Power Ministry Practices and Personnel
The state, including its law enforcement and security services, is there to work for the people, to defend their rights, interests and property, not to mention their security and their lives.
Vladimir Putin, 2004336
Do Russian law enforcement and security services work for the people and defend their rights? On the eve of his second term, Putin put his finger on what is central to thinking about not just the capacity, but the quality, of state coercive organs. In a civil state with high state quality, the state’s monopoly of force is wielded not primarily for the interests of the ruler(s), but for society as a whole.337
In the previous two chapters, we focused on the capacity of the Russian power ministries. At the national level, there is some evidence that the capacity of the power ministries increased during Putin’s presidency. Violent clashes for sovereign power in the capital were off the table, the fiscal capacity of the state increased, and toward the end of Putin’s tenure, there seemed to be some improvement in fighting violent crime and terrorism, although Russia continued to lag comparatively in these areas. The greatest increase in coercive capacity, however, came in the rebuilding of a “regime of repression” that the Kremlin used to help fix elections and repress economic and political rivals. Moreover, private property rights remained insecure, both for oligarchs and for ordinary businesspeople and citizens, as we will see in this chapter.
The power ministries also were a crucial actor in building the “power vertical” and undermining federalism under Putin. Although the decentering of force under Boris Yeltsin had probably gone too far, the recentralization of
Coercion as part of the federal reforms, and the use of this reacquired club against the regions, increased the power of the center without necessarily building state capacity overall. In a federal state, coercive capacity should be assessed not in terms of which level of government controls it, but whether the lawful decisions of different levels of government are implemented by state personnel. In this respect, law enforcement structures still were subject to manipulation in the pursuit of particular rather than state interests, to the neglect of both law and order.
The surprisingly modest improvements in state capacity under Putin are tightly linked to the neglect of state quality. I conceptualize state quality as the extent to which the state and its officials serve the interests of the population in a fair manner that promotes the general welfare. Russia’s rulers have been more concerned that the power ministries serve their interests than those of society. The upshot of this orientation has been that, when not fulfilling extraordinary tasks, law enforcement and security personnel often serve not societal but individual interests. Specifically, they engage in corrupt and predatory activities. The rule of law and state quality thereby suffer.
In this chapter, I show that the quality of state coercive bodies in postSoviet Russia has been relatively low and, equally important, that their quality did not increase as a consequence of Putin’s state-building strategy. This discouraging performance can be traced in part to patrimonial bureaucratic forms and the failure to inculcate a culture of public service among power ministry personnel. I begin with a discussion of how Russia compares to other states in terms of the rule of law and controlling corruption. I then turn toward a more detailed discussion of the evidence for corrupt and predatory law enforcement practices, drawing on surveys, interviews, and press and academic accounts. The third section develops a theory of predatory power ministry behavior that encompasses the multiple empirical examples of corruption within a broader framework about Russian law enforcement culture and practice. Fourth, I examine personnel policy and the problem of recruiting and retaining high-quality personnel in these bodies, demonstrating the weakness of Weberian rational-legal mechanisms. The concluding section argues that Russian state quality in the coercive realm has remained low due both to the continuation of patrimonial bureaucratic forms and the failure to instill a new mission in the power ministries that orients officials’ behavior toward serving society rather than either state or personal interests.
CORRUPTION AND THE RULE Of LAW: RUSSIA IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT
Putin promised at the beginning of his first term that the only dictatorship that would be established in Russia would be a “dictatorship of the law.” Critics such as Mikhail Krasnov, Yeltsin’s former legal advisor, branded the very formulation “illiterate.” The generous interpretation of this statement was that Putin was interested in the creation of a “rule of law” state.338 Both defining and measuring the “rule of law” are subjects of vigorous dispute, and Judith Shklar has called the very notion a “self-congratulatory rhetorical device” of “Anglo-American politicians.” At a minimum, the concept implies that the law applies equally to everyone, and that the government and state personnel are also bound by the law. These two definitional components alone make clear that the rule of law is an ideal that has nowhere been fully realized. Rachel Kleinfeld adds three other elements to her definition: respect for human rights, predictable and efficient justice, and law and order.339 Many experts distinguish between “rule by law,” which, as Thomas Carothers notes, implies “the regular, efficient application of law,” and the “rule of law,” which highlights the importance of limits on the power of the state through government subordination to the law.340
The World Bank Governance project defines the rule of law as “the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.”341 Although this definition includes features that I would consider more about capacity than quality, such as the likelihood of crime, in general it provides a rough measure of state quality, including that of the law enforcement system. Russia’s percentile ranking for “Rule of Law” has been consistently around the 20 percent range since the project began in 1996 (see Figure 5.1). Although there was a small improvement at the beginning of Putin’s first term, the Rule of Law measure for Russia declined in Putin’s second term, leaving Russia in 2007 roughly where it had been in 2000, and below the level it was when first measured in 1996 under Yeltsin. Overall, it seems fair to conclude that, by these measures, the rule of law has changed little in Russia throughout the post-Soviet period. Indeed, Dmitriy Medvedev maintained in January 2008 that Russia is a country of “legal nihilism,” with a respect for law lower than in any other European state.342 Most importantly, perhaps, Russia’s score in this category remains
Year
FIGURE 5.1. Rule of law (WGI).
Considerably below the average for states in its income category, particularly after it moved into the World Bank Higher Middle Income group in 2004.
Another key component of state quality is the amount of corruption. Corruption, defined as the use of public office for private benefit, weakens state quality. If state officials are using their office for personal gain, then they are by definition not serving the population and the general welfare in a fair way. Of course, the danger of external actors using corruption allegations as another “self-congratulatory rhetorical device,” and of holding states to unrealistic and unattainable standards, is as present in the study of corruption as it is in rule of law promotion.343 Indeed, several decades ago, “revisionists” argued that corruption provides certain economic and political benefits, such as overcoming administrative inefficiencies and integrating new groups into politics during modernization. More recently, scholars have rehabilitated these revisionist arguments to suggest that corruption can help bind together elites in divided societies and even increase state capacity by providing leaders a means to blackmail subordinates to enforce compliance.344 Although these
Year
FIGURE 5.2. Control of corruption (WGI).
Arguments may be partially true, most recent studies have argued persuasively that, in general, corruption has negative political and economic consequences, undermining growth, state strength, and democracy.345
The World Bank Governance project defines corruption as “the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as ‘capture’ of the state by elite and private interests.” Russia’s percentile ranking for “Control of Corruption” is slightly higher for 2007 than it was in 2000 when Putin took office (see Figure 5.2).346 On the other hand, Russia’s percentile ranking was lower in 2007 than it was in 1996 (16 percent versus 23 percent), and it had declined markedly from the 2003 high of 27 percent. The two most striking features of these scores are the downward trend in Putin’s second term, and how Russia’s scores were considerably below the average for states in its income category. To use a different set of ratings, in the 2007 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, Russia was tied for 143rd place out of 179, along with Gambia, Indonesia, and Togo. Its raw score was 2.3 (out of 10), down from a high of 2.8 in 2004 and comparable to the scores of Yeltsin’s last years, 1998 and 1999, when it scored a 2.4.347
Overall, these comparative data are fairly blunt instruments for assessing state quality. Still, they represent the best available cross-national comparative data on the issue, and they do suggest a couple of important tentative conclusions. First, Russian performance in improving the rule of law and controlling corruption changed little under Putin, and indeed throughout the post-Soviet period. Second, Russia remains a relative underperformer on these measures compared to other states at similar levels of income. In the next section, I use more detailed information on corruption in the power ministries to show that the quality of the Russian state was relatively low and improved little, if at all, under Yeltsin and Putin.
Corruption in Russian law enforcement
Corruption and weak adherence to the rule of law are a particular problem in the power ministries. For example, surveys of Russian citizens show that they believe corruption is particularly widespread among the police, the traffic police, customs officials, the procuracy, and the courts.348 In other words, Russians believe that the very structures that are supposed to uphold the law are the most consistent violators of it.349 This belief is well founded.
Law enforcement in general, and policing in particular, is an activity that, perhaps paradoxically, is prone to corruption everywhere. This is true for several reasons, including:
1) Police officers, unlike most state officials, can use or threaten to use violence to achieve compliance;
2) Police have regular contact with lawbreakers who obviously do not want the police to do their jobs, and these criminals may have both the means to buy off the police and strong incentives and few disincentives to seek to influence the police in such a way;
3) Police officers, as “street-level bureaucrats,” have substantial autonomy and discretion in how they carry out their duties;
4) Police managers have difficulty in monitoring the activity and effectiveness of individual police officers.350
Indeed, it is not just in Russia, but around the globe, that the police are perceived to be one of the most corrupt institutions; in Transparency International’s 2007 Global Corruption Barometer the police tied with legislatures for second place (political parties were first) among fourteen different sectors in terms of the degree of corruption. Still, there is a great deal of crossnational variance, between 1.8 (Finland) and 4.6 (Cameroon and Ghana) on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all corrupt” to “extremely corrupt.” In Russia, the police were in first place among all institutions, with a rating of 4.I.16 In polls conducted between 2004 and 2006, consistently about 80 percent of Russians said that “lawlessness and arbitrary despotism (bezzakoniye i proizvol)” was either “a rather serious problem” or “a very serious problem” among the police; only around 10-15 percent said it was not a problem or not a very serious problem.17 The forms of corruption described in this section show that there are ample reasons for such results.
Forms of Corruption
It is important to stress that corrupt behavior by Russian power ministry officials, particularly in the law enforcement realm, is not the episodic work of a few bad apples, nor is it new, although by all accounts the problem has worsened considerably in the last twenty years.18 Rather, law enforcement structures now operate within a system of commercialization in which illegal activity is viewed as normal by all parties. What follows are some examples of common forms of converting guns into money, or what Vadim Volkov memorably dubbed “violent entrepreneurship.”19
World History
