On
the take
In
Russia there are two kinds of
people: those who give bribes,
and those who receive them.
Leonid Bershidsky, who’s
done his fair share of giving,
reveals why maybe this is not
such a bad thing.
Just this morning, I took a
shortcut on my way to work. I
have a problem waking up in
December: my body tells me I
should be hibernating rather
than showering, shaving and
driving through Moscow’s deadly
traffic jams. So I’m always on
the verge of being late, and I
hate that feeling. Ergo, I took
a shortcut and was greeted by a
traffic cop with an evil grin on
his face. He didn’t even have to
say anything, but he did.
“That’s no way to drive,” he
said.
I didn’t have to
say anything, either, and I
didn’t. I just handed over my
driver’s license wrapped in a
500 ruble note.
The
cop returned the license and
saluted. I kept going. I had
just saved time: now I would not
need to go to a bank (as is the
way here) to pay a fine. But now
I would almost certainly be
late: by stopping me somewhat
unnecessarily, the cop had
wasted three of my precious
morning minutes.
That, according to the classical
argument, is exactly the problem
with corruption. While it seems
to speed things up, thus curing
certain inefficiencies, it also
creates an incentive for
bureaucrats to slow things down
so they can extort a bribe.
Daniel Kaufman and Shang-Jin Wei,
of the World Bank and the IMF,
respectively, had to study 2,400
companies in 58 countries to
find out that the more firms
have to bribe, the more time
they waste on negotiating with
bureaucrats who are supposed to
expedite business. But it’s
obvious even without massive
amounts of proof that a corrupt
bureaucratic system writes rules
and places hurdles so it can
extort more money. If Moscow
traffic police did not take
bribes, that sergeant would not
have been waiting for me on the
street corner. The more corrupt
traffic cops are, the more of
them are out there on city
streets hoping to collect.
That’s why you don’t need
Transparency International to
see that in Vienna, traffic
police are less bribeable than
in Moscow: you just don’t see
them anywhere in Vienna.
Corruption is bad. A strong
civil society reduces corruption
by exercising public control
over bureaucrats. Right? Wrong,
if you ask respected Russian
sociologist Simon Kordonsky.
Kordonsky believes corruption
networks are Russian
civil society, and he recently
articulated this idea in one of
Moscow’s more highbrow opinion
journals. “Our corruption,” he
argues, “is a system of actions
by members of the civil society
that allows them to attain their
goals in spite of government
regulations, rules and laws,
using bureaucrats to fulfill
their needs. And, symmetrically,
it is the use of state powers by
officials to satisfy the needs
of their relatives, friends,
friends of friends, and those
recommended by friends of
friends. After all, a bureaucrat
is just as much a member of
civil society as the man on the
street.”
According to Kordonsky, the
strength of Russian civil
society lies in its unshakable
institutions: the banya (public
bath, with or without girls,
restaurants frequented by
certain professional groups,
fishing and hunting trips,
summer home communities. These
great institutions exist almost
everywhere, but it’s
possible—and Kordonsky makes a
compelling case for this
theory—that in Russia, the range
of services they provide is one
of the widest in the world. An
incomplete list, according to
Kordonsky: “optimizing taxes,
winning a tender, getting a
building permit, getting a
relative care at an ‘elite’
clinic, helping a son avoid the
draft, sending a daughter to a
good school, getting back a
driver’s license confiscated by
the police, cutting short a
criminal investigation against a
partner, or instigating a police
raid on a rival.”
Money and favors are exchanged
through these informal networks,
but you need to know whom to
pay, and you need to know how
not to offend while paying. When
you are asking a bureaucrat to
accept a bribe, you have to do
it nicely. In most cases, the
bureaucrat is taking a risk for
you out of sincere sympathy for
your plight or a deep personal
liking. And be aware: while
offering the bureaucrat
compensation is certainly the
polite thing to do, it is by no
means full payment for services
rendered. A building permit may
be worth $500,000 to you, but
helping you could cost your
benefactor a 20-year career that
might have ended in, who knows,
a ministerial post or even the
presidency. The scale is not
tilted in your favor, and your
friend from the banya needs you
to understand that.
The
notion of corruption as protest
against an oppressive state, and
a valid alternative to it, has
gotten a lot of mileage in
Russia. Vasily Aksyonov, one of
the Soviet Union’s finest
writers, wrote with the utmost
sympathy of the fartsovschiki*
illegal traders in Western
goods, who obviously had to
bribe cops to operate in
Brezhnev-era Moscow. To the
author, now a U.S. citizen,
these minor crooks were no
lesser dissidents than the few
openly critical intellectuals of
the time.
These days, the state is slowly
returning to the level of
pervasiveness it maintained in
the early 1970s, Aksyonov’s
heyday. So once again, it is
theoretically possible to use
corruption as a form of protest.
This would mean, for example,
that a businessman who pays off
cops and bureaucrats is not an
extortion victim—he is a civic
figure, a freedom fighter.
One
of the academic terms for
widespread bribery is “state
capture.” In Russia, it is an
ambiguous term. Who is capturing
whom? Both sides, the state and
the citizen, are equipped with a
healthy predatory instinct. So
they end up capturing each
other. It’s a symbiosis that
Kordonsky and I find hard to
replace with any other credible
system. I know what to do when a
bureaucrat winks. He knows how
to position himself for the
wink. Efficiency may be
important, but it’s not
everything.
