An article by Alexei was published in The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Le Monde to mark the anniversary of his poisoning one year ago.
We are publishing the original Russian version of this article:
Exactly one year ago, I did not die from poisoning with a chemical weapon, and corruption appears to have played a major role in saving my life. Having rotted the state system, it also rotted the security services. When the leadership is busy protecting businesses for profit and extorting money, the quality of covert operations will inevitably suffer. A group of FSB officers applied a nerve agent to my underwear just as incompetently as they had followed me for three and a half years—in violation of every instruction and protocol—which allowed civilian investigative activists to expose them completely.
But a regime built on corruption performs simpler tasks brilliantly. The judicial system—and that is the first thing autocrats who want to rob their people take control of—works perfectly on a quid pro quo basis. That is why, when I returned to Russia after treatment, I went straight from the plane to prison. There is little pleasant about that, but I do now have plenty of time to read the memoirs of world leaders.
World leaders describe, often fascinatingly, how they tackled humanity’s greatest problems: war, poverty, migration, climate change, weapons of mass destruction. These are the issues of the so-called “big agenda.” But the fight against corruption is not very often mentioned by world leaders among what they consider their legacy. That is hardly surprising—it is treated as a “secondary agenda” issue.
And yet—strikingly—corruption is almost always mentioned when world leaders describe failures: their own and, more often, those of their predecessors.
“We spent years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of human lives on Iraq/Afghanistan/Mali/you name it, but the corrupt government of al-Maliki/Karzai/Keïta/you name it alienated the people through its theft, paving the way for radicals to win—armed with slogans about honest, just government and RPGs.
And that raises an obvious question: if corruption prevents us from solving the problems on the “big agenda,” then perhaps it is time to put corruption itself near the very top of that agenda?
It is generally clear why that has not happened so far. Corruption is a very uncomfortable subject for discussion at world summits. You discuss Syria and cyberattacks with Putin, for example. Everyone is satisfied, everyone is interested. At the closing briefing, everyone has something to say.
Now imagine a meeting with Putin on the subject of corruption. The very fact of such a meeting makes it personal. From beginning to end, it is an uncomfortable situation. The richest man in the world, who has robbed his own country, is being asked to discuss how to fight himself. Very awkward and very uncomfortable.
Now turn on the news: the West’s refusal to “notice” the total corruption of the governments of Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, its unwillingness to talk about this personally uncomfortable subject, became a crucial factor in the Taliban’s victory with broad public support. They did not want to discuss theft from the state budget—now they will be discussing stonings and executions by beheading.
After the collapse of the USSR and the end of global ideological confrontation, corruption in its classic definition—the use of public office for personal gain—became the universal, non-ideological foundation of prosperity in the world of the authoritarian international. From Russia to Eritrea, from Myanmar to Venezuela. And corruption давно ceased to be merely an internal problem of those countries. It has almost always become one of the main causes of the global challenges facing the West as well. A new real war in Europe involving aircraft and artillery? That is Putin taking revenge on Ukraine for an anti-corruption revolution that toppled his protégé Yanukovych. Religious extremists of every kind find it easier to spread propaganda when their opponents drive Rolls-Royces through the streets of their impoverished countries. Migration crises are caused by poverty, and poverty is almost always caused by corruption.
“Good thing climate change has nothing to do with corruption,” you say ironically. I invite you to say that in the face of the millions of hectares of Siberian forests that burn every year because of barbaric clear-cutting carried out in violation of fire-safety rules for forest use. I do not want this prediction to come true, but I fear that the next major terrorist attack will not be something like another bomb from religious fanatics, but, say, chemical weapons in the water supply of a major city or a devastating attack on the IT infrastructure of an entire country—and that the people ordering it will be one or another owner of gilded palaces. And it will be done in order to distract the world’s attention from those palaces by shifting it to global security issues.
So it is not we who should feel uncomfortable asking authoritarian kleptocrats tough, personal questions. On the contrary, they should know that their shadowy dealings will always be the main subject of discussion at world summits. That would be a crucial step toward removing the causes of many problems.
So what should we do? After all, people sitting in Washington and Berlin cannot effectively fight the corruption of officials in Minsk or Caracas, can they?
That is true, but it is also true that an important feature of corruption in authoritarian countries is its use of Western financial infrastructure. And in 90% of cases, the stolen money is kept in the West. If anyone understands how important it is to keep capital far away from colleagues and the boss, it is an official working for an autocrat.
All that is needed to begin is determination and political will on the part of Western leaders. At the first stage, corruption must be turned from a source of tremendous opportunity into a heavy burden, at least for part of the elites surrounding autocrats. That will split those elites, while the camp of those who favor modernization, progress, and lower corruption will expand, grow stronger, and gain new arguments in domestic elite debates.
These few steps are entirely realistic, easy to implement, and could provide a highly effective start in the fight against global corruption.
The West should designate and recognize a special category—“corruption-enabling countries”—which would make it possible to adopt uniform measures toward groups of countries rather than imposing sanctions on specific states.
The main sanction for this group of countries—and, if you like, a tax on corruption—should be “compulsory transparency.” All documentation related to contracts concluded between Western companies and their counterparties from high-corruption-risk countries should be published if those contracts are connected in even the slightest way to the state, officials, or their relatives. Are you an employee of a state-owned company in a country with a high risk of corruption and want to buy a villa on the French Riviera? Go ahead, but all information about the transaction will be publicly available. Want to do business with the official authorities in Minsk or with the aunt of a Russian governor? No problem, but you will have to publish every document in the transaction chain, and the bribe you pay through a “regional representative” or “local partner” will no longer be possible to hide.
Fighting corruption without fighting corrupt individuals is hypocrisy that undermines voters’ trust in any action taken in this area. Until individual sanctions are imposed on oligarchs—above all those in Putin’s circle, the moral leader of all the world’s corrupt figures—any anti-corruption rhetoric from the West will be seen as a game and empty talk.
Nothing is more frustrating than reading yet another “sanctions list” filled with obscure colonels and intelligence generals, but carefully purged of those in whose interests those colonels act. The West must escape the semantic trap in which the label “businessman” serves as a kind of indulgence, making it much harder to end up on a sanctions list. Putin’s oligarchs—both the heads of state companies and those who are formally private but whose prosperity is tied to Putin’s group—are not businessmen but leaders of organized criminal groups. Yet for now, unfortunately, the Western establishment behaves like a collective Pavlov’s dog. Show them an intelligence colonel, and they shout: “Sanction him!” Show them the oligarch who keeps that colonel on the payroll, and they shout: “Invite him to Davos!”
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany already have excellent tools for fighting foreign corruption, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Bribery Act, and others. Guess how many cases were opened on the basis of complaints filed by our organization, now designated extremist by Putin’s government? That’s right: zero. The bitter truth is that even Western law enforcement agencies provide foreign corrupt actors with preferential treatment. A little political will from governments—and pressure from the public—and the situation can be corrected.
Preventing the export of political corruption clearly warrants the creation of an international body or commission. Look at what is already happening. By investing relatively small sums, Putin, for example, is buying up far-right and far-left movements across Europe in bulk, turning their politicians into his oligarchs and agents. Legalized bribery through “membership on the boards of state-owned companies” and similar arrangements is flourishing. A former German chancellor, a former Italian prime minister, and a former Austrian foreign minister perform as a dictator’s backup dancers, normalizing and covering up corrupt practices. Any contracts linking former or current Western politicians with counterparties from corrupt authoritarian countries should also be subject to publication.
These are only first steps, but even they would have a substantial effect by creating elite groups within authoritarian countries for whom the struggle to reduce corruption would become a rational choice.
No money, no soldiers, no restructuring of industry or world politics is needed to begin acting. Only political will. Unfortunately, that is often a scarce resource. Public opinion and the will of voters are the final ingredients that can break the deadlock. And someday world leaders will write in their memoirs that they solved many important problems on the “big agenda” simply by eliminating their root cause. Without troops, billions, or decades wasted in vain.