Opinion: Shouting about a naked emperor

Transparency activists' long game against the Kremlin

On December 1, Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation released damning evidence that the relatives of Attorney General Yuri Chaika and other top officials do business with known mobsters. Despite attracting international attention, inviting conspiracy theories on state-controlled Russian television, and winning a documentary film festival award, Navalny's revelations have yet to prompt any action by the state. Does this mean the investigation was a failure? In a recent opinion piece for the newspaper Vedomosti, Inliberty chief editor Andrei Babitsky argues that Russia's embattled transparency activists are actually chipping away at an immoral social contract. Meduza translates that text here.

When a foreigner (especially one from a place where they speak German) hears about the recent developments involving Attorney General Chaika, he typically asks how many people were fired, as a result of the scandal. A Russian, if he's naive, asks what happened to the people who published the investigation. If he's wise enough, he wants to know what the point was of looking into the matter at all. None of it changes anything, and there won't be even a single protest.

Thanks to the heroic work of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), things in Russia could get even worse, the layman's intuition tells him. The ruling authorities defiantly ignore any investigation into state officials, instead granting those same corrupt individuals carte blanche to exact revenge. They'll close ranks and might even decide to terrorize the country openly, no longer fearing further discrediting leaks. Neither society nor civic avengers can win against this.

The lack of a response to high-profile investigations is, of course, no accident. The authorities work very carefully to make sure that this is always the case. Despite this, many people are willing to take great personal risks to expose government corruption. Russia's most famous inspirer and organization of high-profile investigations has been tried and convicted multiple times on absurd charges. But hundreds of people are still willing to help him, without the slightest hope that their work will bear fruit, at least within the foreseeable future. In a political system built on shamelessness, does it make any sense to shout that the emperor is wearing no clothes?

What drives the system itself to chase its accusers? After all, every one of the regime's important political victories has been tied to yet another act of open disdain for common decency. The country's leaders don't even bat an eye saying "we've never hid that," when talking about things they denied desperately just a day before. Officials publicly disavow their own children and wives, not when questions of war and peace are at stake, but when it concerns a few million rubles in a sloppily completed declaration of income. The best means of demoralizing any protest is to do something odious and then turn to the public with a mocking smile, instead of a justification.

But every new investigation reveals again and again that even the most foolproof scheme is weaker than human nature. You can shut your eyes as tight as you wish, cover your ears, and shout “lalalala,” but the allegations don't disappear. The silence with which FBK's accusations were met rings like a bell. And with every press conference, that bell rings louder. Even the president and the prime minister—two men who have proved their ability to ignore any crime—now find themselves to be uncomfortable participants in this silence.

For a mafia state to exist a long time, there needs to be a consensus between officials and the people not to call it a mafia state (at least not out loud). And as soon as this tacit agreement falls into question, even criminals can no longer pretend that everything is okay.

Perhaps no one will be sent to prison or forced to resign because of the scandal with the attorney general, but Russians should be grateful to the investigators at FBK for the mere fact that they are helping to destroy an immoral social contract.