribution of scarce goods “among their own” or by blat, and therefore the idea of simply monetizing the usual model “not for all on equal rights, but only for their own” was accepted calmly;
- in 1991, Russia had no state ideology that would be attractive to the general public. Only two ideas were popular - “We want full stores” and “Get rich!” And since the growth of corruption did not hinder the realization of these ideas at first, and in some respects even helped, the first sprouts of corruption did not cause any particular rejection and were able to take root; Committee for People’s Control, the Interior Ministry, the KGB, and the Prosecutor’s Office) has been replaced by a model of corrupt “feeding from office” in exchange for loyalty to superiors (“you can take it, but don’t take it, and remember that in case of anything, the dossier on you is already ready”).
That is why Alexei Navalny, choosing corruption as the center of his political activity, was right in some respects, but apparently wrong in some respects. He was right in that the topic of corruption has always been of great interest to Russians - it is terribly interesting to find out how much an official at this or that level “takes in his paw” and what kind of house he has on his estate for his duck!
And the mistake, it seems, was in assuming that the accumulation of such knowledge would cause a significant number of Russians to despise and hate the current government in Russia and encourage people to strive to change it.
In fact, Russians reading investigations of corruption seem to have perceived them partly as a secular chronicle and partly as information for choosing their own paths to jobs that can yield good sums of bribes. This idea is suggested by the knowledge of the huge competitions for applicants that once arose for places in educational institutions that trained employees for Russia’s customs and tax services.
“Customs students are the elite of the Cooperative Institute,” says Liliya Nigmatullina, head of the Customs Department of the Kazan Cooperative Institute of the Russian University of Cooperation (KKI RUC). - And the specialty is in high demand, even though it costs more to study and takes longer. It is interesting that this year a new profile with a “power” bias - “Law enforcement and information technology in customs” (2018) - is especially popular among applicants.
The trouble is that to this day in Russia there is no clear long-term ideology and strategy, explaining where the country will go and which actions of officials will be considered correct and which will not. Therefore, those decisions are made that are better paid for with bribes (i.e. state decisions are actually sold on the corruption market as a special type of service).
My colleague Yaroslav Kuzminov wrote about this quite correctly back in 2012 in his “Theses on Corruption”: "The interests of the state are not formalized, unclear for both its employees and voters. It is often unclear to an official what the interests of the state he is supposed to serve are. Therefore, he serves (consistently worsening the result for society) his department, his boss, himself and his friends, and finally, his “external customer” and sees no moral problem in it. He often simply has nothing to betray.
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In this situation, the elimination of bribery - as horrible as it is to realize - will actually worsen, not improve, the situation in the Russian economy. Decisions will cease to be made (sold) in exchange for bribes, but they will not be made on other grounds either, since these grounds do not exist and, I believe, will not exist under the current government. Officials will simply avoid making any decisions and spending public funds, if they do not see their own benefit in it, but at the same time fear punishment for wrong actions.
This is not a hypothesis, but a realization of the real practice of the Russian state apparatus. Thus, even under the conditions of war, the volume of unfulfilled federal budget funds amounted to 784 billion rubles by the end of 2022 (the report of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation.
Apparently, starting the transformation of Russia with the fight against corruption is an ineffective idea.
We need some more powerful levers - like Lenin’s “End the imperialist war, power to the Soviets, land to the peasants, factories to the workers” - to start the process of a new total reorganization of all life in Russia. Only through such a process can corruption be suppressed to a non-threatening level, making it once again a universally condemned form of human behavior rather than a convenient strategy for improving the lives of one’s family and developing one’s business.
But whether such levers can be found for today’s Russia and whether they will help to steer the country away from the road leading to its deepest catastrophe and impoverishment, I do not know.
April 2024.