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[Read Calling Moscow (Part 9)]
Some useful children of unlikely parentage. Bribery in all but name. At 3am, in the snow… it shall all become clear.
Neil presents an essential trade-off between pre and post Communist systems. One the one hand there’s a Soviet system which would prop up the weak or inept, whilst never allowing the “common man” to fly. Alternatively, with its absence, there is the potential to fly but you’ve also got the potential to fall hard as well… when it all fell to bits. Neil adds:
“That’s right. You could say that what they’ve ended up with now is a kind of uneasy compromise between those two extremes… They’ve still got a largely Soviet style health system, and a largely Soviet style education system. But they’ve got, nominally, free enterprise in the commercial sphere and quite a lot of independent small business. It’s a kind of mixed economy of the two things. And it will be interesting to see if they can actually make that work. Still, in Moscow you’ve got the strange paradox that there are lots and lots of private clinics and hospitals, the former state ones. Yet the best care legendarily is in the old tradition. At the Sklifovsky hospital, I think the motto is above the door: “Never a penny taken from anyone”. They treat everyone there free. Still there’s this very old socialist system that actually produces some quite good results and sometimes manages to survive alongside modern, capitalist, profit-making enterprises.
“They would say that countries like Sweden, which are extremely socialist, are actually more socialist than contemporary Russia. They’ve got even more money tied up in state systems, education, infrastructure, transport, health than the former Soviet Union.”
So if you could cherry-pick the best of each system, then you might have something that’s pretty good?
“Yes that’s true, and I think what’s holding it back now is not so much the system but the personalities, where some old guard bloke (and it is almost always men) is holding back some organisation because he’s at the helm and until he retires, he won’t go… The system itself could improve and take care of people better once the nutters have been finally removed. But that generation is going to take some time to filter through the system completely, even though most of them have now gone.” Those Soviet-Strong-Men again.
And what of the system’s functioning as a whole…? The wheeling, dealing, the favours, the bribery? “Things have become a lot more legit overall. You still end up paying pretty much for the same things but they’ve been made “legitimate” instead of bribery-related. The same things that everyone is used to in the rest of their lives: which effectively are a bribe but not called that. You can sign up with an Internet provider… but you have to sign up for 3 years. And if you break the contract, you mysteriously owe them millions of pounds… It’s this kind of thing which is effectively the same old bribery scenario, but just described in a different way. Even 10 or 15 years ago to try and get an extra telephone or fax line at home was almost impossible without a bribe. Now you just pay the commercial price and someone comes the next day and does it. Still, on things like government projects, national-scale developments, planning permission, change of use for buildings, permission to build new buildings or to tear down old ones, backhanders will be absolutely essential. It’s even legal to build the back-handers into the budget, because everybody knows you’ll have to do it! It’s dying out… the number of industries and situations in which you come across it get fewer and fewer with every passing year but there are still areas… particularly to do with permissions, permits, that kind of thing… You could almost say that the government is complicit in this.”
Neil explains the maths: “In the case of say, a clerk issuing permits at $100 a pop, direct to her own purse. She may only get paid $350 a month… how’s she going to make up the rest of her income..? They know she’s going to do that so they deliberately underpay her by 75%! Some people say that it actually encourages an efficient system because if people were just paid their salary, they’d probably not do any work. They’re effectively on a productivity bonus for 75% of their salary… because they actually have to do something!”. Incentivisation, Russian style. “They frequently say that about the traffic cops. Who else would sit in minus 17 in the snow, in a car, by traffic lights at 3 in the morning to see who went through them when they were red? Only somebody who is going to get a share of what the fine is going to be.”
Hmm, now when you put it like that…
And relax… Calling Moscow takes a break, to return refreshed with more Moscow-centric perspective later. Also, Tips and Tales for (and from) Siberian travellers at ground level… and more. In the meantime look forward to one-off articles set at varied tangents.
[Photo by Martjusha]
