A Few Bad Men 

The following reader comment (from Brian in Colorado) was posted to my recent story on whistleblower cop Aleksei Dymovsky:

Having lived in Russia throughout most of the 1990s, I can say that this comment is spot on.

But the problem of corrupt and abusive cops long preceded the rise of Vladimir Putin and the siloviki and it will probably not go away once they leave the scene.  In fact, it was endemic throughout the supposedly liberal years of Boris Yeltsin's presidency.

Reading this comment, I was reminded of a summer night in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. Some friends and I had just finished dinner at a downtown restaurant and decided to go for a walk. Somebody suggested we stroll down Nevsky Prospect, the city's bustling main drag. But a Russian friend quickly nixed that idea saying he didn't feel safe walking down Nevsky at that hour. "There are too many police there," he said.

Everybody nodded in agreement. We walked down the Fontanka Embankment instead.

Reflecting on the exchange later, I was bothered that I had internalized this fear of the police that is second nature to many Russians. "I've been in this country too long," I thought.

The fear was nonetheless rational. Most of us had had unpleasant experiences with the police ourselves or knew somebody who had.

An American accountant I knew was robbed twice by police officers. A Finnish journalist was snatched off the street for no apparent reason, and taken to a police precinct where he was brutally beaten and robbed. A Russian friend was picked up and press ganged into the Army.

A favorite trick in those days was for police to stop somebody for a routine document check. After examining your papers, they would then say they had to inspect your wallet for narcotics (because everybody hides narcotics in their wallet, right?). During this "inspection" they would then take any money they happened to find and hand the wallet back. It was brazen and there was little one could do about it. You had two choices: either let them get away with it or make a stand and risk being detained for resisting a police officer.

One Russian photographer I knew told me how his brother was fired from the traffic police for not taking bribes. Every cop on the street, he was told, was expected to collect bribes -- and turn kick most of the proceeds upstairs to their superiors.

This, in fact, is a metaphor for how Russia's whole economy works. The only difference between the Yeltsin and the Putin era is that the system has become much more centralized -- and expensive. Russians now pay an estimated $300 billion in bribes annually -- a tenfold increase over 2001.

This problem is not a matter of a few bent cops. It is systemic.

-- Brian Whitmore

Your Own Personal Vertical 

An influential think tank is advising President Dmitry Medvedev that he needs to establish an alternative power structure answerable only to him in order to reach his goal of modernizing Russia.

In a report for Medvedev, the Institute for Contemporary Development concludes that it will be impossible for the president to carry out any meaningful changes as long as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's siloviki cronies remain in key administrative posts. But attempting to dismantle Putin's vaunted power vertical would be difficult (if not impossible) and destabilizing at this point.

So the institute is advising that Medvedev set up his own personal power vertical. 

Here is how "Nezavisimaya gazeta" describes the proposal:

And here is "Nezavisimaya gazeta" quoting directly from the report:


The Institute for Contemporary Development, of course, is headed by Igor Yurgens, an adviser to Medvedev. 

Yurgens made waves back in February by suggesting that Russia's implicit social contract, in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards, had been abrogated by the financial crisis. Political liberalization, Yurgens said at the time, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession.

His remarks were met with ridicule by Medvedev's powerful deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist and architect of Russia's authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy."

Undeterred, Yurgens and other public intellectuals like Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, continued to push for political liberalization in an increasingly public spat with Surkov.

I don't know what to make of the Institute for Contemporary Development's report just yet.

But what is interesting is that it appears just as reports are surfacing that Surkov is trying to make common cause with -- or attempting to co-opt -- key technocrats and economists close to Medvedev in order to enhance his own political position and weaken his opponents in the Kremlin.

Surkov has long been engaged in a low-intensity clan war with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the head of the siloviki clan of security-service veterans surrounding Putin.

According to a report by stratfor.com (which we blogged here), Surkov is supporting economic reforms proposed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina as a means of weakening Sechin's control over key sectors of the economy.

How Yurgens' institute's report fits into this -- if it fits at all -- is anybody's guess at this point.

But after sparring for most of the year, Yurgens and Surkov appear now to share a common enemy -- Sechin and the siloviki.

Surkov, if the stratfor.com report is correct, appears to be proposing that they be taken on directly. Yurgens, on the other hand, is advising Medvedev to work around them.

And Putin, the one voice that really matters, has been characteristically sphinx-like in his silence.

-- Brian Whitmore

Gas Or Freedom? 

Next week the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is expected to choose a new representative on freedom of the media. Of the six nominees, two are considered to have the best chances: Mikhail Fedotov, the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists and a coauthor of Russia’s surprisingly liberal mass media law (surprising because it has failed so spectacularly to protect freedom of the press) and Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and indefatigable monitor of media-rights violations throughout the former Soviet Union.

On the website “Yezhednevny zhurnal” today, National Circulation-Audit Service head Igor Yakovenko, himself a former Union of Journalists official and a former liberal Duma deputy, posted a nice commentary on the election that made several good points.

First, Yakovenko notes that the OSCE representative on freedom of the media is chosen by the governments whose abuse of media rights that representative should be exposing and condemning, rather than by the journalists he or she should be protecting. This fact means that Fedotov, who was nominated by Russia and who has made many compromises with power over the last 15 years or so, stands a good chance of being elected.

Surely Panfilov’s uncompromising monitoring of press-freedom abuses over the last decade or so is unlikely to win him any votes. As Yakovenko writes, “Those countries that his center monitors will, of course, vote against him.” So, we can count on countries like Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and all of Central Asia to join Russia in electing a toothless representative. Panfilov, incidentally, was nominated by Georgia, a country that has also been the target of some of his principled monitoring (in August 2008, RFE/RL interviewed Panfilov about media coverage of the Russia-Georgia war.)

Yakovenko notes that Fedotov’s main claim to fame, his coauthorship of the Russian media law, came 18 years ago and during that time, many in Russia have undergone “metamorphoses” straight out of Franz Kafka. More recently, Fedotov has been the Kremlin’s man:

It will be very interesting to see how the Western European countries vote (the OSCE has 56 member states). How many will see backing Moscow’s view on media freedom as a small compromise to make in order to secure a good gas deal or get a pipeline built? Especially since media freedom is, for the most part, not a problem in their countries with their own well-developed civil-society and legal mechanisms. If the Kazakh government doesn’t want a forceful media advocate, then why should France or Britain force one on them? (By the way, Kazakhstan will take over the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE in January.)

Yakovenko’s article is headlined “Europe’s Choice” in a clear reference to William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice.” What will it be, Europe? Deals with Moscow or a chance to improve the lives of millions in the former Soviet Union?

-- Robert Coalson

A Kremlin Marriage Of Convenience 

Watching Vladislav Surkov's maneuvers can make your head spin.

One day the powerful deputy Kremlin deputy chief of staff is ridiculing suggestions that Russia needs to open up its political and economic system to deal with the ongoing economic crisis. On another he appears to be supporting that very idea, telling the ruling United Russia party that it needs to share power.

There is widespread agreement among Kremlin watchers that Surkov was somehow involved in the recent walkout in the State Duma by three "opposition" parties to protest alleged falsification in the October 11 local elections. But there is little agreement whether the move was initiated by Surkov to embarrass his foes, or an operation orchestrated by Surkov's opponents designed to weaken him.

Confused yet? Good.

Surkov made news again this week with an interview with the weekly "Itogi" in which he warned that Russia was falling dangerously behind in economic development and risked becoming a "resource power" if the economy is not modernized. In the same interview, Surkov also argued against liberalizing the political system, warning that it could plunge Russia into chaos.

So what is Surkov up to?

In a recently published four-part series titled "The Kremlin Wars," Stratfor.com offers up one possible answer.

According to Stratfor, the Kremlin is divided into two roughly equal clans -- one headed by Surkov and one led by his archrival, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin:

In an effort to inflict a decisive defeat on Sechin and his "siloviki" clan, Surkov has reportedly teamed up with a group of technocratic economic liberals who are close to President Dmitry Medvedev.

This group of economists and specialists in civil law, who have been dubbed the "civiliki," include Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina, and Natural Resources Minister Trutnev.

As I have written here, the civiliki also include Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov and other lower-level officials who studied law with Medvedev in St. Petersburg.

Stratfor argues that the economic crisis has led the Russian authorities to rethink the statist and top heavy economic model dominated by Sechin and the siloviki:


Surkov is less interested in economic reform than in buttressing his own power vis-a-vis Sechin. But, according to Stratfor, he sees the value in using the economic reforms proposed by the civiliki to purge Sechin and his allies from the commanding heights of the Russian economy.

One hint that something along these lines might be under way came in August when Medvedev instructed Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to open an investigation into Russia's massive state corporations, a key power base for Sechin.

If Surkov is indeed gearing up for a decisive battle with Sechin and has teamed up with the civiliki to pull it off, this would explain his increased enthusiasm for economic reform. And the last thing he probably wants in such a situation is the unpredictability that any political liberalization would bring (thus the warnings about chaos).

The wild card in the equation, of course, is Putin, who would need to sign off on any campaign of this magnitude -- especially one targeting a close ally like Sechin.

I'm skeptical for the moment. But Stratfor argues convincingly that the economic crisis has shaken up the elite to the degree that such a move is at least plausible:


Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, whole Stratfor series is thought provoking and well worth a read.

-- Brian Whitmore

Gorbachev Calls Local Elections A Sham 

The man who initiated the first competitive elections in the Soviet Union two decades ago has slammed Russia's most recent vote as a sham.

In an interview published today in "Novaya gazeta," Mikhail Gorbachev said the October 11 local elections, which were swept by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party amid massive claims of vote rigging, have damaged trust in the country's political institutions:

Allegations of vote rigging in the October 11 local elections have been backed up in some cases by videotaped evidence.

Gorbachev's comments are the second high-profile attack on the election results.

The election sparked a brief walkout in the State Duma by three parties, the ultranationalist Liberal Democrats (LDPR), the Communists, and A Just Russia. Although, as we have written here and here, this appears to have been inspired more by inter-clan battles in the Kremlin that by any concern for democratic practices.

It is still unclear what motivated Gorbachev, who has been largely supportive of the current regime, to take such a forceful public stand.

-- Brian Whitmore