Since 2008, the National Anti-Corruption Plan has been approved by presidential decree every two years. The fight against corruption is declared as one of the priority areas of law enforcement work. In the statistical forms of various agencies, from the police to the courts, separate columns are often provided for recording corruption-related crimes. However, in practice, the size of bribes in corruption cases that reach the courts remains very modest - in 2014, in 80% of convictions, the bribe did not exceed 10,000 rubles (according to the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation). Moreover, compared to 2011, the median bribe size in cases sent to court fell from 7,500 to 2,500 rubles in 2013. That is, in half of all cases, the bribe amount was lower than the indicated figures. We are seeing an even greater reduction in the size of corruption cases.

While the actual amounts of bribes in cases sent to court have decreased, there has nevertheless been a significant increase in the number of serious and especially serious cases. This is especially true for cases of giving or receiving bribes for committing illegal actions. The number of people accused of receiving or giving bribes for illegal actions has increased by 5.5 times (from 934 in 2012 to 5119 in 2014), while the number of people accused of committing minor corruption crimes has decreased by 3 times.

It would seem that this should be a positive signal – finally, they have started to fight, if not major corrupt officials, then at least against obviously illegal unlawful actions and decisions taken by officials for a fee. However, this trend is most likely due not to the reorientation of law enforcement agencies to identifying the most socially dangerous cases of corruption, but to the new broad interpretation of the illegality of actions in bribery by the Supreme Court Plenum, expressed in mid-2013. Now this feature covers any deviation from the scope of authority of an official, as well as any violation of the procedure, even if the action is substantively legal – for example, when the procedure for issuing a license is violated, although in fact the recipient of the license meets the requirements. Given the excessive regulation of any activity, violations can be found in almost any decision made by civil servants. Accordingly, what was previously considered a minor crime with a maximum imprisonment of up to 2-3 years is now classified under more serious parts of corruption articles.

The increase in the number of cases of bribes for committing illegal actions is due to the fact that only serious and especially serious corruption crimes are directly designated as an indicator for assessing the activities of territorial bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, namely the Ministry of Internal Affairs provides the main flow of corruption cases (about 84% according to open data from the Prosecutor General's Office). As a result, regardless of the amount, when qualifying a bribe for illegal actions, the crime is considered serious and is positively taken into account when assessing police officers.

Since mid-2011, the receipt of a bribe in a significant amount (from 25,000 to 150,000 rubles) has been singled out separately, which is also a serious crime and can be counted towards police officers in the fight against corruption. However, the prospects for more intensive work by law enforcement agencies in this area are unclear, since the incentives for work are conducive to identifying and bringing the simplest cases to court. Data from the Judicial Department show that approximately 100-110 cases of receiving bribes in a significant amount are sent to courts throughout Russia every year. It turns out that the departmental fight against corruption, as in recent years, is aimed primarily at small bribes. At the same time, small bribes themselves, in the course of professional games of lawyers in interpreting the law, in an instant turned into serious crimes, which looks good in reports, nothing more.

The authors are Associate Professor of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Southern Federal University (Rostov-on-Don) and Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law Enforcement Problems at the European University in St. Petersburg

Anti-corruption simulation