The Corruption International
Making excuses for the corruption has much broader implications than the apologists realize
Credit: Hugo Cornuel, via Unsplash
Apologies for the silence last week. We unexpectedly spent the week in Ukraine (as one does), which has become a warning to us all about the chaos that comes for a country consumed by authoritarian corruption. To be sure, we are far from the exact outcomes (hopefully) that Ukraine is experiencing, but the Trump administration’s astonishing levels of corruption and self-dealing aren’t happening in a vacuum. It is slotting the US into a system. Trump’s corruption is the American chapter of an international ecosystem of corrupt authoritarians. Think of it as the Communist International, but rebranded for the present. Then, the “communism” just enabled the authoritarian power structure. Now, it is corruption because the most effective restraint on modern authoritarianism is the rule of law — so it’s only logical that so much effort goes into debasing its coin. I’ve long held the theory that the growing international corruption ecosystem is just the new Communist International, with some caveats, of course.
We’ll be back on our regular schedule tomorrow, but we wanted to ease back into the week with a deeply weird poem by Kash Patel’s Russian counterpart. Enjoy!
In the US and Europe, Russian propagandists excel at portraying their state as the real “conservative” Christian power, the last bastion of “traditional values” in Europe and a leading opponent of the far-left “woke” global establishment. Russia even offers an “anti-woke” visa for foreigners who want to get away from the decadent West.
As a recent BBC report highlighted, those who take up this offer may find Russia disappointing. One couple who arrived in Russia had had their savings stolen, leaving them homeless. Others note that divorce and abortion are widely practiced and accepted, hardly the kind of thing an ultra-conservative American or European Christian would expect in a “conservative” society. Anyone Westerner who has spent any time in Russia outside of a package tour or some kind of government-sponsored junket could have told these emigrants what to expect.
Russia is a deeply corrupt country, and if there are values that the Russian state and the Russian elite aspire to, it’s usually not the values of conservative Christianity, even conservative Russian Orthodox Christianity. Aside from a few of the high elite like Konstantin Maloveev, Russia’s leaders tend to be either dead set on stealing as much as possible or are pining for the USSR (or both). Putin, the kleptocrat-in-chief, has bemoaned the fall of the USSR, even though in the USSR he could hardly have amassed all his private wealth.
Of course, in that system, as a secret police official or a member of the top nomenklatura, or as a high state official, he might not have much personal wealth, but he would be functionally wealthy, with his every desire satisfied. One thing the USSR wasn’t, though, was “conservative” in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word. The Soviet elites weren’t just “woke,” they were full-on communist, against private property, and contemptuous of our free society. Now, it is true that the later USSR was a highly prudish society (and maybe that would be enough to make a certain kind of person believe that the USSR was “better” than the US), but it wasn’t because the USSR wanted to save people’s souls, and it certainly was not as if there was no illicit sex in the USSR. There was plenty of prostitution, illegitimacy, and divorce. Likewise, the late USSR was officially against corruption and had regular high-profile corruption prosecutions, but the actual experience of people at every strata of society was intimately connected to corruption - to secure jobs, get grades at school, keep the police off your back or just find something to eat.
This widespread nostalgia for the USSR among the Russian elite and among a significant portion of the Russian populace is rarely translated into Western languages by Russian propagandists - this would interfere with the image of being a “Christian” “conservative” power. As a public service, we are translating a poem by none other than Alexander Bastrykin, a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin from law school and the current Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. That makes him the rough equivalent of the Attorney General or the head of the FBI within the Russian system. Bastrykin read this poem aloud at the annual St. Petersburg Legal Forum on June 26. You can see a video of him reading this deeply weird poem, to loud applause at the end, here on YouTube
I want to go back to the USSR
The land in which I was born.
Having cast off the lies and the heavy debts
Freed from fantasies
From all freedom and mortgages
From rising prices and inflation
From long streams of empty talk
From lying facades.
From the Central Bank, with its key
The ever-rising rate of interest
Like a vile fight
With a perpetual barking bitch
I want to return to the former world,
Where nations are all brothers
And where wealth is not an idol
Nor is the rate of pay
But where there’s always the certainty
That our future
Always depends on our work,
And that tomorrow will be more beautiful
And only honest, common labor
And equality, and brotherhood,
Will bring happiness to the nation,
And where our state
will restore to us the power of goodness
And faith in justice again
And once more the winds of October
Will reinstate intransigence
Against the one who loves to oppress
To cheat, and to rob.
(Against) He who does not stand by the machine in the workshop,
But instead tricks the workers.
And the newly-awakened people
Will return to supreme power
And will again adorn the heavens
Not out of a passion for profit,
But for our country’s Star, the symbol
That has united us
We were all born to it
And in this lies our strength
The reference to the Central Banker and the “barking bitch” might refer to Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Russian central bank, who, according to many accounts, is responsible for keeping the wheels of the Russian economy turning during sanctions and war. She recently disappeared for two weeks, leading to rumors that she had finally fallen out of favor with Putin’s set. The official explanation was that she was ill. She re-emerged a few weeks ago to announce a cut to interest rates. Kevin Warsh, call your office.
Show this poem to the next person who tells you that Russia is a good partner to the US and a supporter of “traditional” values. They might be traditional values in Russia, but the tradition is mostly authoritarian and communist.
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