Current Affairs

“We are lucky to have you,” were words said at the Atlantic Council by a Russian emigre to the United States. Ilya Yashin had just presented a report on Russian corruption, though the report was compiled six years ago, the very people that the report was aimed at, have managed to jail Ilya Yashin for eight and half years for his opposition to the Russian government and the war in Ukraine.

The court argued that Yashin had “expressed hatred of the political system” and “created a threat to the formation of a negative attitude towards the armed forces.” In the courtroom Yashin said that he “ must remain in Russia, I must speak the truth loudly, and I must stop the bloodshed at any cost. It physically pains me how many people have been killed in this war, how many lives have been ruined and how many families have lost their homes. You cannot be indifferent. And I swear I do not regret anything.”

Soon after the verdict, Yashin’s partner married somebody else, Yashin said nothing, made no statements, just accepted that he would be in jail and was sent away to prison. As a voice for the opposition, Yashim supported the Magintsky Act, an attempt to punish the Oligarchs who moved their money freely through the West before the war in Ukraine. Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition in the British parliament breathed a sigh of composure and declared that it was time that the dirty money emanating from Russia,  be removed from the City of London, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

In his speech to the Atlantic Council six years ago, Yashin argued that Russia would find its way, it would find a new direction when Putin is gone and those who had corrupted the state would either plead innocence or disappear. “Do you believe there could be a Maidan in Russia, just as in Ukraine, when Yanakovich was forced to leave?” he was asked. “Why not,” Yashin answered.

According to Russian polls, President Putin has an approval rating of 80 percent, the view of the West is met with disapproval, polling 18 percent. Whether you believe the polls or not, the language determining the polls delineates where Russia moves, whether the polls are truthful or not.

In a leaked conversation between two oligarchs using colourful language, they described the country’s leadership as “stupid cockroaches” which “gnawed on each other,” and is “dragging the country downwards” and “destroying its future.” According to Tatiana Stanovaya, this language is not uncommon among the elite, but according to consensus they have to win this war.

Tatiana Stanovaya, writing in Carnegie, argued that the most vulnerable groups are “in-system” liberals, people with ties to the West; apolitical technocrats and cultural figures, whose “lack of enthusiasm for the war makes them especially suspicious.”

 Between 2014 and 2017, 38 Russian businessmen and oligarchs died in suspicious circumstances. Bill Browder believes that Putin is ordering the executions of influential business leaders who he feels are not going to agree to all his orders, which of course intimidates their successors with threats of death or violence. But according to an investigative report in Novaya Gazeta, some of the deaths could be connected to fraud in Gazprom, but this does not explain the deaths of 32 executives or officials who have died since 2022.

In 2020, Transparency Internationals government defence integrity index found that Russia had a high corruption risk in its defence sector. Most defence contractors expressed either low or very low risk to anti-corruption activity. Corruption penetrates the political level as well, top officials in the Russian Defence Ministry, where officials and generals own property that significantly outmatches their income, which points to possible corruption.

According to Transparency International the war in Ukraine was a “reminder of the threat that corruption and the absence of government accountability pose for global peace and security.” They went on to say that the kleptocrats had amassed a fortune by pledging their loyalty to Putin in exchange for profitable government contracts and because of this they enabled and empowered his pursuit of geopolitical ambition.

Paul Massaro, a senior policy advisor for the US Helsinki Commission said that “when Russians see somebody like the Ukrainians and they see somebody succeeding, […] they think ‘How can we pull them down, how can we bring them to our level?’ They want to make everybody corrupt. No, they can’t fight corruption. The state form of Russia would have to evolve beyond empire to fight corruption.”

Noah Buckley argues that corruption is endemic and has played a larger role in the Russian regimes stability. “It serves as a force to co-opt and control the political elite and to replace formal institutions with something more flexible and more amenable to the needs of a consolidated authoritarian regime.”

“ It’s better to spend 10 years behind bars as an honest man than quietly burn with shame over the blood spilled by your government,” Yashin added before his sentence.

But the reality for Yashin is that he will spend the next eight and half years in jail and when he comes out there won’t be any changes to the Russian state, because it is endemically corrupt, because of the poor pay that officials receive. Putin’s cronies will continue to push the Russian state to the limits of endurance because of power plays in the Dumas, and the elements determining its future are undeterred by those that have empowered the arguments that have enabled a clone of Putin to enter power.

It is difficult to see other forms of argument that Russia could possibly have because corruption is so deeply engrained in the system. The question is whether there is a place in the political canon for those who are not corrupt and are innocent of the absolutes that have empowered a lexical dictionary that starts with the letters corrupt and ends with the word corruption as part of a system determined by extraordinary wealth in the hands of a select few.