The nature of Russian governance has moved on somewhat since the 16th century. But one thing has remained the same: post-Soviet Russia is a profoundly feudal society. I don’t mean that as a generalised insult denoting ignorance and backwardness. I mean really feudal, in its most literal sense. Feudalism is the exchange of service for protection. In the absence of functional legal or law enforcement systems, people’s only real protection lies in a network of personal and professional relationships with powerful individuals. And so it is in Russia today — for every member of society with something, however small, to lose, from a market stall owner to the nation’s top oligarchs. Your freedom from arbitrary arrest, fraudulent expropriation and extortion by bureaucrats is only as good as your connections.
… In November, 37-year-old tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died of pancreatic failure in Moscow’s most notorious remand prison, Butirskaya. At the time of his arrest Magnitsky had been working for Hermitage Capital, once the biggest investor on Russia’s stock market. Magnitsky’s crime had been to complain about a $230 million tax refund scam apparently perpetrated by corrupt tax officials and police. These criminals had used companies stolen from Hermitage during a police raid as vehicles for claiming false tax refunds. Magnitsky and the Hermitage team had painstakingly documented the details of the scam and complained to every official body they could think of. Yet instead of pursuing the guilty, Russian authorities arrested Magnitsky. According to his heartbreaking prison diary, investigators repeatedly tried to persuade him to give testimony against Hermitage and drop the accusations against the police and tax authorities. When Magnitsky refused, he was moved to more and more horrible sections of the prison, and ultimately denied the medical treatment which could have saved his life.
… The case, which had garnered next to no publicity while Magnitsky was alive, suddenly made the pages of the Moscow business press on his death (though not, of course, the tightly controlled national television stations). The presidential human rights council, a rather beleaguered body of activists, brought the Magnitsky case directly to the President’s ear. Medvedev’s response, to his credit, was swift. To date, 20 prison officials have been fired, as well as the deputy head of the Moscow Interior Ministry in charge of investigating tax crimes. More heads will doubtless roll in the coming weeks — although I would bet that the real perpetrators of the tax scam, reliably reported by the New Times magazine to be in the upper echelons of the Federal Security Service’s ironically named Economic Crimes Department, will escape punishment.
So was justice done? Emphatically no, and not just because the real culprits are likely to escape. The point is that even the firings which have taken place bring Russia no closer to being a law-based society. Rather, it was personal justice, dispensed on the President’s word. In time-honoured fashion, misdeeds were brought to the attention of the good Tsar who dispensed quick and terrible punishment. This is not the ‘order’ that Russians yearn for, it is simply another brand of legal nihilism.
via There’s something rotten in the state of Russia | The Spectator.
So, the system has basically continue as it was under Tzarism, only the “image” we see it’s somewhat different. No, Medvedev does not either want change: he wants things as they ever were:
under the current system, it is your superiors — or, if you are unlucky, your enemies and competitors — who decide whether you get prosecuted for your crimes, or whether to protect you. Crucially, it also means that innocence is no defence against prosecution, as poor Sergei Magnitsky found.
More power, more corruption: the circle goes on, because Putin has already got rid of every possible opposition Russia could have had. Neo-Soviet Russia in all its splendour.
