The Committee of Civil Initiatives created by the former minister is helping to draw up plans for the most important reforms for Russia, but the committee itself could use more transparency

The absurd ouster of Alexei Kudrin from the Russian government has begun to bear fruit just over a year later. Without any irony - significant results. Not in public administration, of course, but in analytics. But it is precisely this that is now most lacking for making the right management decisions - or people who know how to draw the right conclusions based on analytics.

The first of these results is the report of the Committee of Civil Initiatives on why the Concept for the development of the pension system written by the Ministry of Labor should not be implemented. Of course, many questions can be asked about this conclusion. It seems to me that it has an exaggeratedly optimistic assessment of the compulsory pension accumulation model created in Russia. And the risk of losing this money as a result of its investment in “kickback” and unproductive government infrastructure projects such as road or railway construction is not taken into account. Nevertheless, of the non-journalistic works published to date, the CGI conclusion is the most reasonable analysis of the consequences of policy implementation, promoted by the social bloc of the Medvedev government.

published a week ago The second fruit of Kudrin’s exile was the extensive report by the Central Social Research Center on changes in the political mood of Russians in the summer and autumn of this year. Of course, Mikhail Dmitriev and Sergei Belanovsky began their work before the creation of the KGI (see interview with Dmitriev and a note about one of the political reports of the Center for Social Research). And they would have continued it even in the absence of KGI. But his financial support made it possible to conduct a more extensive socio-political study than in previous reports. And by the way, what is especially valuable, the participation of the KGI in the preparation of the work did not affect the objectivity of the assessment of the potential prospects of Kudrin himself as a political leader (see pp. 91-94 of the report, where it is said that he often hesitates in his own decisions and does not clearly state his position ).

And here is the third fruit, the best of the three, a report published on November 1 by the Institute of Law Enforcement Problems at the European University in St. Petersburg on the functioning of law enforcement agencies and the experience of its reform in other countries. Vadim Volkov , who is leading this work together with Ella Paneyakh , promises that in November, based on this analysis, an alternative reform plan will be prepared (Chapter 6 of the report). about some of the provisions of this work at the Higher School of Economics. has already spoken One of its authors, Kirill Titaev,

Oddly enough, there is a demand for such analysis. The new head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Kolokoltsev, admitted several times that Medvedev’s reform of the police did not produce significant results. He is seriously thinking about abolishing the cane system, introducing a special investigation procedure for “criminal offenses” - petty crimes, radically reducing bureaucratic reporting, etc. However, Kolokoltsev has not yet spoken about a radical change in functions and a reduction in the number of employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And Kolokoltsev’s predecessors also had reformist tendencies. The most serious plan for reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was the attempt by Dmitry Kozak and Boris Gryzlov (2000-2001) to divide the police into federal criminal police and municipal police. In the end, this plan ended up in about the same place as local government as a whole.

The fruits mentioned above show what KGI can, in principle, become in its development. Potentially, this is a kind of think tank - a classic analytical center that has its own vision of the most important economic, political and social problems, ordering the best researchers to study them and promote them in the media, parliament, etc. This is approximately how Heritage , Brookings , American Enterprise Institute , Council work on Foreign Relations , Hoover Institution and other major "tanks". They hire the best researchers, both for individual projects and full-time, and promote ideas in which they believe.

But, unlike KGI, these “tanks” 1) exist on donations from many citizens and organizations, plus income from their endowments, 2) disclose their sources of funding, 3) disclose at least the main areas of expenses. Supporting such organizations, like other charities, reduces your tax burden. So far, KGI is terribly far from all this. Information about the Kudrin Foundation for Support of Civil Initiatives, registered six months ago, cannot be found. “The main assets of the Fund will consist of property donations from Russian individuals and legal entities,” says the Committee’s website, but whether they came from it, how the current work of the KGI is financed, and what its annual budget is is unknown. Data on the Committee's projects is, to put it mildly, fragmentary. In the “Publications” section on the website there are not reports prepared for the committee by the Central Social Research Center, the Institute of Industrial History at the European University, and not even the conclusion of the committee itself on pension reform, but articles from the media. The structure of the committee and the functionality of its members are unclear. Well, etc. - questions can be multiplied.

It is not yet obvious whether KGI is going to move towards the practices of the best think tanks. But in the case when the foundation sponsors statements on the most important topics (reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, pensions, attitude towards political leaders), it is necessary to know the sources of funding simply so that later the lack of clarification of this issue does not cast a shadow on the measures themselves advocated by the Committee on Human Rights. Provided, of course, if the same law enforcement agencies do not chase after citizens and organizations transferring funds to the Kudrin Foundation.

However, if we put these considerations aside, we must admit that the IPP-EU report on law enforcement agencies promoted by the OIG is a unique work, beyond all praise (with one caveat - it was not touched by the hand of the editor). Based on numerous interviews and surveys, a study of forensic statistics and empirical practice of interaction between citizens and businessmen with the investigative and judicial system, the report builds an analytical model of how the law enforcement system is structured and functions, what motivates its participants, what are their behavior strategies in various situations.

The IPP showed where the wave of “heterogeneous and unsystematized reporting” comes from, for which they even employ special employees to falsify it. How the work of departments and individual employees is assessed based on statistical gross indicators. This leads to the fact that negative practices once “hard-wired” into the work of police officers (fabrication of documents, pressure on a suspect) can no longer be eradicated - without them, it is impossible to achieve the targets once achieved. In such a system, any “marriage” revealed by the subsequent authority to which the case comes (suspension of the investigation, return of the case by the prosecutor, acquittal) is a negative indicator, a reason for disciplinary sanctions. “There is no margin for honest error for the prosecution, and it is forced to seek a conviction at any cost,” the researchers write.

Each employee, taking a case, must first assess the chances of success with such an incentive system and cannot change his opinion about the guilt of the person involved during the investigation. The officers on duty first try to “solve” the crime, and then register it. Investigators first make sure that they can correctly document the evidence, and then initiate a case. This shifts the real moment of establishing guilt to the earliest stages of the investigation (all decisions that should be made “at the exit” are actually made “at the entrance”): guilt is established not by the court, but by the prosecutor’s office, the proof of the accusation is according to the investigator’s assessments, and the proof of guilt is determined by the prosecutor’s office. at the beginning of the investigation, at the stage of criminal prosecution. As a result, the operative is responsible for bringing the accused (and cannot change his mind during the investigation), and the investigator is responsible for ensuring that the case goes to trial.

The same system of incentives forces the police to “play” with the qualifications of the charges, presenting the defendant with the most severe case, preferably “group” (they are valued “more expensive”). And at all costs avoid registering “wood grouse” - situations where there is a case, but there is no accused. Until now, all attempts to abolish the “stick” system have only led to its complication. Volkov, Paneyakh and their colleagues analyzed each indicator on which law enforcement officials report, showing what actions it provokes police officers to take. And the courts are part of the same system: the next structure in the chain puts the “stick”.

The system absolutely does not know how to “back up and correct its own mistakes.” On the question of the suspect’s guilt, they are simply forced to trust each other, starting from the moment the operative’s opinion was formed. Everything else is a formality; from this moment on, the person involved can safely consider himself convicted. It is clear that such a system cannot do without torture: the police themselves condemn them only in the case of obvious deliberate falsification of the criminal case and only if the person involved is not considered a “criminal element”, whose isolation is an absolute benefit.

The last to be integrated into this chain is the correctional system - the Federal Penitentiary Service. As economist Anton Tabakh showed at the seminar “Prison Economy” at the Sakharov Center, as a result, Russia is among the 15 world leaders in the number of prisoners per capita. The United States is in first place on this list, but we are ahead of them by 55% in terms of the number of FSIN employees per prisoner. The system spends 81% of the funds received from the budget on the maintenance of the contingent and is absolutely closed to control.

Step-by-step strategies, rules and norms of behavior for law enforcement officers are a very good basis for its reform. Until now, system employees could say that “civilians” do not understand the basics of its functioning, but now they do not have this opportunity. All that remains is to write a reform plan.

How Alexey Kudrin became a sponsor of the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs