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From: Vladimir Shlapentokh (shlapent@msu.edu)
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Subject: Montaigne and Roosevelt’s Mistake: Some Fears are Good in Russia and America

Montaigne and Roosevelt’s Mistake: Some Fears are Good in Russia and America
By Vladimir Shlapentokh
Michigan State University

I learned the famous phrase by Michel de Montaigne, “The thing I fear most is fear,” when I lived in the Soviet Union. Only later I learned that it had been paraphrased by Roosevelt in his famous inaugural speech at the depths of the Great Depression. The omnipresent fear of the KGB and the party was overwhelming in Stalin’s times and remained a powerful influence on life in the Soviet Union after 1953. This fear, which did not spare anyone, particularly the upper-class members of the political and economic elite, as well as the intelligentsia, was humiliating and sleazy. George Orwell was the first author in the West to realize what fear meant in a totalitarian society and saw the love of Big Brother as the only medicine against it.

In the giddy days of August 1991, the Muscovites watched with pleasure as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, was dragged to the ground in the square in front of the sinister KGB headquarters where the trembling agents watched from inside. It seemed as though much of the suffering of the Russian people would come to an end and the fear in society would dissipate. Only a few among these joyous Russians suspected that this may be an illusion.

Before 1991 the Russians were the victims of centralized fear. It came from the top of the totalitarian state. Though fearful itself, the Kremlin dispensed fear among its citizens according to its goals. Everyone in Soviet society understood that the Kremlin (and not any other national or local body, including the heinous KGB) made the decisions about who would be repressed and with what intensity. After 1991, those who celebrated on Derzhinsky’s square (assuming that they were now free from their Orwellian fears) would soon be terrorized by a less concentrated and more local source of fear: the worries about criminals of all sorts and corrupt bureaucrats.

The people could not foresee in these moments of elation that in fifteen years their second biggest concern would be “personal security,” as a survey by the Fund of Public Opinion showed in 2004. This concern was ranked second only behind the people’s worries about their health. It was much more important than such issues as unemployment or housing conditions. The fears of street crimes and burglaries haunt the residents of not only small cities (the main problem in Soviet times), but large cities as well, including Moscow, which had indeed been quite safe in the Soviet period. In the beginning of the new century, street crime continued to grow while criminals became more aggressive and crueler than in the pervious decade. In 2004, the number of victims of roving bandits increased in comparison with the previous year by 12 percent, according to official data. As reported by the Moscow newspaper Trud in March 2005, citizens should be particularly afraid of teenagers, whose number among the murderers is growing. Nobody in the country was amazed when they learned that an American consulting company assessed Moscow as one the most criminal and “economically chaotic” cities in the world. Among the 215 cities in the study, Zurich was rated in first place as the safest city in the world, and Baghdad the most dangerous, ranked 215. Moscow’s rating was 178.

While street crime makes life dangerous for ordinary people, organized crime hovers over Russian businesses, even if in the last years the members of the police and FSB “replaced” criminals as “the roof” for businesses, resulting in the extortion of a great deal of money “for security” from frightened managers. Rashid Nurgaliev, minister of internal affairs, reported that in March 2005, 116 mafias controlled 500 big companies. In 2003 these mafias killed 425 businesspeople. The criminal structures are so confident in their invulnerability that in September 2004 the criminal leaders organized an open meeting of representatives from the various cities in the region in downtown Yekaterinburg, a fact that even the minister of internal affairs was forced to recognize as shocking.

In 1991, the Russians could not imagine that they would live in a society in which the political elite constantly defy the law. Indeed, two thirds of the Russians, according to a poll conducted by the Levada Center in January 2005, believed that the bureaucracy is totally corrupt. Would it be possible to predict in 1991 that in 2004 the fear of the arbitrariness of the authorities would be almost as high as the fear of “old age, illnesses and helplessness”?

When Russians talked in 2004-2005 about the arbitrariness of the authorities, they, of course, were thinking first of all about the local police. The Russians see the police as not so much of a threat to criminals, but rather to citizens. In a recent poll, 79 percent felt their “total vulnerability before the police.” The Russians are sure that the police regularly collude with mafias and see it as unreasonable to ask the police for protection against criminals.

Considering the significant rise in crime and corruption, it is interesting to note that the Russians would like to see an increase in one particular type of fear: the fear of violating the law. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, Russia evolved into a society with a very fearful population and an almost fearless bureaucracy­a big contrast to the Soviet times when the situation was reversed. Of course, bureaucrats are afraid from time to time that they will be outsmarted by their rivals or that they will lose their connections to the Kremlin. In general, however, with their total lack of fear before the law, bureaucrats have never been more impertinent in Russian history. Even in tsarist Russia, which was notorious for corruption, the provincial bureaucrats, as Nikolai Gogol showed in his famous play “Inspector General” (1836), were still afraid of an emissary from Saint Petersburg who could discover their machinations. Today, none of the Russian governors or their subordinates is afraid of the auditors from the capital.

The transformation of Russia into a society in which bureaucrats have little fear or respect for the law began in the early 1990s. President Boris Yeltsin, using the privatization of state property as a pretext and an instrument, chose as his major goal the maintenance of his personal power, as well as the enrichment of his family and close circle of aids and associates. Law was openly and impertinently violated by the president who shelled the parliament in 1993, and achieved reelection in 1996 with the help of corrupt moguls in a fraudulent election campaign. With these actions, Yeltsin set the trend for future politicians and the country as a whole.

Putin emerged from obscurity as Yeltsin’s heir with an evident mandate to maintain the status quo in society and to save his mentor and the members of his circle from prison. Putin’s promise in the beginning of his presidency to “install a dictatorship of law” turned out to be completely empty. With his evident encouragement, the State Duma has not adopted a bill to fight corruption, in spite of discussing such a bill for several years. Fifty-one percent of the Russians attested, according to a VTsIOM survey in late 2004, that the state of corruption in the country under Putin became even worse than before; only 7 percent thought that corruption had diminished. Two-thirds of the Russians reported that they were more fearful of criminals now than four years ago. Continuing Yeltsin’s tradition, none of the officials, governors or ministers that have been fired by the president was accused of corruption or other violations of the law. Recently, Putin reappointed as governor of the Far East Sergei Darkin, whose connection to criminal structures is well known to everyone in the region.

The developments in December 2004 in Blagoveshchensk, a city in Bashkiria, are quite noteworthy in this respect. The police in this city, as a punishment for the attack on a police patrol, seized between 500 and 1,000 men, ages 15 to 60, and beat many of them severely. Asked about what happened in Blagoveshchensk, only a quarter of the Russians said that it was an “extraordinary” event; 59 percent were confident that it is “a wide spread practice.” Forty-six percent of the respondents were sure that the guilty police officers will never be punished.

The defiance of law by the bureaucracy created a model of behavior for ordinary Russians, and especially for businesspeople. Watching their superiors and following the old tradition of disrespecting the law, most Russians, while fearing the bureaucracy, police and criminals, violate the law whenever possible. They know that with bribes it is possible to trespass the law in any sphere of life. About two thirds of the Russians, as suggested by Elena Pamfilova, the head of the Russian branch of Transparency International, pay bribes at least once a year and in this way “learn” how much it costs to disrespect the law.

This fundamental fact of Russian life is well known to the terrorists who in the last years were able, for little money, to carry out several terrorist acts. One of the most shocking examples occurred in the airport Domodedovo in August 2004 when two female Chechen terrorists were able to board a plane with dynamite strapped to their bodies; the plane was later destroyed in flight.

The specific coexistence in Russia of a fearful population and a bureaucracy that regularly defies the law should draw the attention of the American public and the U.S. government in particular. Some American liberals, such as Corey Robin in the book Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2004), have highly praised Roosevelt’s famous statement about fear, demanding the total elimination of fear from social life. As Robin wrote, “the politics of fear” have “prevented freedom and equality from becoming a reality in the United States.” This claim, however, is one sided. While we should indeed do our best to diminish certain fears, such as the fear of criminals or discrimination, which can have a negative influence on the quality of life, at the same time, society should sustain the fear of violating the law. Indeed, who would refute the claim that an increased amount of fear of the law among certain members of the business community­such as CEO of WorldCom Bernard Ebbers, Kenneth Lay from Enron, and Dennis Kozlowski from Tyco­would have a positive impact on the American economy, not to mention the benefit to thousands of stockholders and employees. It is indeed encouraging, as reported by Lee Sorkin, a senior white-collar crime lawyer, in the New York Times, that corporations “acting out of fear” have adopted in the post-Enron era a “zero tolerance policy,” trying now to “clean house.”

Would society benefit if drug dealers or sexual predators were more fearful of transgressing the law? The fear of cholesterol has both negative and positive elements. While fighting one sort of fear, we should nurture other fears that are useful for social order.

The current situation in Russia, where the members of the bureaucracy do not fear the law or their superiors, is dangerous to the entire world. The world cannot be confident in the security of nuclear materials and other weapons in Russia if all levels of the bureaucracy are colluding in a general defiance of law and the interests of the state. While asking President Putin not to abandon the road to democracy, we should also suggest that he drastically increase the fear of violating the law in his country.

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to thank Joshua Woods for his editorial contribution to this article.