This year Russia didn’t make the final sixteen, or even the final one hundred and sixteen.
This isn’t the World Cup, but Transparency International’s annual ranking of countries based on the perceived level of corruption. Out of one hundred and eighty nations, Russia currently occupies position one hundred and thirty-five. To stay with the beautiful game for a moment, if the combined honesty of their politicians, FSB agents, business people, tax inspectors, and police were ranked according to the FIFA countries’ football rankings, Russia would be St. Kitts and Nevis.
When conducting researching for my crime novel, Motherland, I was conscious as an outsider that it was easy to explain away the explosion of corruption in Russia as a modern phenomenon and to lay the blame firmly with Vladimir Putin, who, after all, has been in charge for nearly two decades. As well as traveling to Saint Petersburg and listening to stories about paying off traffic cops, the horrors of conscription, and even the tale of a photographer who unwittingly took a picture of a group of smiling mobsters in the back room of a restaurant, I needed to learn about the history of Russia’s corruption problem, and it goes back a long way.
The Tsars had always struggled to impose their will on a sparse population of various nationalities. Messages across the vast country took weeks to arrive and payments to public servants were unreliable. Instead, a system of kormleniya or “feeding” allowed servants of the state to charge for the work they performed – the equivalent of a modern day Russian traffic cop asking a speeding motorist if they would like to pay the fine now and avoid all that administrative unpleasantness at the station.
Wilful bribery was different. In 1550, Ivan the Terrible introduced the death sentence for the crime. One popular, if doubtful, tale has him ordering an official to be hacked to death for accepting a goose stuffed with ducats. With each blow, the executioner supposedly demanded: “How do you like the goose now?” Two hundred years later, Peter the Great established a small army of bureaucrats or “fiscals” to enforce violations of his new written laws. One casualty was the Governor of Siberia, who was executed on the orders of Ober-fiscal Nestorov. Another casualty was Ober-fiscal Nestorov himself, who was later charged with bribery and broken on the wheel before having his head chopped off.
When the serfs were freed in the 1860s, millions flocked to the cities where they found misery, vodka, and prostitutes, soon falling victim to newly formed gangs who wasted no time exploiting them. In the countryside, however, peasants continued to be in thrall to local landowners, and servants of the state continued to supplement their meagre salaries with a little “feeding”.
Fifty years later, the country was rocked by a series of catastrophes. In Saint Petersburg, where my novel is based, the effects of the First World War caused severe shortages. By January 1917, strikes and rioting broke out causing the city to fall, and within weeks the Tsar abdicated. Armed gangs of organised criminals swept through Moscow, profiting from the chaos. By the time Lenin’s Bolshevik party consolidated power the state was weak and Lenin was forced to compromise with the crime gangs who had grown too powerful, as well as useful. The compromise lasted until Stalin came along.
Stalin and Lenin, ironically, had both been serious criminals albeit to fund their revolution (in 1907, they organised a bank robbery in Tbilisi where forty people were killed and fifty injured), but the severity of Stalin’s rule and the fight for survival in the Great Patriotic War stopped even hardened criminals. The new gangster class that emerged in the cities, the Vory V Zakone or “thieves who follow the code”, were forced into the gulags where they developed their own language and style – these are the old school gangsters often seen on TV with their elaborate tattoos that acted as a form of CV.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the gulag system was dismantled scattering millions of ex-prisoners across the country, particularly those who had earned their freedom by cooperating with the state. By the 1960s the Soviet dream had turned into a lumbering, inefficient bureaucracy. The family of Premier Leonid Brezhnev would later be charged with corruption and those cooperative gangsters had become an indispensable part of the shadow economy.
The seeds to Russia’s corruption problem were now firmly planted and all they needed was a little water. In 1985, it came in the unlikely form of an honest agricultural economist, Mikhail Gorbachev. As General Secretary of the Soviet Union, he cut back on alcohol sales which had much the same effect as prohibition in 1920s Chicago: organised crime exploded. Next, Gorbachev began his process of perestroika or “restructuring”, creating a new class of entrepreneurs. Although necessary for reforming the economy, these new enterprises were often financed by loan sharks and offered fresh money-laundering and protection racket opportunities for the gangsters.
After Gorbachev, Yeltsin proved unable to restrain the forces unleashed in the country. As the state collapsed, colossal fortunes were made, usually by unscrupulous means, and a new breed of oligarchs was born who were able to manipulate the ailing Yeltsin. As these fortunes were stashed offshore, servants of the state were seldom paid and there was little effort to rein in the gangsters.
During the Wild West years of Yeltsin’s government, an unemployed ex-spy called Vladimir Putin found a job working for Saint Petersburg’s first elected mayor, soon developing a reputation for deal-cutting in the murky world of what was then Russia’s crime capital. In 1991, a council commission investigation into missing funds earmarked to feed the struggling city discovered up to one hundred million dollars had been stolen. The council commission recommended that Vladimir Putin be prosecuted for the crime but instead his fortunes were about to soar.
In just three dizzying years after joining Boris Yeltsin’s administration, Vladimir Putin was made head of the FSB, then Prime Minister, then personally nominated by a tearful Yeltsin himself as his successor. Putin’s first act as president was to grant Boris Yeltsin and his family a lifelong amnesty from prosecution over a scandal in which they had sought to enrich themselves.
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