Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (21 page)

Everywhere, an executive-branch aggrandizement took place, irrespective of whether regions were ruled by ‘democrats’ or Communists. In Krasnodar province, for example, old party elites lost scarcely a step after 1991 as a national-populist rose to power locally and maintained his position by doling out goodies and patronage. Tomsk province was convulsed by a strong democratic movement centred on the regional legislature, yet by 1994 pluralist politics had faded and the executive ran roughshod over the legislature. A similarly high-handed executive formed 156

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in Perm province, but they skipped the interlude of democratic movements and went directly to dividing the spoils of office. For Krasnodar, Perm, and even ‘democratic’ Tomsk, one scholar has persuasively argued, ‘the re-establishment of executive dominance can be attributed to the continuation of old practices by incumbent politicians, by the weakness of the democratic opposition, or by presidential moves against [the federal legislature]’.
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But in St Petersburg, ‘democrats’ dominated both the executive and the legislature. Yet the St Petersburg regional legislature never managed to operate effectively as policymaker.

That ‘democratic’ St Petersburg came to resemble ‘Communist’ Krasnodar suggested systemic factors at work. Across the country, one could trace a movement over the years 1989–94 of officials from high Communist Party posts first to elected regional soviets, then to the new regional executive bodies, which appropriated the local Soviet-era Communist Party headquarters sporting the best offices and communication equipment. This national trend could not be explained by the usual invocation of the baneful influence of Moscow’s ‘robber barons’. Nor could primary blame fall to the Kremlin, since the Kremlin was preoccupied with carrying out its own executive-branch aggrandizement at the federal level (as was Moscow’s city government). Rather, the triumph of an executive-dominated, winner-take-all spoils system was rooted in the executive branch’s manipulation of property, which was transferred to insiders connected to the execu-157

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tive or to members of the executive themselves. Regional legislatures busied themselves with acquiring ‘their share’

of the goodies distributed by the local executive.

What followed upon the loss of Communist Party and planned economy centralism was not so much ‘decentralization’, as many commentators suggested, as the formation of eighty-nine largely disconnected fiefs. Moscow’s relations with the regions were semi-regulated by complicated budgetary politics and bilateral ‘treaties’, many of which, like local laws, contradicted the Federal Constitution. Branches of federal agencies—police, customs, tax collection—were dependent on regional bosses for offices, heat, salary supplements, and housing. Of course, regional barons and republic presidents did not completely control local property. But they used their office to confis-cate revenue-generating businesses, subsidize friendly media, and choke off hostile media. Compelled to submit to elections, regional executives, especially in Russia’s national republics, wielded powers over candidate registration, budget funds, and other means to block potential opponents. Many still lost re-election bids, but their successors often continued the flouting of federal laws.

Kremlin pressure, and threats by President Putin to try to return the country to a system of centrally appointed regional leaders, did curb some of the most outlandish behaviour. But the Russian Federation—a product of the Soviet era, the Union’s dissolution, and improvised bargaining—stood some way from becoming a functioning federation.

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Towards the rule of law?

Alone among the Union republics, Russia did not have its own KGB—until May 1991, when one was established and given a handful of offices inside USSR KGB headquarters.

After the August 1991 putsch, Yeltsin forced Gorbachev to appoint a person who would dismantle the Soviet KGB, but he simultaneously named a conservative career police official to run the incipient Russian KGB (which, though subdivided into foreign and domestic intelligence and variously renamed, was still colloquially known by its infamous Soviet-era acronym). At the time the Union was dissolved, the Russian KGB had grown by annexation from twenty-three officers to 20,000. Soon, it would expand to more than 100,000 and appropriate the USSR KGB’s wealth of office buildings and other installations. This survival of the domestic arm of the KGB testified to Yeltsin’s opportunism and political weakness: he had a mere dozen or so loyal clients, many from outside Moscow and thus lacking roots in the capital’s deeply rooted, expansive patronage groups. It also testified to the undertow exerted by institutional legacies, and to the sheer number of Soviet state personnel that Russia inherited.

For the post-Soviet KGB, which still occupied the same armada of buildings in historic central Moscow, there were no more ideological nonconformists to persecute.

Catching foreign spies was complicated by the fact that so many former and present KGB operatives were privately 159

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selling classified information, not all of it bogus. Anti-terrorist (and terrorist) operations claimed substantial man hours, but so did clandestine surveillance on the state elite, and the compilation of damaging dossiers on businessmen and politicians for cash. To spy on his staff and government, the Russian president formed his own mini-KGB, the Presidential Security Service (PSS), out of the former KGB directorate that had both protected and kept tabs on the Soviet elite.
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The PSS also established a private firm, which specialized in the blackmail of the president’s enemies and the assistance of court favourites.

Yeltsin disbanded a rival ‘parliamentary guard’ that had been set up by a former first deputy chief of the USSR

KGB, Filipp Bobkov, for Khasbulatov. But Bobkov then took numerous KGB operatives with him to a private media and financial company, MOST, which in effect acquired its own private KGB.
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The gas monopoly, too, formed its own private KGB, as did many avowedly criminal groups.

Most KGB agents in private employ were either moon-lighters who retained their state posts or those who had left the agency yet remained in the ‘active reserves’. Whatever the case, the fragmented organization’s mystique and discipline were gone. What endured were many notorious practices, which—like other state ‘services’—had become available to the highest bidder. Supposed transcripts of eavesdropped conversations among the high and mighty became a staple of Russian politics, yet these proved useful primarily for boosting newspaper circulation and 160

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TV ratings. For attacking rival businessmen and politicians, a far more effective tool—also available for private hire and susceptible to political manipulation—was the new 40,000-strong tax police, whose power flowed from the rich ambiguities of Russia’s prolific tax regulations and the lethal rates. Another handy weapon in political and commercial warfare turned out to be the state procurators and courts staffed by judges who, like the KGB

operatives, were inherited from the Soviet Union.

No aspect of Russia’s transformation was more overlooked or more important than legal reforms. Back in 1989, the ‘Principles of the Law on Court Organization’

passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet had established the presumption of innocence, a defendant’s right to an attorney to combat coercion during confessions, and the introduction of jury trials to force prosecutors to prove accusations. But the Soviet Ministry of Justice, which controlled judges’ wages and court budgets, aggressively subverted plans for the bureaucratic independence of the judiciary. So did the Soviet Procuracy, which was significantly larger and better financed than the court system, and had no parallel in a liberal order. Performing the functions of a public prosecutor, a procurator also had responsibility for ‘overseeing legality’, which meant the operation of the courts and state administration. The Procuracy, still lodged in its Soviet-era edifice, did little to ensure that the higher-ups in the executive branch behaved legally, yet it doggedly fought elimination of its power to supervise the courts.

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Even before the end of the Union, Russia’s Supreme Soviet adopted a ‘Concept of Judicial Reform’, outlining how Russian law and practice could be brought into line with international norms. The ‘Concept’ proposed establishing judicial control over the police, investigators, and procurator, institutionalizing the presumption of innocence as well as the right against self-incrimination, eliminating the accusatory functions of judges, and having trial by jury. A July 1993 ‘Law on Court Organization’ enacted some of these goals, such as reviving jury trials (reintroduced, experimentally, in nine of Russia’s eighty-nine regions). In addition, the 1993 Constitution reduced the scope of the Procuracy’s jurisdiction, though, in a 1995 ‘Law on the Procuracy’, the agency reacquired broad oversight powers over state administration. Also, whatever the law, many procurators simply skipped trials, leaving judges to interrogate defendants rather than act as neutral arbiters. Procurators even more than judges continued to wield vast formal powers on legal matters, though both groups were subjected to political pressure and, given their minuscule salaries, to financial inducement.
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A minority of high-level legal officials, guided by the view that Russia constituted a part of Europe, continued to provide impetus for legal reform—as had happened throughout modern Russian history. They struggled to have Russia’s court system meet the new demands of a private-property, Constitutional order. The Soviet-era Supreme Court retained general jurisdiction over the law, 162

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and higher courts continued a trend to show little defer-ence to lower courts, issuing reversals even on findings of fact.
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But the Soviet system for settling commercial dis-putes, state arbitrage (an underused administrative agency), was remade into arbitrage courts, and, in another innovation, a Constitutional Court was established (it was suspended by President Yeltsin in 1993–4, and, when revived, its powers were curtailed, but it groped its way towards issuing authoritative opinions on the country’s Basic Law
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). The formation of this tripartite judicial system was accompanied by a plethora of new laws, and an increase in the number of legal professionals, though these remained relatively few, to say nothing of their quality. For example, the position of ‘people’s assessors’—non-professionals who had ruled alongside judges in the Soviet period—was eliminated, yet many were drafted to serve as judges. Over the 1990s, Russia’s feeble population of judges nearly tripled from 6,000 to around 17,000—giving the country still only one judge for every seven or so KGB operatives.

Court funding, lacking a separate line item in the federal budget, was haphazard and severely inadequate.

Judges, like most other federal officials (except the KGB), became dependent on regional executives for housing, heat, and everything else. The 1993 ‘presidential’ Constitution afforded the president the power to nominate judges for the high courts, and to appoint judges to all federal courts, but the term ‘federal’ was not defined; Boris Yeltsin took it to mean all courts in the Russian 163

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Federation, but many regional leaders appointed local judges and even unilaterally restructured the judiciary on their territory. Plans to create interregional federal courts went unrealized. All of this reinforced the conspicuous disunity of the Russian Federation’s legal space. Even Constitutional Court decisions could not be easily enforced outside Moscow—or inside, for that matter.

Implementation of judicial decisions was a general problem, while decrees on combating organized crime granted security officials extraordinary powers of search and seizure that partially undermined the trend towards the protection of suspects’ rights. Even many well-intentioned laws were very poorly written.

Inheriting Soviet institutional structures, and confront-ing difficult real-world challenges, Russian legal reform faced an uphill climb. The country experienced a great expansion of judicial jurisdiction, averaging in the mid-and late 1990s more than five million civil cases and well over one million criminal cases per year, yet many wronged parties sought redress not in the courts, where attorneys were necessary (and costly), but through free petitions to the local procurator, as in Soviet times, or through political connections. The ‘demand’ for law did not immediately follow upon its supply.
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And yet, the greater role played by bribes, even the violent attacks on judges and court premises, perversely demonstrated the increasing importance of Russia’s resource-poor, be-leaguered legal machinery. Rather than functioning as a set of universally applicable and consistently enforced 164

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rules, the law in Russia remained a source of unpredict-ability, but further efforts at legal reforms were likely, driven partly by shifting business interests, and partly by a spreading practical desire to become competitive in the world economy.

Institutional kasha

Proponents of ‘reform’ inside and outside Russia, using self-serving categories such as ‘democrat’ (for themselves) and ‘Communist’ (for their enemies), obscured the fundamental issue of what happened to the remnants of the Soviet state. There was no mass emigration, no demolition of state office buildings—on the contrary, they were all packed to the hilt, and many underwent extension. Gran-diose numbers of state personnel as well as long-established practices, even many entire agencies, endured the break-up. And, just as the nature of the collapse profoundly shaped the entire post-Soviet environment, so Soviet-era institutions and officials, as formidable ‘facts on the ground’, exerted immense influence on the scope and pace of any directed change. Of course, multiple new institutions were created. But, even when staffed by people with little or no experience in the Communist Party apparat or Soviet state, the new executive institutions bore the unmistakable stamp of the Soviet epoch, and even of the tsarist period.