During the last couple of months, probably everyone, from New York to Tokyo, has heard a Russian dystopian fairy-tale about filthy corruption, insatiable individual greed, and long hands of modern authoritarianism. Interestingly, people seem to be not raged as much as hypnotized by a Hollywood-style story of a mediocre KGB agent who, by privatizing the social ladder, left 150 million Russians hang at the very bottom of the ivory tower. Due to his numerous mythological feats, this leader has earned a “flattering” comparison with Hitler in Western media.
The analogy with fascism is, indeed, relevant in the discussion on the nature of Russian corruption, and in more ways than meets the eye. As majority of Nazi collaborators and ordinary “peace-loving” citizens of the German Reich refused to acknowledge their direct or indirect participation in terrible crimes of fascism, similarly, Russian population has not yet woken up to the fact of its feasible contribution into the current disaster. With a contempt for formal rules inspired by belief in national and, consequently, personal exceptionalism, surely, it could not be regular citizens who gave bribes to the enforcement bodies to avoid responsibility for breaking the law, they definitely didn’t silence or take part in “fair” business of their employers to fit in with the team and secure promotion, and, in no way they tried to use personal connections to provide their children with a place at a good university or a cushy job.
Corruption is a tree-like system rooted deeply into the entire population; those on the top are just the most visible. Michael Bulgakov noted that the spread of social diseases, one of which is corruption, tends to result in mass pandemics. “Ruin starts in people’s heads”; not in one individual head, even that of the national leader, however sick he could be. The earlier the entire social organism acknowledges its afflication, the faster recovery will start. In the end, being healthy means, in a way, to be like everybody else.