Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Legality in Russia is in the eye of the beholder. Such is the impression left by the first four articles in this issue of Russian Politics and Law. That sense of the law's futility as a means of conducting business and settling issues in conflict comes through clearly in the long, two-part essay by Igor' Kliamkin and Lev Timofeev ("The Shadow Life: A Sociological Self-Portrait of Post-Soviet Society"). Massaging data from an ambitious survey of public opinion on the shadow economy of payoffs and favoritism, they give a broad interpretation of attitudes of business people, would-be business people, and the general public. Kliamkin and Timofeev provide a multitude of insights into Russian views of corruption, noting, among other observations, that President Vladimir Putin's commitment to "the dictatorship of law" may create the preconditions for a "dictatorship without law." To buttress their observation of the chronic nature of petty criminality in Russia, they quote novelist-turned-historian Nikolai Karamzin commenting on the Russian people two centuries ago: "they steal; everyone steals." And in a warning for contemporary Russian leaders, they suggest that the great-power ambitions of Russia's rulers could be pursued only by impoverishing the people to raise an army and that widespread poverty inevitably led to general corruption. "Until government cannot interfere in the business of property owners, measures against corruption are no more than the shams they have always been in Russia," they conclude.