HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

I can point to my own experience at YUKOS. When our team joined the company every level of management was eaten up by corruption. This was because it was planted at the very top. When the company passed into the hands of a private owner who wasn’t interested in stealing from himself, the natural motivation to spread corruption disappeared. A different matter was the technology, which was pretty basic. Each employee was given a proposition that it was hard to refuse: either you stop stealing and earn a decent salary; or you’re out, and in the worst cases legal action may be taken. If this isn’t just a game, but the real political line, everything is solved very quickly. It took us less than two years. This is why I don’t see corruption as an insurmountable challenge. But on the other hand, solving it doesn’t deal with the issue of competent management. An idiot who isn’t corrupt but is lazy can sometimes be more dangerous than a bright spark who’s corrupt.

From the very first days it will be essential to start creating the state structures as an independent task, unconnected with the work of building democracy or the battle against corruption. But in Russia there’s an extra, complicating cultural factor in trying to achieve this. The deep-rooted tradition of seeing any official just as a lazy thief, and one whose work could be done by anyone at all. What makes it worse is that not only is this impression widespread among the general population, but it’s shared also by a significant part of the educated urban population and the democratically-inclined intelligentsia. This is a real impediment when it comes to considering the work of the state apparatus as something serious.

This attitude to officials found its most grotesque form in the well-known Bolshevik view that any cook would and should run the state. Just a couple of years after the revolution, though, Lenin was complaining that the government had had to recall to its service a large number of officials who had earlier been dismissed. Each had to be watched over by a commissar. On a rather smaller scale, this happened again at the start of the 1990s. Thanks to the results of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s perestroika, a large part of the Soviet nomenklatura found themselves a place inside the new authorities. This was inevitable. You can’t just pluck managers out of thin air, or create them from scratch. When no others are available, you have to use those that you have, however unpleasant this may be.

This constant negative attitude to officialdom in Russia came about because for centuries managing people wasn’t seen as an art or a profession. And yet it’s one of the most complicated areas of professional activity. It needs lengthy and complicated training, and very serious qualifications and skills that come only with long experience. The philosopher, Max Weber, considered the training of an effective official to be one of the most complicated tasks there is, and one that costs society a great deal. He suggested that modern officialdom in Europe came about as a by-product of the development of capitalism, with its difficult cultural management. Overcoming Russian traditions in this area and the creation of a professional and modern state service should be seen by the temporary government as the starting point for working out the general approach to the formation of a civil service in the new Russia.

To pause briefly on the most general principles that should guide the temporary government in resolving this issue, I would underline four points:

Change the relationship to government service and officialdom as a social class. Contempt for bureaucracy (that’s understandable and easy to explain, and which even becomes hatred), should be replaced by a constructive and respectful approach. Officials and any state employees should be seen by society as people who are carrying out an essential role. If this isn’t the case, then the other side of the same coin is impossible to fulfil: people should be able to make demands of the officials.

Separate state service from politics. State service should be professional and apolitical. Politicians come and go, but this shouldn’t affect the civil service. The civil service should operate according to its own internal statutes and follow its own internal code of conduct, in accordance with which a career path should depend entirely on professional qualities, and not whether someone supports one political opinion or another. Officials should be chosen to serve predominantly on the basis of the results of open competition, and should be selected for promotion thanks to their achievements, also decided predominantly on the basis of competition. In brief, a civil service has to be created virtually from nothing in Russia, and as a separate institution of authority, capable of working with any political leadership.