Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 10 – New Russia
legislation to prevent officials from having cash or stock accounts abroad,
promoted by the regime as a step toward “the nationalization of the elite,”
brings Russia into line with countries like Bangladesh rather than the West and
gives the Kremlin powers much like those of medieval Muscovy, a Moscow
commentator says.
In an article in “Novaya gazeta,”
Mariya Snegovaya says that Russia is set to join “such ‘progressive’ states as
Venezuela, Nigeria, Kenya and Bangladesh” by banning politicians and officials
from having cash or share accounts abroad, a policy that is being sold by the
Kremlin as “’the nationalization of the elites’” (novayagazeta.ru/economy/57985.html).
Already passed by both houses of the
Russian parliament and likely to be signed, the new arrangement, polls suggest,
enjoys widespread support among Russians who consider that it constitutes an
effective means of combatting corruption and who apparently accept the regime’s
argument that that is what the measure is for.
But in fact, Snegovaya says, this
measure is “a reaction to the mass protests of 2011-2012 and the Magnitsky
List,” but one that is anything but “in the democratic key.” Instead, she points out, this is an attempt
to give the top leaders the ability to counter any possibility that “the first
signs” of a division within the elite will grow into a challenge to their
power.
That is because, by depriving
political figures and the bureaucracy of the right to keep some of its
resources abroad, the Kremlin deprives them of any independence because the Russian
Federation does not genuinely protect property rights. Instead, she says, property
there is something that exists only at the pleasure of the regime.
Moreover, “despite frequent
references to ‘Western experience’” in the course of the campaign for this
legislation, most Western countries have nothing like this law. Few ban foreign holdings, although they do
require both declarations of holdings and the placement of them in blind trusts
in the case of the most senior officials.
There are laws in Western countries
which require more junior officials like policemen and firemen to live in the
jurisdiction where they are employed, Snegovaya notes, “but there are no laws
specially defining the type of accounts which officials are allowed to own,”
because private property in Western countries is “inviolable.”
The sources of this new Russian law are
to be found in Russian history, she says.
Citing the works of Harvard historian Richard Pipes, she notes that
Russian tsars in medieval times deprived the nobility of independence by
depriving them of any independent property. Instead, the tsar “de facto” owned everything, and others
used it only by permission.
That
rendered the nobility “totally dependent” on the tsar. The only way out was
flight abroad, but the tsars made it clear that that would not be tolerated
either, a history that not only ordinary Russians today but quite clearly their
leaders are very familiar, even if the two draw very different conclusions
about its applicability now.
One
can be sure, Snegovaya continues, that “the demand to return accounts to Russia
will not be limited to the elite and will be extended to ordinary citizens” as
well. Indeed, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, has already hinted as
much by saying that there should be what he called “’the nationalization of the
entire society.’”
Such
an approach, she warns, will mean that property and power will in fact be “completely dependent on the arbitrariness of the authorities,”
thereby depriving Russian citizens of “their basic rights and destroying the
foundations of private property which had begun to appear in the country.”
That
will constitute a real conservative revolution, the “Novaya gazeta” writer
concludes, because the Kremlin in this way “will successfully return the
country to it immemorial radical traditions, right back to those of the Muscovite
Tsardom.”
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