Raspberries from the Land of Fools

The nasty word "corruption" is on everyone's lips. Fighting it, if you believe the word, all the powerful, albeit fruitless branches of government and the notorious vertical trunk. Steal, of course, everywhere, and in the West too. But nowhere, except in Russia, could such a dialogue take place as between Emperor Peter I and the Prosecutor General of his Senate, Pavel Yaguzhinsky. Peter ordered an end to theft. Yaguzhinsky brought a rope to the tsar and said that theft could be ended only if all the senators, including himself, were strangled on this rope. When corruption is universal, the fight against it turns into demagogy or into an instrument of selective reprisals against "extra people", superfluous for a mafia, corporate state. The mafia happens not only in Sicily or in Chicago, but wherever both property and power belong to one corporation (in our case, the secret services), everyone else receives something only with its consent, and a member of the corporation who violated the "law of omerta" and divulging its secrets, he eats his portion of polonium, like Litvinenko.

How did we grow ourselves such corruption? It all started with the wild, suffocating centralization of the Muscovite kingdom back in the 16th century. And even earlier: the Moscow Danilovichi, Yuri and Ivan, back in the 14th century received a license from the Mongols occupiers to collect taxes from Russian cities. The Horde received the agreed amount, but no one counted how much the Moscow princes appropriated.

Ivan the Terrible gave the official right to robbery (that is, corruption) in relation to the Zemshchina (that is, Rus') to the guardsmen, that is, to his personal special services, in exchange for loyalty. So besides the dog's head and the broom at the saddle, they could also hang a purse. "Treason" was not swept away for free, and "enemies of the state" gnawed out for a good bribe. Today's Chekists, who sing psalms from morning to evening about the security of the state and external threats, about extremism and terrorism, are rowing under this noise at random, and Yukos, I'm afraid, is just the beginning.

In the 17th-18th centuries, the farming program continued, plus the governors appointed from above mercilessly stole.

The differentiation of territories that are sufficiently independent of each other and of the central government - all this ended with us together with Kievan Rus. Now you understand why the gubernatorial elections were cancelled. The regions are given to feed "native little men", as in Famusov's times, fixed taxes, that is, taxes, are sent to Moscow, to the foot of the vertical, and the rest is seized by the local satrap, who is no longer threatened by control in the form of elections.

The Soviet government brought centralization to the point of absurdity, delegating absolutely everything to the center. And don't be surprised now that grandmothers are asking Putin to provide gas. And the people were taught to steal en masse, forbidding them to honestly earn their living. Forced to live on a salary; crushed successful peasants - "kulaks"; cut off household plots; it was forbidden to keep livestock and poultry; work for several rates; get rich and own property. The people became a "carrier". Stealing was the only way to feed.

The state paid the same to hard workers and loafers, and people were convinced: “ours” is “nobody's”. Now people are being pushed into the same place: the confiscation of Yukos is a signal that honest work and white bookkeeping lead to prison. In a country of total scarcity, there was a new privileged stratum, consisting of sellers. It was called "orsocracy". For someone who wanted to eat something or put on a decent piece of clothing, corruption was inevitable: all this was acquired only for bribes. All the people gave bribes to each other, exchanging salmon for Italian consumer goods in order to dress and eat decently. The state costs us dearly. Since 2000, corruption has doubled, and roads built by half, despite oil windfalls. The more state, the more corruption, directly proportional to the number of officials.

An authoritarian country is a Country of Fools, a country of continuous “raspberries”, where every Sonya is doomed to become a Golden Pen. With such a "raspberry" you can’t cook porridge, much less jam.