The last question is perhaps the easiest to answer. Historically, the iron fist of Russian authoritarianism has crushed expressions of popular discontent, but it has not dispelled the mistrust that attaches to a system of governance which claims all power for itself and refuses to respect the rule of law or the rights of its citizens. I wonder if you can guess who wrote the following – and when it was written:
The fundamental principle of Russian government has always been the autocratic ruler who combines all legislative and executive powers and disposes of all the nation’s resources. There are no limits placed on this principle. When the powers of the ruling authority are unlimited – to such an extent that no rights are left over for the subjects – then such a state exists in slavery and its government is despotic.
It is a description that could accurately be applied to the autocracy of the Communist Party or that of Vladimir Putin, but it was actually written in 1809 by Mikhail Speransky, an adviser to Tsar Alexander I. Speransky lamented that Russia had never been a law-governed country, in words that describe perfectly the state of affairs today.
Under autocratic rule there can be no code of law, for where no rights exist there can be no impartial balance between them … there is nothing but the arbitrary decisions of the ruler, prescribing to the citizens their bounden duties until such time as the autocrat decides to change them. The law is completely dependent on the autocratic will which alone creates it, alone establishes the courts, names the judges and gives them their rules … as the fancy strikes it.
Speransky concluded that the absence of justice, law and protection from capricious authority stifles initiative and progress, with the result that the country remained mired in primitive backwardness. Today, in Putin’s Russia, the law continues to be trampled on and bypassed in favour of the dictatorship of the men who occupy the Kremlin. For them, laws exist merely to cloak despotism in the trappings of legitimacy, a fig leaf for the political coercion that makes the system incapable of constructive evolution.
A country’s legal system should not be the expression of the sole will of the ruler; it should be the consolidated will of civil society as a whole. That is what allows a state to function on the basis of consent, where citizens obey the law because they respect its foundations. Such laws must be built upon unchanging principles, ones not subject to alteration on the whim of the moment, and they must be passed by an independent, freely elected parliament. So long as personalised autocracy remains the only political configuration known in Russia, there is little prospect of progress.
The lack of legal protection for private possessions in the face of a rapacious, grasping state continues to undermine confidence in Russia. ‘What is the use of laws assigning property to private individuals,’ Mikhail Speransky wrote, ‘when property itself has no firm basis in any respect whatsoever? What is the use of civil laws when their tablets can at any time be smashed on the first rock of arbitrary rule? How can finances be set in order in a country with no public confidence in the law!’
Lack of belief in the protection of the law has caused an outflow of capital and people from Russia, a fall in the number of long-term projects financed outside of the state budget, and the insane corruption and embezzlement of state property that eat up more than 10 per cent of GDP.
Under Putin the state has not only neglected to develop the country’s intellectual potential; its predatory policies towards business and its trampling on individual rights have also contributed to a massive flight of human talent, including the cream of Russia’s young entrepreneurs. These are people who need to feel independent and safe in conditions of democracy, so the statist ideology that pervades our country has prompted them to emigrate. You can imagine the harm this has done. If a 25-year-old entrepreneur decides to leave Russia, the country loses millions of dollars in potential revenue back into the economy. And a hundred thousand such entrepreneurs and highly qualified specialists are leaving Russia every year.
