The Spectator: There’s something rotten in the state of Russia

January 7, 2010

Pres­i­dent Dim­itry Medvedev was sup­posed to clean up his coun­try but, says Owen Matthews, feu­dal­ism, law­less­ness and cor­rup­tion suit all those keen to hold onto money and power.

There is a chill­ing sequence in Tsar, Pavel Lungin’s dark and bril­liant new film about Ivan the Ter­ri­ble. Ivan, played by the mer­cu­r­ial rock musi­cian Pyotr Mamonov, steps out of his pri­vate chapel wild-eyed after a long ses­sion of wheedling and bar­gain­ing with his God. The Tsar walks, lost in thought, through a series of rooms. As he shuf­fles along grov­el­ling boyars cer­e­mo­ni­ally dress him. One group gen­tly places a cloth-of-gold gown over his shoul­ders. Another group presents an embroi­dered col­lar, then cuffs, a crown and staff. Finally the Tsar emerges into the win­ter sun­light, golden and ter­ri­ble. The crowd of peo­ple who have been wait­ing for him since dawn pros­trate them­selves in the slush and the shit of the palace yard. Silence falls. The mes­sage is clear: for the grov­el­ling boyars and the grov­el­ling peas­ants alike, the Tsar is God’s mes­sen­ger on earth, the sole fount of worldly power and protection.

The nature of Russ­ian gov­er­nance has moved on some­what since the 16^th cen­tury. But one thing has remained the same: post-Soviet Rus­sia is a pro­foundly feu­dal soci­ety. I don’t mean that as a gen­er­alised insult denot­ing igno­rance and back­ward­ness. I mean really feu­dal, in its most lit­eral sense. Feu­dal­ism is the exchange of ser­vice for pro­tec­tion. In the absence of func­tional legal or law enforce­ment sys­tems, people’s only real pro­tec­tion lies in a net­work of per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships with pow­er­ful indi­vid­u­als. And so it is in Rus­sia today — for every mem­ber of soci­ety with some­thing, how­ever small, to lose, from a mar­ket stall owner to the nation’s top oli­garchs. Your free­dom from arbi­trary arrest, fraud­u­lent expro­pri­a­tion and extor­tion by bureau­crats is only as good as your connections.

Dmitry Medvedev under­stands this prob­lem all too well. He puts it in dif­fer­ent terms, of course, rail­ing against the ‘legal nihilism’ which is rot­ting Rus­sia from within. But we’re talk­ing about the same thing. It’s pre­cisely because Russia’s legal sys­tem is for sale to the high­est (or most pow­er­ful) bid­der, because bureau­crats are above the law and because police­men are not only cor­rupt but actively crim­i­nal that Rus­sians turn to older rhythms of social organ­i­sa­tion — to per­sonal, feu­dal rela­tion­ships with indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that can pro­vide secu­rity. Rus­sians buy the pro­tec­tion that the state can­not provide.

It’s hard to over­state how seri­ous and cor­ro­sive a prob­lem this legal nihilism is — and how fun­da­men­tally it stops Rus­sia from becom­ing a nor­mal, func­tional soci­ety and econ­omy. One recent case shows just how deep the rot goes — and how pow­er­less, and ulti­mately unwill­ing, even Medvedev is really to change the system.

In Novem­ber, 37-year-old tax lawyer Sergei Mag­nit­sky died of pan­cre­atic fail­ure in Moscow’s most noto­ri­ous remand prison, Butirskaya. At the time of his arrest Mag­nit­sky had been work­ing for Her­mitage Cap­i­tal, once the biggest investor on Russia’s stock mar­ket. Magnitsky’s crime had been to com­plain about a $230 mil­lion tax refund scam appar­ently per­pe­trated by cor­rupt tax offi­cials and police. These crim­i­nals had used com­pa­nies stolen from Her­mitage dur­ing a police raid as vehi­cles for claim­ing false tax refunds. Mag­nit­sky and the Her­mitage team had painstak­ingly doc­u­mented the details of the scam and com­plained to every offi­cial body they could think of. Yet instead of pur­su­ing the guilty, Russ­ian author­i­ties arrested Mag­nit­sky. Accord­ing to his heart­break­ing prison diary, inves­ti­ga­tors repeat­edly tried to per­suade him to give tes­ti­mony against Her­mitage and drop the accu­sa­tions against the police and tax author­i­ties. When Mag­nit­sky refused, he was moved to more and more hor­ri­ble sec­tions of the prison, and ulti­mately denied the med­ical treat­ment which could have saved his life.

The case, which had gar­nered next to no pub­lic­ity while Mag­nit­sky was alive, sud­denly made the pages of the Moscow busi­ness press on his death (though not, of course, the tightly con­trolled national tele­vi­sion sta­tions). The pres­i­den­tial human rights coun­cil, a rather belea­guered body of activists, brought the Mag­nit­sky case directly to the President’s ear. Medvedev’s response, to his credit, was swift. To date, 20 prison offi­cials have been fired, as well as the deputy head of the Moscow Inte­rior Min­istry in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing tax crimes. More heads will doubt­less roll in the com­ing weeks — although I would bet that the real per­pe­tra­tors of the tax scam, reli­ably reported by the New Times mag­a­zine to be in the upper ech­e­lons of the Fed­eral Secu­rity Service’s iron­i­cally named Eco­nomic Crimes Depart­ment, will escape punishment.

So was jus­tice done? Emphat­i­cally no, and not just because the real cul­prits are likely to escape. The point is that even the fir­ings which have taken place bring Rus­sia no closer to being a law-based soci­ety. Rather, it was per­sonal jus­tice, dis­pensed on the President’s word. In time-honoured fash­ion, mis­deeds were brought to the atten­tion of the good Tsar who dis­pensed quick and ter­ri­ble pun­ish­ment. This is not the ‘order’ that Rus­sians yearn for, it is sim­ply another brand of legal nihilism.

But the truth is that Medvedev does not really want to end legal nihilism, even if he could. The only effec­tive way to tackle the per­va­sive rot is not pres­i­den­tial inter­ven­tion but the entrench­ment of prop­erly inde­pen­dent courts and pros­e­cu­tors unafraid to charge top offi­cials and those with pow­er­ful friends, a vig­or­ous free press and a real polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion to shout about abuses to the rafters. Even if we allow the pos­si­bil­ity that Medvedev may recog­nise those things as desir­able in the­ory, it’s very clear that in prac­tice he con­sid­ers them dan­ger­ous and desta­bil­is­ing. The depress­ing truth is that Medvedev is in his office not to change the sys­tem but to make the cur­rent — feu­dal — sys­tem work a lit­tle better.

And here we come to the heart of the mat­ter. Talk pri­vately to any senior Russ­ian gov­ern­ment fig­ure and you will quickly hear, in one form or other, the sen­ti­ment that what Rus­sia needs now, first and fore­most, is sta­bil­ity. With­out sta­bil­ity — and I am quot­ing directly here from recent con­ver­sa­tions — there is no chance for Rus­sia to grow pros­per­ous, and with­out pros­per­ity there will be no mid­dle class and no change to civil soci­ety. Put like that, it sounds very rea­son­able. But in truth what the Russ­ian elite has done is to elim­i­nate not only the pos­si­bil­ity of oppo­si­tion but the pos­si­bil­ity of being seri­ously chal­lenged for theft or incom­pe­tence by the press, par­lia­ment or courts. All three of those insti­tu­tions have been evis­cer­ated by Putin and brought under strict con­trol of the state. Fur­ther­more, Putin has made it increas­ingly clear that he intends to return to office in 2012. In the name of sta­bil­ity, Putin and the Russ­ian elite have made them­selves untouchable.

Given those ground rules, it’s not hard to see why Medvedev doesn’t want real change. Inde­pen­dent courts might actu­ally enforce the law — and that would strike at the very base of the entire sys­tem on which Russia’s cur­rent sys­tem is based. Enforc­ing the law would mean, for instance, rou­tinely putting offi­cials in jail for bribe-taking and incom­pe­tence. Whereas under the cur­rent sys­tem, it is your supe­ri­ors — or, if you are unlucky, your ene­mies and com­peti­tors — who decide whether you get pros­e­cuted for your crimes, or whether to pro­tect you. Cru­cially, it also means that inno­cence is no defence against pros­e­cu­tion, as poor Sergei Mag­nit­sky found.

The Her­mitage case, by the way, is by no means unique — accord­ing to Trans­parency Inter­na­tional, an NGO, a stag­ger­ing three quar­ters of Russ­ian small and medium-sized busi­nesses report hav­ing fought off some kind of own­er­ship raid by scam­mers in league with bureau­crats. And over the last year and a half three major Russ­ian retail­ers have been taken down in raids by police, their own­ers either jailed or fled.

That absence of recourse to law changes every­thing. First and fore­most, it utterly under­mines the much-vaunted sta­bil­ity in whose name Putin elim­i­nated all the checks and bal­ances. Every Russ­ian, except per­haps the high­est Krem­lin cadres and their cir­cles, is sud­denly vul­ner­a­ble to a change of for­tune that could land them in jail. All it takes is for an angry busi­ness part­ner or an ex-husband to make a pay­ment to the right law enforce­ment body or FSB office. That knowl­edge extin­guishes any pos­si­bil­ity of long-term busi­ness plan­ning; it kills entre­pre­neurism and ini­tia­tive. It incen­tivises steal­ing, both for busi­ness­men who know they have to stash as much as pos­si­ble before their busi­nesses are raided, and for bureau­crats who take over busi­nesses with impunity (as long as they kick enough prof­its upstairs to their liege-lords).

Medvedev is not a fool; he knows the sys­tem from both sides, from his days as a cor­po­rate lawyer and major share­holder in a paper-pulp com­pany in the 1990s. But his tragedy is to believe that the sys­tem can be fixed on its own terms, and that he can change things for the bet­ter from the inside. Lord knows, this ener­getic, fra­grant lit­tle man is cer­tainly no Ivan the Ter­ri­ble. But at some deep level he still believes that it’s the Tsar, and by exten­sion the state, which must rule and which must solve Russia’s prob­lems. But in real­ity it’s the rot­ten state itself which is Russia’s biggest prob­lem, cor­rupt­ing and ruin­ing every­thing it touches. Medvedev doesn’t want to see that it’s only out­side forces — courts, media, oppo­si­tion, an open soci­ety — that can stop the putre­fac­tion which is not only drag­ging Rus­sia back into its own dark past, but also rob­bing it of its future.

Pub­lished in Spec­ta­cor.

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