Do you ever read a news story and think: damn, this is so wonderful it’s hard to believe. People just like us live not far away, and yet what an enormous gulf separates us?
These news stories had exactly that effect on me:
One:
Two:
And this isn’t happening on Mars, or the Moon, or even in New Zealand, which has the lowest perceived level of corruption.
Poland. Our fellow Slavs. Neighbors from the old socialist bloc. A similar mindset and all that.
A minister resigns, and then gets fined over a watch worth $6,000.
Just imagine how hard the former head of Udmurtia (a Russian republic) with a $120,000 watch, or former Moscow deputy mayor Resin with a watch worth $1 million, must be laughing when they read this story.
I’m not even bringing up people like Liksutov, who awarded a state contract worth 400 billion rubles (about $6 billion at the time) to a company in which he held shares through an offshore entity registered in his wife’s name. Or the various Neverovs, with their mothers-in-law buying palaces.
And the point isn’t even that our crooked officials laugh at stories like this, but that many of us don’t consider such a “trifle” grounds for resignation either.
“This one has already stolen enough, and if new people come in, they’ll just start stealing all over again” and “Let him steal, at least he gets things done” are the two most hellish and disgusting phrases that, I’m sure, many of you have heard—and they are exactly what keeps our society trapped in endless feudalism.
But there is a very strong reason for optimism in the fact that stories like this are increasingly coming from countries like Poland. Norwegians are hard to hold up as an example for ourselves, but Poland—that’s different, Poland is right here. I myself dealt with Polish traffic cops a few years ago, and they seemed to me a hundred times more crooked and extortionate than ours. The kind you’d think were beyond reform.
And yet they are developing, getting better. They pass the right laws, and then make themselves and their officials live by them.
That means we can do it too. We already want it—the 87% support for the idea of criminal liability for illicit enrichment shows that perfectly. Of that 87 percent, many may shrug off examples like these watches, saying nothing like that will ever happen here—but they would like it to.
We have almost collected the 100,000 verified signatures needed for the first step of our #Twenty campaign. Hurry if you want to be counted among them.
Of course, this won’t automatically make us “like Norway”—far too many people in power here still want to go on flaunting watches worth ten times their annual income with complete impunity. But it will be a step forward toward the day when Russian media, too, will be publishing such wonderful news. Vote.