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No Moolah - No Marches

By Yuri Politov

Russia cannot have proper opposition because of corruption. Such was the unexpected conclusion that the authors of the "Corruption and Extra-systemic Opposition" report arrived at. The report was presented the other day by the Democracy Issues Research Foundation.

The authors based their report on the premise that there was rather more to corruption than bribing civil servants. Having examined media publications over the last few years and interviewed fringe politicos themselves, they concluded that corruption permeated virtually all the organizations of the so-called extra-systemic opposition, from the Other Russia not registered anywhere to [Eduard Limonov's] banned National Bolshevist Party.

"The document abounds in instances to that effect," says Democracy Issues Research Foundation director Maxim Grigoryev. "Take, say, the "dacha case" involving [ex-premier] Mikhail Kasyanov and his attempts to buy up the Democratic Party, or bribing and funding the opposition by Boris Berezovsky from abroad, and before him, by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin. Or else corruption scandals that overshadowed Boris Nemtsov's vice-premiership."

There is nothing to prevent the authorities from instigating criminal proceedings against the protagonists of these cases, the experts believe, but oddly enough, this is not being done; either because the authorities fear further accusations of hounding dissidents, or because of corruption within the law-and-order agencies.

"Corruption is above all detrimental to the opposition itself," political analyst Pavel Danilin says confidently. "The public, however, is yet to wake up to the enormity of the threat posed by political corruption. After all, if any given political decision can be bought for a certain sum of money, then the entire country can in theory be bought as well."

This article originally appeared in Izvestia on 22 May 2009. Our translation of it is posted here on the fair use principle.

Roy's comment: It is a pity that the piece in Izvestia is so brief, and the facts collected in are not more widely publicized. The reason may be that we here in Russia are only too well aware of the malodorous background of such characters as Kasyanov or Nemtsov or Kasparov or Limonov, and act on the principle the less said of them, the better. In the foreign media, though, they are presented as democracy's knights in shining armor. A stronger effort to acquaint the public abroad with pertinent facts might - and I stress that it merely might - dampen some of the enthusiasm with which foreign media and politicos heap praise on these clowns. This also goes for certain Russophobic elements in the Russian media, with their unwavering support for anyone declaring themselves in opposition to the "Putin regime," however smelly these "oppositionists" may be. Curiously, a bona fide opposition party like the Communists is simply ignored by these elements, too busy building up a bunch of unsavory characters like those discussed in the Maxim Grigoryev report.