By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Responding to pleas from terrified business people and urgent demands from Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Russian President Boris Yeltsin on June 14 issued a decree permitting tough action against Russia's vast and powerful criminal underworld.
If that were the whole story, the law-abiding sections of Russian society would have nothing but praise for the initiative. However, the decree grossly violates human rights, and a number of its provisions breach the new constitution. Despite widespread horror at the exploding crime rate, the president's move has been condemned by a broad range of human rights and political organisations, including close Yeltsin supporters.
Under the decree, a category is established of people considered "on the basis of sufficient evidence" to belong to an organised group "suspected of committing serious crimes". Also in this category are relatives of such people, and anyone who has lived with them in the past five years. Although the constitution stipulates that all Russian citizens are equal before the law, the rights of this category of people are restricted.
"With the agreement of a prosecutor", the authorities can now:
- detain suspected members of criminal organisations for up to 30 days without bringing them before a court (the constitution stipulates a maximum of 48 hours);
- examine the financial affairs and property of suspected members of criminal organisations, of their relatives, and of people who have lived with them in the past five years;
- obtain access to commercial and banking secrets of suspect individuals and companies;
- search buildings and vehicles, and examine documents;
- use in court evidence obtained through "sting" operations, in which the suspect is incited to commit a crime.
In addition, Yeltsin's officials have been instructed to draw up lists of territories and urban areas to be subjected to "special control" as a result of high local rates of banditry.
Mixed reactions
If the bandits were intimidated by the decree, this was certainly not apparent in the days after the contents were announced. Gang wars continued unabated. In less than a week, 15 people were killed in and around Moscow, including six dead in a single shoot-out at a hotel.
The bulk of the population either welcomed the decree — here too, promises to "get tough on crime" are the reliable stock in trade of populist politicians — or reacted with indifference. Business organisations and political groups took widely varying positions, depending on whether they were afraid more of gangsters or of the arbitrary power of the state.
The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs expressed guarded support. By contrast, business circles close to the neo-liberal Russia's Choice bloc were alarmed that the decree's provisions would become a powerful means of stifling competition, as crooked entrepreneurs and corrupt officials colluded to force legitimate businesses to reveal their commercial secrets. The newspaper Izvestia, which throughout the 1990s has given Yeltsin almost totally uncritical support, sharply attacked the decree on these and other grounds.
The Liberal Democratic Party of ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was clearly pleased; Zhirinovsky himself has proposed controlling crime by setting up mobile courts and shooting captured mobsters on the spot.
Spokespeople for the Communist Party condemned the decree, likening it to Stalinist legislation of the 1930s. Equally fierce criticism came from the human rights organisation Memorial, which declared that the authorities had "decided to sacrifice the principles of justice and democracy".
Parliamentary deputies from Russia's Choice — the formation closest to Yeltsin — took a position of anguished dissent, deploring the violation of constitutional rights and voicing fears of an orgy of state lawlessness. The spectacle was an odd one; last September, the forces now grouped in Russia's Choice cheered when Yeltsin overthrew the constitution and parliament.
Yeltsin, meanwhile, spent the Saturday following the announcement of his decree visiting the elite Interior Ministry troops of the Dzerzhinsky Division, on which he had relied heavily during the confrontations that followed his September coup. Plans have been announced to transfer particular military units and bases from army to Interior Ministry control, and the president promised the division a big expansion of personnel.
Statements by presidential aides gave no hint that Yeltsin might be troubled by the constitutionality of his actions. The Constitutional Court, which in theory could rule his decree invalid, has been suspended since last September. It was also theoretically possible for the parliament to vote down the decree. But, scared of being outflanked on law-and-order issues, many deputies were preparing to compete to see who could introduce the most ruthless anti-gangster legislation. According to the liberal daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, an anti-crime bill now under discussion in the lower house also breaches the constitution.
Cause of crime wave
Is savage anti-gangster legislation likely to stop Russian society dissolving in criminality? Criminalisation has moved closely in step with turning of state property into private capital, a process controlled by the same official-managerial layer that is best placed to profit from it. There has been massive theft of state property by the people who formerly administered it. Vast new openings have also appeared for criminal gangs which originated outside the state apparatus.
Former apparatchiks and independent criminals have now fused to the extent where it possible to speak of ownership of the means of production being taken over by a new nomenklatura-mafia proto-bourgeoisie.
Where pro-capitalist ministers and high state officials have not themselves been involved in the theft of state assets, they have often taken a strikingly complacent attitude toward it. During the early 1990s the view was widespread in liberal circles that even if bandits and bribe-takers were flourishing, it was in a good cause: within a few years they would turn themselves into capitalists. The tolerance is evident in figures which show that in 1993 only 15 people were prosecuted for banditry, at a time when the authorities reportedly knew of 5631 organised criminal gangs.
But the authorities miscalculated. The rise of a nomenklatura-mafia bourgeoisie was not a stage on the road to capitalist stabilisation, but a factor precluding stabilisation. Knowing the real situation, the wealthy "new Russians" were not such fools as to leave their money here; they put it into Swiss banks or London real estate. Real investment within Russia collapsed.
Huge profits from the pillage of state assets meant the ability to pay astronomical bribes. As a result, the new authorities were unable to create even a minimally honest, minimally efficient state machine — a precondition for stability and economic growth.
The bureaucracy is now saturated with crime up to a very high level. The head of Russia's Federal Counter-Intelligence Service, Sergei Stepashin, declared recently: "Crime is making ever-deeper inroads into the structures of power, in the government and in the presidential entourage". With the information-gathering capacities of the former KGB at his disposal, Stepashin is in a position to know.
Economy blocked
Trying desperately to find something optimistic to say about Yeltsin's "reforms", pro-capitalist journalists have written of a swashbuckling new sector of private business, playing fast and loose with the law but nevertheless creating a market economy. To a large degree the "boom" in the private sector is imaginary. Where it exists, it has a good deal in common with the flush on the cheeks of the dying consumptive.
A criminalised society soon develops a class of big-spending millionaires, and a layer of high-priced retail and service enterprises catering to their tastes. The fact remains, however, that near-universal criminality is almost as bad a medium for capitalist entrepreneurship as it is possible to imagine.
To the taxes of the state are added the taxes of protection racketeers — in Moscow, typically, around a third of profits. Contracts with state structures are liable to be worthless if someone else pays a higher bribe, and court suits are often futile for the same reason. Not even basic property rights are assured; as the owners of retail kiosks regularly discover, a wrong choice of "protectors" can lose everything.
The new "biznes", as distinct from enterprises established during the Soviet period, produces virtually nothing. The layer of little industrial sweatshops that forms the underpinning of Third World economies has failed almost completely to develop in Russia. Even with wages at around US$3 a day, the returns from productive investment are too low to justify the extraordinary risks.
Yeltsin set the scene for the criminalisation of society when he accepted the advice of liberal ideologues that the dropping of state controls and the crash privatisation of state assets were necessary whatever the cost. Now the president and his allies are discovering that the cost of these policies has been so high as to render the whole exercise self-defeating.
The desperation of Yeltsin's campaign against crime thus comes as no surprise. There is, however, little chance that the campaign will have much impact. The security apparatus is already too corrupted. Russia is a country where crime bosses who make $200 an hour are pursued by senior investigators who make $200 a month. The consequences are sadly predictable.
But this is not the most fundamental reason the crime-fighting campaign appears doomed. Politicians such as Yeltsin and Mayor Luzhkov cannot launch a serious attack on the nomenklatura-mafia bourgeoisie. With their popular approval ratings now below 20%, what other social base do Russia's leaders possess?
Defeating crime can be carried out only by forces which do not have an interest in looting the productive wealth inherited from the Soviet era. These forces are primarily the working class, together with the democratic intelligentsia and peasantry. But by restricting human rights and creating new tools for economic victimisation, the president's decree will expedite attacks on these very layers.
Whatever shape the new "crime-fighting" legislation assumes, it will clearly include a marked expansion of the powers of the state security organs. These are under the direct control of the president, rather than of the government or parliament.
As a result, Yeltsin will have scored a major advance in his battle to concentrate key decision-making functions in the presidency. The decree against banditry is most unlikely to make society less criminal. But it will make it significantly more dictatorial.