Kommersant: "People Support Prime Minister’s Anti-Corruption Initiative"
But they doubt that it will be effective.
Most Russians believe that government officials should declare not only their income, but spending as well. Earlier, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the development of such a bill. Sociologists at the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, however, have found that nearly half of Russians do not believe that this measure will be effective.
At a United Russia conference in Bryansk, on the eve of the spring income declaration campaign, Vladimir Putin said that "anyone who goes into politics must be transparent and accountable to his or her income and spending" (see Kommersant issue dated March 9). A month later, the prime minister said that people viewed the initiative "very positively," and that "tighter supervision" over officials' incomes "would create healthier state machinery." Chief of Government Staff and Deputy Prime Minister Vyacheslav Volodin was charged to draft a corresponding bill (see Kommersant issue dated April 5).
According to the results of a public opinion poll that the centre conducted among 1,600 Russians in 46 regions, only 23% of Russians are indifferent to having officials declare spending as a measure to combat corruption. Most Russians (67%) support the prime minister's proposal, and of them, 48% believe that such declarations "can help identify discrepancies between income and spending, and thus reduce corruption." Twenty two percent of respondents believe it is fair for people to know how officials live. Another 9% feel that "this measure is long overdue" and that officials have grown too complacent. Only 6% of Russians disapprove of Putin's initiative for one of the two reasons: of them, 51% believe that this measure is ineffective and that "officials will find a way to get around it, and no one will provide true information," and 39% are sure that this is a populist move doomed to failure (the remaining 10% could not explain why they disapprove of the idea). Granted, even those who support the prime minister's initiative are far from unanimous, with 42% saying the measure will "likely be ineffective" and 45% saying it will "likely be effective."
It is worth noting that Putin is not the first to raise this issue. The idea that officials should declare their spending as well as their income came up when the State Duma was considering anti-corruption measures suggested by President Dmitry Medvedev in 2008. Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman and Farid Mukhametshin, chairman of the State Council of Tatarstan, put forth this idea in 2010. United Russia was in no hurry to draft amendments to anti-corruption legislation, despite acknowledging the idea of declaring spending as correct.
Valery Fyodorov, director general of the public opinion research centre, explained to Kommersant that the poll results indicate the typical mistrust of Russians. "Everybody acknowledges that corruption is all-pervading and that it needs to be combated," he said, but they believe that "it is impossible to eradicate it." Whatever the government undertakes, society will criticize its initiatives, he said.
Sergei Obukhov, a member of the Communist Party in the State Duma, sees people's doubts about the effectiveness of spending declaration as evidence of the "total distrust of the authorities" that keep making empty promises. "Spending declaration alone without introducing the legal notion of 'illicit enrichment' is useless," the deputy told Kommersant. He recalled that together with State Duma Deputy Alexander Kulikov, he called for the ratification of Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption last year. The article introduces the legal notion of "illicit enrichment" and holds that "a significant increase in the assets of a public official that he or she cannot reasonably explain in relation to his or her lawful income" is a crime. However, the deputy said that the government "is seeking escape routes," and that the bill's reading was being put off. Without the ratification of Article 20 of the UN Convention, Putin's proposal "is of no value," Obukhov says, because without the concept of "illicit enrichment," a public official need not explain why he or she has got "a villa in the Canary Islands on a salary of 15,000 roubles."
Maxim Ivanov
