By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Russian President Boris Yeltsin intervened personally during August to block his own corruption-fighting unit from investigating crooked deals by officials of the Moscow city administration.
Responding to complaints of corruption at all levels of the Russian state machine, Yeltsin had earlier appointed Yuri Boldyrev, a former deputy to the USSR parliament, as chief state inspector.
Boldyrev and his staff quickly concluded that some of the most brazen corruption centred on the privatisation of commercial property in Moscow. In June, a special commission consisting of four groups of representatives of the Yeltsin government was set up to conduct detailed inquiries.
Moscow is now emerging as the chief centre of Russian capitalism. Although the new social system is feeble and chaotic, its operations have created intense competition for Moscow's small supply of office space. For officials who can supply firms with suitable premises, the opportunities for bribe-taking are almost limitless.
Many officials of the city administration have also set up their own firms, taking advantage of the fact that in the new capitalist Russia, conflict of interest laws scarcely exist. Stories abound of city functionaries signing over office buildings to their own companies, for outrageously low payments.
Almost the only person who still denies the existence of massive corruption in the Moscow city administration is Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Several times in the past year, Luzhkov has brought libel suits in response to charges surrounding deals by his own
firms.
Moscow city officials react with fury to any suggestion that their actions should be investigated, and in the past have regularly succeeded in having such inquiries stopped. With the setting up of Boldyrev's special commission — backed by the authority of the Yeltsin government — it seemed that the big guns might finally be aimed at the crooks in the Moscow administration.
Predictably, Luzhkov did his best to thwart the investigators. On August 3 the mayor sent a telegram to the regional heads of the city administration, ordering them to stop furnishing materials to the commission.
Boldyrev and his team were determined to persist with their inquiries despite this setback. But two days later came an instruction from Yeltsin himself, ordering the commission to "cease its investigations in the city of Moscow until the details of these investigations have been clarified with the President of the Russian Federation".
With their work at a standstill, and no indication that Yeltsin was prepared to let it resume, Boldyrev and his team were left wondering whether the government's promises to fight corruption were anything more than window-dressing.
Hoping to embarrass the government into letting him continue his work, Boldyrev then revealed the whole story to the press, in an extensive interview reported in the September issue of the journal We.
"Huge number of city officials are now selling off what doesn't belong to them", Boldyrev stated, "and their activity is completely out of control.
"In the past, state officials used to hand out
free passes to sanatoriums. Now that privatisation has begun, they're deciding who will receive ownership of the means of production and who will receive the city's most valuable real estate. It's easy to see why corruption in the ranks of officialdom has reached such dangerous proportions, and why it continues to grow rapidly.
"The punishments for the illegal transfer of property are completely inadequate ... In the most extreme cases, the officials involved stand to lose their jobs.
"Only a few exceptional people prefer to remain honest. Corruption is becoming all-pervasive ... Everyone breaks the law — the parliament, the government and the police."
Only a few of the Western business people active in Russia were ready to collaborate with anti-corruption investigators, Boldyrev observed. "They've grown used to our corruption, and accept it as a sort of additional tax. Some foreign entrepreneurs even profit from it."
The success of the struggle against corruption, Boldyrev maintained, depended above all on President Yeltsin's attitude to the problem. Later in his interview, the chief investigator suggested what this attitude might be.
Various members of the Yeltsin government, Boldyrev noted, opposed the clean-up campaign on the grounds that corruption was a necessary evil during the construction of a capitalist society.
During July, Boldyrev had summoned representatives of a number of political parties and outlined his plans for the fight against corruption. All of those present had responded enthusiastically, but none of the parties had gone on to do anything concrete.
"Everyone says they agree, but no-one gives any
real support."