Lee Kuan Yew died yesterday. The article about him on Russian Wikipedia is insultingly short. Hardly anyone here really knows much about him, even though, it would seem, he was a successful authoritarian ruler who repeatedly argued that European-style democracy was unsuitable for many countries around the world. You’d think that the current state propaganda of the Russian Federation would find such an example incredibly useful.
And yet among our elite, Lee Kuan Yew is far less popular than someone like Robert Mugabe.
The whole point is that the authoritarian Lee Kuan Yew crushed corruption in an authoritarian way. Really, genuinely did. In Singapore, populated by Chinese and Malays—groups about whose “natural inclination toward corruption” people say far more than they do about Russians—corruption is practically nonexistent.
According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, Singapore ranks 7th, while Russia is 136th.
That’s why Lee Kuan Yew was never popular in the Kremlin. He was the wrong kind of autocrat for them: what’s the point of establishing an authoritarian regime if you’re not going to steal billions in the process? It makes no sense to them.
And his famous quotes about fighting corruption—the ones everyone loves, us included—must sound outright unacceptable and frightening to our authorities:
I have a small personal story about this man, even though I obviously never knew him.
Some time ago, if you remember, the oligarchs launched the Skolkovo business school. As usual in such cases, there was a lot of hype, but they decided to pay for it with state money—Sberbank issued a $250 million loan on non-market terms, based on a completely absurd, made-up business plan.
As a Sberbank shareholder, I made a huge fuss over this for a long time, raising hell about it. I remember Gref saying I was narrow-minded and didn’t understand the long-term prospects. But in the end, they gave up and decided to refinance the loan through another bank, just to put the matter to rest and stop dealing with it.
Now, one episode in that fight struck me to the core. The thing is, I wrote letters to all the trustees of the Skolkovo school, and one of them was Lee Kuan Yew. It was a simple letter saying that you can’t build a good business school on bad loans.
Some of the recipients even replied to me, but the reaction from the Skolkovo-Sberbank team was specifically about the letter to Singapore. Whether he said something to them or simply forwarded the letter, people I knew told me they were absolutely furious that a complaint had been sent there. Something like, “That bastard Navalny—fine, let him make a scandal here, but why did he have to write to Lee Kuan Yew?! That’s below the belt!”
I listened to that and thought: that’s the kind of man Lee Kuan Yew was. Here, they’re afraid of no complaints and care nothing for public opinion; they don’t give a damn about anything and think they can get away with it all. And yet there’s a Chinese man sitting in the other hemisphere of the Earth before whom even our oligarchs and officials feel ashamed.