Ivan Krastev
Sofia, Bulgaria — THE recent release of the so-called
Panama Papers raises a lot of questions, one of which is: Is it better for an
authoritarian regime to fight corruption, or work with it? Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia point us to two very
different answers.
In 2012 President Xi, calling corruption an
existential threat to China’s Communist rule, undertook a broad campaign to
purge the Communist Party of what he called “tigers and flies” — corrupt
officials and businesses, at every level of the party apparatus and government
bureaucracy. As of last year, the campaign had netted more than 100
high-ranking officials, including a dozen military officers, several senior
executives of state-owned companies and four top politicians.
Critics of the regime tend to blame President Xi for
using the campaign to eliminate his rivals, but the anti-corruption effort is
highly popular with the public, and many independent analysts agree that it
helped galvanize further reforms in semiprivate industries like the oil sector.
President Putin has followed Mr. Xi’s lead, at least
rhetorically — except that in his nearly 17 years in power, not a single
political “tiger,” to borrow Mr. Xi’s term, and only a few “flies” have been
brought down by corruption charges.
But why is Mr. Putin, despite his willingness to start
military wars, reluctant to declare a real war on corruption — even though, as
Mr. Xi has found, anti-corruption campaigns are usually popular with the
public?
Only a fool would argue
that there’s a dearth of corruption in Russia. Recent opinion polls from Moscow’s independent Levada Center indicate that
a majority of people view state bureaucracy as irremediably corrupt. Russian
movies and novels are full of officials who take bribes. Why then is the
Kremlin so unwilling to undertake a cleanup, particularly in a moment when
cutting the cost of corruption could compensate for depressed oil prices?
The commonplace explanation in the Western media is
that Mr. Putin himself is deeply corrupt — indeed, that he sits at the
epicenter of Russia’s corrupt edifice. This may be so. But as someone who has
spent his life in the Balkans (and therefore knows a thing about corruption), I
have learned that being corrupt is hardly a reason not to declare a war on
corruption; on the contrary, it could be an incentive, because there is nothing
that corrupt politicians hate more than other people’s corruption.
The reason for Mr. Putin’s reluctance, then, is more
complicated.
On one hand, for him, mutual accusations of corruption
are the dirty bombs of the intra-elite wars, which cause a lot of collateral
damage. Research has long demonstrated that corruption, although hitting the
poorest groups in society hardest, is primarily a middle-class concern — and in
today’s Russia, the middle class to a great extent is composed of these same
bribe-taking officials that anti-corruption campaigns should target.
On the other hand, what matters in politics is not the
levels of corruption, but the public’s perception of how corrupt their country
is, and very often the link between the two is not direct. Small and successful
wars abroad can be a better instrument to change people’s perception of how
corrupt their country is than the actual efforts to reduce corruption.
Correlation is not causation, but in the wake of Crimea’s annexation, the
number of Russians who believed that corruption was increasing plummeted to 30
percent, from 50 percent.
Interestingly, there is one way that corruption itself
worries Mr. Putin: as a weapon that can be used by Russia’s external enemies
against him. What worries the Kremlin is not that Russian officials are
corrupt, but that they are vulnerable to Western pressure, since the assets
they stole, just like their children, are in the West. Corruption as a rule
helps unite elites, but it can also make them good recruits. (In this sense,
Moscow should not be unhappy about the West’s efforts to clean up hidden
offshore accounts.)
The Kremlin’s top priority then is not purging corrupt
elites, but nationalizing them. Russian elites have the right to be corrupt,
but only if they have proved their loyalty. Paradoxically, the West’s sanctions
against business figures closest to the Russian president helped whitewash some
of the most notoriously corrupt Russian oligarchs and allow Russian propaganda
to present them as selfless defenders of the motherland.
Ultimately, the most important reason for Mr. Putin’s
reluctance to declare a war on corruption is that any anti-corruption campaign
will inspire the public to demand change. It plays not only on the public’s
anger, but also on its aspirations. And it is precisely this demand for change
that the Kremlin fears most. Unlike in China, leaders in Russia avoid promising
that life will be better tomorrow; what they promise is that things will not
get worse. And unlike in China, they can afford to do so because the Russian
economy is driven not by the entrepreneurial energy of the masses, but by
natural resources.
This is why the Russian government is ready to
acknowledge corruption’s ubiquity — the slickest propaganda couldn’t convince
people otherwise. But the government also advances the idea that corruption is
a way of life and is thus a natural phenomenon. In a way, corruption is like
vodka: You know it hurts, but Russia is unimaginable without it.
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