Crime syndicates born out of the corruption-ridden privatisation of the 1990s have not only survived but also developed close ties with the law-enforcement agencies in Russia.
Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia is still struggling to overcome the consequences of the chaotic and crime-ridden transition from Communism to free market. The year 2010 gave shocking evidence of how deeply organised crime is entrenched in Russia. In November, the country was shaken by the brutal massacre of 12 people, including four children, at a farmer's home in Kushchevskaya town in Krasnodar Territory, Russia's bread basket region in the south. A federal-level investigation ordered by President Dmitry Medvedev — the killers did not spare even a nine-month-old baby — revealed a chilling picture of crime and corruption. A 100-men gang, led by a local legislator, had terrorised the town of 35,000 for more than a decade. The band committed hundreds of rapes, murders, and land-grabs. It was officially registered as a private security company working for the region's one of the largest and most profitable farms owned by the gangsters.
The Kushchevskaya tragedy came as a shock. It was widely believed that the time in the 1990s when President Boris Yeltsin called Russia the “biggest mafia state in the world” and “superpower of crime” was long gone, and that freewheeling banditry came to an end after Vladimir Putin replaced the weak and ailing Yeltsin as President in 2000 and rebuilt the state machine. It has, however, turned out that the crime syndicates born out of the corruption-ridden privatisation of the 1990s have not only survived but also developed close ties with the law-enforcement agencies.
The Kushchevskaya gangsters acted with absolute impunity thanks to collusion with the local police, prosecutors and government officials who covered up their crimes. As investigation progressed, several law-enforcement officials in the Krasnodar region lost their jobs and at least one senior police officer was arrested on charges of extortion.
Mr. Medvedev said the massacre revealed “systematic corruption” in the law-enforcement agencies, while Prime Minister Putin spoke of the “failure of the entire system of law enforcement.” Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachev made a shocking admission: “Similar gangs are active in every district of the region,” he said adding they “enjoy support in the regional centre.”
It soon emerged that mafia groups are just as active in other parts of Russia too. Emboldened by the Kushchevskaya investigation, small business owners in Gus-Khrustalny, 250 km from Moscow, addressed an open letter to Mr. Putin complaining of organised crime and police cover-up in their town, famous for its crystal ware industry. After Moscow ordered a sweeping review of all grave crime cases across the country, a number of senior regional officials were arrested on charges of running criminal rings.
The media are sceptical of the current crackdown breaking the stranglehold of organised crime on Russian provinces. Rossiiskaya Gazeta, central mouthpiece of the federal government published from Moscow, recalled that it had exposed mass rapes and terror in Kushchevskaya five years ago, but no action was taken at the time. The independent Novaya Gazeta daily, co-owned by the former President, Mikhail Gorbachev, told the story of Volgodonsk, a town with a population of 1,70,000 in the south that has been under mafia control for the past two decades. Seven years ago, 60 local businessmen driven to despair by racketing, intimidation and assaults wrote to President Putin. His intervention led to the firing of a regional police chief and the sentencing of seven gangsters to suspended prison terms, but the criminal grip of the town has only tightened since.
Mr. Medvedev, in last year's state of the nation address, said the impotence of the law-enforcement agencies was the result of “their direct merger with criminals.” This merger came to light in both Kushchevskaya and Volgodonsk, where local gang leaders were members of municipal councils elected on the ticket of the ruling United Russia party. Criminals also infiltrated the government in Novosibirsk, a city with a population of 1.5 million called Russia's Siberian capital — where a Deputy Mayor doubled up as a gang leader masterminding contract murders and other crimes — and Saratov, another million-strong city where the head of a municipal district ran a band of killers, and many other regions.
After the Kushchevskaya massacre, Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin issued a stunning warning that the country was in the danger of becoming a criminal state and suffering complete collapse. “One has to admit, honestly, that the organised crime disease has too deeply infected our country,” he wrote in Rossiyskya Gazeta. “Crime is undermining the foundations of our fragile legal system … [and] corroding the fabric of our still immature civil society.”
The judge noted that a “fusion of authorities and criminals” had taken place in many parts where it was becoming impossible to distinguish between local government and mafia operations. If the mafia isn't pushed back, “it will raise the question whether Russia can survive beyond the next 10 years.”
It is for the first time since the 1990s that anyone, let alone the head of Russia's apex court, has spoken about the crime scenario in such apocalyptic terms. Mr. Zorkin also questioned the main achievement of Mr. Putin's eight-year presidency — economic and political stability. “What stability are we talking about? Stability for whom? For the people or for criminal communities that are terrorising the people?” The Constitutional Court Chairman urged the government to study and apply the radical methods of fighting the mafia the United States resorted to in the 1930s and again in the 1960s.
The Kremlin appears to be waking up to the need to take urgent action against organised crime. On New Year's Eve, Mr. Medvedev signed the law on the establishment of an independent Investigation Committee, a Russian analogue of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which will report directly to the President, who will also have exclusive powers to appoint and dismiss its head.
Parliament will soon consider a new law aimed at overhauling Russia's notoriously violent and corrupt police. Mr. Medvedev said the bill should close all loopholes for potential abuse of police power. The law would step up centralisation of the police force, which today reports to both the Federal Interior Ministry and regional government bodies. In a symbolic break with the past, the Communist-era name for the force, “militsia,” will be replaced with “politsia” or police.
A majority of Russians, however, do not believe that the effort to overhaul law enforcement will improve its ability to fight crime. Fifty-two per cent of Russians in a recent poll said the police reform would boil down to a cosmetic name change and personnel reshuffling. Public scepticism stems from abominable corruption that has plagued the state machine, including all law-enforcement agencies. The Berlin-based Transparency International estimates the Russian corruption market at around $300 billion, which is close to a quarter of the Gross Domestic Product; other calculations are much higher.
After becoming President in 2008, Mr. Medvedev declared war on corruption but had to admit last summer that the effort brought few palpable results so far. “It is obvious that no one is satisfied with how corruption is being fought — neither our citizens, who consider corruption one of our country's most serious problems and challenges, nor our officials,” he said. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International, Russia slid to 154th among 178 countries surveyed in 2010 — next to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia and Tajikistan.
Lack of progress in fighting the evil is blamed on entrusting the effort to officials most likely involved in corruption schemes themselves. As one analyst put it, “The corrupt system is trying to fight itself.” None of Mr. Medvedev's anti-graft initiatives has empowered public groups, the media or Parliament to exercise effective oversight over corrupt officials or provided them with tools to stop corrupt practices.
A growing chorus of experts and politicians says Russia's problems with fighting crime and corruption are rooted in the absence of a working democracy, where there is no political competition, no checks and balances and where is a docile legislature.
“We need a democratic, competitive environment, sources of initiative at all levels, activity of civic society, and real public control,” Mr. Gorbachev wrote in an article last month. He called on Mr. Medvedev to formulate a new democratic agenda for Russia in 2011.
“The present-day elite do not want to or cannot solve this problem [of corruption]. A presidential initiative is needed, supported by civil society and brave new political forces, in order to achieve a real breakthrough.”
source;the hindu