Peter Pomerantsev in LRB: Sistema in Russia - networks, corruptions and evasions

[muriel_volestrangler]

There are any number of paths and initiations into sistema, the liquid mass of networks, corruptions and evasions – elusive yet instantly recognisable to members – which has ordered the politics and social psychology of Russian civilisation since tsarist times. When I arrived in Moscow to work as a TV producer my initiation took the form of a driving test. I would never pass, my instructor explained, if I didn’t pay a bribe (500 dollars, but soon to double; I should get a move on). When I protested that I wanted to pass the test for real he said the traffic police would fail me until I paid up. He was a friend of a friend of my parents and I was told by everyone I knew that he was trustworthy. I gave him the money and he made the deal. I had assumed I would receive the licence in an envelope. To my surprise he told me to go to the traffic centre to take the test along with everyone else. The theory exam was held in a large, bright room with brand-new computers. There were around twenty of us working through on-screen simulations of various driving scenarios. I now decided, rather relieved, that my bribe had been lost in the works and set about using my common sense to get through the test. I got a handsome 18/20, enough to pass. Later I realised that every computer in the room had been rigged for an 18/20 result: everyone had paid.
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Another film I was working on was about a successful young businesswoman called Yana Yakovleva, who had founded a pharmaceuticals company that imported and sold industrial cleaning agents to factories and military bases. One morning she woke up to find herself under arrest: the Federal Drugs Control Service had reclassified her cleaning agent, diethyl ether, as a narcotic. She was now a drug dealer behind bars, awaiting trial. She assumed it was a case of reiderstvo, the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia with hundreds of reported, and probably tens of thousands of unreported cases a year, earning an estimated four billion dollars in profit. Business rivals or bureaucrats – long since interchangeable – pay for the security services to have the head of a company arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released the company has been bought, sold and split up by new owners. The usual way out is a bribe and there is a whole industry of pay-offs. Good ‘lawyers’ are not the ones who can defend you in court – the verdicts are pre-determined – but those who have the right connections and know who to pay off in the judiciary and the relevant ministry. It’s a complex game: pay off the wrong person and you’ve just wasted your money. Soon enough an array of middlemen appear, trying to persuade you that they, and only they, know how to pay the right person off. Yakovleva knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a ‘lawyer’ who said he could help: he suggested she admit to the charges and then he could get everything sorted. The bribe would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yakovleva smelled a rat. Her company had done nothing wrong, shouldn’t she stick to her story? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That she’d traded what she traded? Face up to absurdity? If she started to negotiate, she told me, it would be like relinquishing a part of her sanity, letting the sistema dictate the terms – at which point everything starts to slip.
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When Putin became president, Cherkesov was given the FDCS, considered the least prestigious of the security organs and less lucrative than the oil, arms, tax and customs portfolios. So what it did was launch a series of moves to capture the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Overnight a host of chemicals had their status changed from industrial or medical to narcotic. The plan, Yakovleva sensed, was to ‘break’ these industries: force them to hand over their businesses to people with friends in the FDCS or share their profits. ‘I was meant to swing by the side of the road on the proverbial gallows as a message to others,’ Yakovleva said to me.

But Cherkesov had enemies. He was involved in a power battle with Nikolai Patrushev, another old Putin buddy and Leningrad KGB man, though from the far more glamorous counter-intelligence directorate. Patrushev was now head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. Cherkesov was trying to undermine him by investigating a customs scam run by the FSB on the Chinese-Russian border. In revenge Patrushev arrested FDCS generals at Moscow airport. So when the FSB saw that Yakovleva and other business people were being victimised by the FDCS they let their public campaigns to beat the Cherkesov clan go ahead – they could have shut the protest down – and didn’t do anything to hold the media back. She was released; and around the time Patrushev won his tussle with Cherkesov, the charges were dropped and the ridiculous reclassification revoked. Though nothing would have been possible without her initial decision to fight publicly, even the bravest fighter against sistema has to dance with it to defeat it.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n23/peter-pomerantsev/diary