Social Factors of Corruption in Conflictogenic Russian Society

Abstract

The article highlights the key social factors of corruption in today’s Russian society. In the study, it is stated that today’s Russian legislation has provided a comprehensive legal framework aimed at combating corruption; law enforcement practices have been improving in this direction, too. But, despite this, due to the lasting, permanent work of formational, domain-related and structural factors that determine both resilience and constant reproduction of conditions favourable to corruption, combat against it gives no palpable results. It is noted that the chief formational factor of reproduction of corruption is and remains the Russian-born model of criminal and oligarchic capitalism, peripheral type, that arose in the ‘wild’ 1990ies, the one that has been continuously fuelling both the ‘grassroot’ and ‘high-rank’ corruption. Among the domain-related determinants, the leading role goes to the raw-material exporting model of a quasi-market economy based on private capital and causing a gap between the very poor and reach by the key stratification criteria that is largely in excess of threshold values, and also to political and legal factors associated with the imperfection of such a component of the legal sphere in Russia as statutory regulation instruments. To the purely political factors facilitating reproduction of corruption and hindering an effective fight against it is, alongside the excessive interference of the state with business matters and the patronage that high-ranking officials grant to tycoons, the so-called ‘political thaw’ of 2011-2012 that was accompanied by a certain functional disorganization of the work of the government and escalation of the well-known ‘Bolotnaya square movement’ that threatened the country with massive destabilization and an increase in anomy of the whole of Russian society. To the structural prerequisites belong the institutional, procedural and other components among which it is worth noting the patron-client relations between the state and the business, etc. At last, what is formulated herein are suggestions towards a comprehensive solution to the problem of eradicating corruption; this solution would entail both promoting democratic principles in society and politics, limiting the overly influential exchange relationships so powerful in the system of Russian criminal/oligarchical capitalism, but first and foremost activating and speeding up a systemic modernisation of the body of Russian society along the lines entrenched in the Constitution towards its evolution and transformation into a modern post-industrial society, including the shaping of a full-fledged socially-oriented and rightful state.