Corruption is called one of the main problems of modern Russia. And it's hard to disagree with this. In an attempt to find the ideal model of political and social order in which corruption would be defeated, many turn to the era of Stalinism. After all, it is believed that Stalin fought corruption with an iron fist. But is it really so?
Soviet power and the problem of corruption
Unlike modern political movements of any ideological vector, the Bolsheviks never raised the slogans of the fight against corruption. For revolutionaries who were going to build a new society, focusing on the fact that some tsarist official received a bribe, built an expensive villa or sent his family to France was too small. After all, the Bolsheviks wanted to break the backbone of the very socio-political system of the Russian Empire, to eliminate the exploitation of man by man, that is, to overcome the causes, not the consequences.
In addition, the leaders of the Bolsheviks, being smart people, perfectly understood that fighting corruption as such, with a single phenomenon, is not just petty, but also meaningless. A person is so structured that as long as there are commodity-money relations, as long as there is inequality of property, as long as there are power ambitions, he will strive to live better, enjoy greater benefits, and in some cases he will realize his goals with the help of corruption.
Bribery was by no means eradicated by either the February or the October revolutions. Already in the 1920s, militiamen, security officers, and party leaders, especially in the localities, took bribes well. People lived in poverty and the level of corruption was very high, especially since a large number of random people came to senior positions, to power structures, who "took off" on the wave of revolutions and civil war.
Great opportunities for the development of corruption were opened by the "new economic policy". But when the leadership of the USSR began to curtail the NEP, it became clear that in the new society, which was supposed to be built at a more active pace, bribery must be eradicated. But how was it to be done? And here Joseph Stalin showed great political wisdom - he did not raise the slogan of combating corruption, casting a shadow over the state and party apparatus and accustoming the masses to a certain "legitimacy" of corruption. In the Stalinist era, a unique model of fighting corruption was developed without mentioning corruption itself. Let's see how she looked.
Stalin's Anti-Corruption Mechanism
Joseph Stalin perfectly understood that any slogans of the fight against corruption discredit the government in the eyes of the people, contribute to a split in society. He, a Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary experience, personally observed how at the beginning of the twentieth century in tsarist Russia everyone branded officials and generals for bribery and "covetousness." As a result, the seeds of distrust in the government were sown in society. Gradually, people grew stronger in the opinion that not only the bailiff or the mayor, not only the general or the deputy minister, take bribes. The highest elite of the country, including the Grand Dukes and the Empress, began to be suspected of corruption and embezzlement. Thus, the fight against corruption played a crucial role in discrediting the very institution of autocracy, Tsar Nicholas II and his closest circle.
The Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the strongest powers in the world. It experienced economic growth, industry developed, and gradually, albeit slowly, social transformations were carried out. In 1913, the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanovs was celebrated with pomp, and five years later the abdicated emperor, his wife and children were shot in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg. No one stood up to defend the empire. And the fight against corruption made a significant contribution to discrediting the very idea of autocracy.
Stalin understood this perfectly and did not want such a scenario to be realized in relation to the Soviet Union. But, on the other hand, the fight against bribery and abuse of official position demanded more and more active measures. Otherwise, one could not even dream of creating a developed and strong socialist state. But Stalin found a way out of this situation - any negative phenomena in the life of Soviet society, including the "bad deeds" of representatives of party structures and government bodies, were now explained solely by external factors, namely the intrigues of foreign intelligence services, the influence of anti-Soviet propaganda on the part of foreign states … So the corrupt officials turned into spies for the German, Japanese, Polish, British, American and any other intelligence services.
An ordinary person could understand and forgive a bribe-taker who was going to buy a gift for his wife, new furniture, or just had a habit of living in grand style. What to do, simple human joys are not alien to anyone. But understanding and forgiving a foreign spy working against his native state was much more difficult, almost impossible. And the punishment for the spy was much stricter. After all, it is strange to shoot or imprison for 10 years for some sum of money, which was taken by an official for solving some issue. But it would be a sin not to shoot a foreign spy or saboteur, a member of an underground fascist or Trotskyist organization - such a person and as a person was not particularly perceived by Soviet citizens at that time.
In fact, there was a rationale behind this approach. In the conditions of the mobilization model of the development of society, that part of it that puts the receipt of personal material benefits above everything else, including the general idea, is a potentially fertile ground for the activities of foreign special services, political opponents and other forces interested in destabilizing the existing system. It is much easier to establish contact with people who are ready to take bribes, who are accustomed to a luxurious life, who are addicted to some vices, to force them to do some kind of action using blackmail or financial reward.
During the "New Economic Policy", a certain layer of Soviet citizens was already accustomed to living at a fundamentally different level than the main part of Soviet society, which was still in deep poverty. And this stratum considered itself the masters of a new life, a kind of new bourgeoisie, which is allowed to do everything and which differs from other Soviet people in its “chosenness”.
Unfortunately, such sentiments have spread among many party leaders, military leaders, police and state security officials, and economic leaders. After all, it is worth remembering that many Soviet leaders of those years were relatively young people who found themselves in important positions during the Civil War as a teenager. Many came from poor and poorer peasant and worker families. And they just didn't have the resilience to resist the temptations of a good life. The result is corruption, abuse of office. Stalin understood that if he let the situation take its course, society would begin to rot quickly and terribly. But imprisoning a party member who had gone through the Civil War, who had a "correct" origin, for a bribe, was somehow not good. And the notorious bribe-takers went on anti-Soviet articles, like political criminals.
In principle, in a mobilization society, bribery and other forms of corruption are political crimes, since they are directed against the ideological foundations of society, destroy its value foundation. Therefore, it was not surprising that the technology of accusing them on political charges was used against the bribe-takers. Corruption was the very anti-Soviet activity for which serious punishments were envisaged, up to the death penalty.
Of course, there are flaws in any system. And the Stalinist system, conceived and created to cleanse the state apparatus, the national economy, the army and power structures from real or potential enemies, corrupt officials, traitors, began to be used against innocent citizens. Scoundrels have an excellent ability to adapt to any situation and instantly adapt to a system, even against themselves. Therefore, political repressions against the real enemies of the people began to be used precisely by the enemies of the people themselves to settle personal scores, vacate higher positions, and eliminate rivals.
The flywheel was started, and neither Stalin nor his closest associates were able to control every arrest, read every denunciation and delve into it. Therefore, today we are not trying to completely deny the fact of political repression in the Stalinist USSR, we are not removing a certain amount of blame for shortcomings and mistakes from the then Soviet leadership. We are talking in general about a model of combating corruption and, more broadly, with any manifestations of anti-state activity.
Rejection of the Stalinist model and its consequences
The death of Joseph Stalin is considered by many people to be the end of the truly Soviet era, and the post-Stalin years are already seen as the agony of the Soviet Union. We will not dwell on this very complex issue in detail now, but note that the topic of combating corruption in the USSR was first raised precisely after the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and coincided in time with the de-Stalinization undertaken by Nikita Khrushchev. And it was precisely during the “Khrushchev thaw” that doubts about the correctness of the course chosen by the country began to creep into the heads of many Soviet citizens, but also the foundations of the Soviet corruption system began to form, and very quickly.
In the 1970s, both guild workers and organized crime flourished, and the nomenklatura, especially in the union republics, was mired in bribery. At the same time, they no longer hesitated to talk and write about bribery in the media, they launched campaigns to combat bribery, but neither the severity of the laws, nor the declared contempt of the party and the state for corrupt officials could correct the situation. Corruption in the late Soviet Union developed very quickly, and along with this process, the Soviet government itself was disintegrating.
The Soviet Union did not cease to exist as a result of a major military conflict with superior enemy forces, not as a result of a popular revolution. It was worn out, eaten away by their own elites, who, in the three post-Stalin decades, managed to discredit the very socialist idea as much as possible, to disappoint millions of Soviet citizens in their own country. And the last blows on the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, by the way, were inflicted, among other things, under the slogan of fighting corruption.
The nomenklatura was accused of bribery, of unreasonable privileges, and these words sounded both from the lips of the main gravediggers of the USSR like Boris Yeltsin, and from the lips of various petty politicians and activists. We all know very well what happened as a result of this “fight against corruption”. As we can see, the consequences of the "fight against corruption" in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Iraq and many other countries of the world.
Corruption can and should be defeated, but the main goal of the political movement is the fight against corruption. Any movement that puts such a goal in the first place is a dummy, a dummy structure that tries to "talk" the people, distract them from really important ideas and phenomena, for example, from choosing a model for the country's further economic development, from discussing the structure of political governance. The main thing, they say, is that there is no corruption, but the fact that there will be millions of beggars, stopped factories, weakened positions in foreign policy - this is all nonsense.
