The U.S.S.R. was corrupt to the core. There was not a single aspect of Soviet life that was not touched by corruption in some way.1 From the high echelons in the Politburo,2 down to the regional offices, everyone in the government was likely to be corrupted in some way or other. "Corruption in the U.S.S.R. is technically expedient, publicly acknowledged, and politically condoned and abetted."4
The main purpose of this paper is to delve into some of the more common acts of corruption that occurred, and the reasons why they occurred and were so widespread. Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union simply did not work. The failure of communism is evidenced by the alarmingly high rate of corruption found in the Soviet Union, which itself was the home of communism, and the leader of all communist states throughout the 20th century.5 Where the system failed, many underground6 capitalistic types of activities began to form to augment the official economy.7 Much of this type of corruption actually served to improve the official economy. "The characteristics developed by 'successful' managers included behaviors that were technically illegal."8 In short, I will attempt to show that communism failed because as a system it was too conducive to the formation of patterns of corruption.
First I will deal with corruption and malfeasance in politics. The Communist Party, known simply as "the Party," controlled everything. Every single aspect of life in the country was controlled by the Party, by virtue of the fact that they were the real leaders of the communist government.9 Many of the laws that governed citizens of the Soviet Union were not written down, but simply "known."10 Thus, the members of the party had absolute control, and could change the laws to fit what they needed on any given day. They could try dissidents or anyone else that they disliked on rules that they would make up after that person "committed a crime," without anybody saying that what they were doing was illegal.11 Through the spy network that existed they could do anything they wanted to anybody, and not have to worry, in all practicality, about any sort of constitution.12 The Soviets often threw individuals who seemed to be against the government into mental hospitals, even though the individuals were in perfect mental health.13 Therefore, someone who wanted democracy in the U.S.S.R. might likely end up being classified "mentally ill."
Not only did the inner party members have a lot of power, they had a lot of wealth, a fact which would have had Marx turning over in his grave if he could have known about it. The government simply gave them everything they needed. If something broke, it would immediately be fixed or replaced at the expense of the proletariat, as a service to member of the inner party, which became the new wealthy aristocracy.14 This represents class formation in an ostensibly classless society, and a perversion of Marxism. However, the higher echelons of the government were not the only ones to be corrupt.15
Corruption permeated every level of government, and the GAI16 was no exception.17 Another one of the most common corrupt practices in the Soviet Union was bribery. Although technically bribery could be penalized with death, this [law enforcement] tactic was rarely used, and did not stop many individuals from engaging in it.18 Just about every single individual in the Soviet Union was touched by bribery at some point in their lives. For one thing, anyone who had a car had to bribe the auto inspectors if they wanted to pass the annual inspection that all automobiles had to go through. Because "any owner of a private car is very well aware that the GAI inspector can always find some tiny problem even if the vehicle is really in perfect shape,"19 every driver hands over a ten-ruble note with the (other) required paperwork in order to pass the test.20 The inspectors were even known to take the ten rubles from their friends and relatives without even looking at the car.21
In addition to bribing automobile inspectors, any individual who wanted to move would have to bribe government officials.
Without the sanction of the Soviet police, a person is not allowed to move from one apartment to another, nor is he even permitted to let his closest relatives or friends stay in his home for more than three days . . . [this] has provided an abundant and inexhaustible source of income for all police officials who have anything to do with it.22
However, this problem was not chief among all the problems that the Soviets had to deal with. Corruption in industry was even more threatening to the communist system.
There was also much bribery that occurred among factory owners. Due to the way that factory system worked, which will be described in detail later, it was necessary for factory managers bribe the managers of other factories in order to get the parts they needed.23 Instead of waiting for the communist system to provide for the goods that they needed, the factory manager with any degree of business acumen would simply bribe the manager of the factory to get him to supply parts or raw materials to him, outside the official system.24 Bribes were common in the U.S.S.R., but there were also other corrupt acts that are worth mentioning.
The most common25 forms of corruption was an act known as "report-padding," which entailed an official in the bureaucracy inflating the quantity of a good produced, and receiving extra money from the central government for the goods which were produced on paper alone.26 There were even several factories existed only on paper and were given production assignments by the Government Planning Department. The Central Statistical Office included these assignments in their records of things "produced."27 There was no incentive in the soviet system to keep people from report-padding.
The final aspect of corruption that I would like to deal with is the one that speaks most directly to the failure of communism in the Soviet Union. There existed an entire network of private enterprises that existed alongside the official communist system of production.28 Konstantin Simis perfectly describes the way in which these illegal enterprises were intertwined with the regular Soviet economy, in what was often referred to as the "second economy."
A private enterprise will coexist, under the same name and under the same roof, with a state factory. This kind of private operation cannot exist on its own without the cover of the state facility. In this symbiotic relationship the state factory operates perfectly normally. It is run by an officially appointed manager and technical supervisor, and it manufactures goods as called for by the state plan, goods that appear on the factory's books and are distributed through commercial channels for sale. . . . But alongside these official goods the same factory is manufacturing goods whose existence is not reflected in any documents.29
Not only was there a high degree of privatization among manufacturers, but the average individual engaged in a small degree of private enterprise by moonlighting. Many people in the working class, or at least what we would judge to be the working class by American standards, plumbers, carpenters, and other craftsmen, average people, would augment their incomes by moonlighting, and selling the liquor on the black market,30 which came into being as soon as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917.31
There are obviously many acts of corruption that occurred in the Soviet Union. Why were they so common? What was it about the way the system worked that caused people to say that "corruption is born of the very nature of the Soviet political and economic system."32 What were the underlying causes of these various acts of corruption? There are a multitude of reasons, from the historical to the psychological. I will delve into several below.
There was no competitive edge in the Soviet Union, and the basic human desire for success had to be fulfilled in other ways. The drive that people needed to work was not present, at least not in the official system. For one thing, ambition was totally checked within factories, because the government adopted a policy of promotion based highly on politics, but little on skills or knowledge.33 This frustrated many Soviets, and made them desire to become successful in other ways.
The second economy, however, provided plenty of incentive for the Soviet masses, it provided a drive to work that the official communist system did not. "An observer of the second economy cannot but be impressed by the constant evidence of widespread enterprise, ingenuity, flexibility, and speed in pursuit of private gain, despite formidable obstacle and great personal risk."34 Because running a private business was illegal in the Soviet Union, there were many legal barriers that had to be crossed, providing even more difficulties for the Soviet entrepreneur. The temptation often outweighed any foreseeable difficulties, which included capital punishment.35
Another reason why the official system provided no incentive was because it left no important decisions up to the people involved in the system. There was a centralized plan that governed what would be produced, how much would be produced, and where and from whom a factory would receive the equipment and raw materials needed for production.36 This system left no responsibility on the shoulders of the plant manager, except to see that the plan was fulfilled, which often did not happen. A survey of 14 factories in the Moscow area showed that not a single one of them actually had met their yearly quotas.37 Because of the fact that the producers of raw materials and other necessities for a factory often let their plans go unfulfilled, the manager who felt it necessary, for whatever reason, to fulfill his plan, or at least get a figure that was near to the theoretical goal, would resort to corrupt practices, like bribery, in the second economy, or black market,39 or they could simply report-pad. In fact, the higher level administrators and bureaucrats did not have any incentive to pursue the managers who participated in the second economy, because they had an interest in showing their superiors that the factories they were in charge of were successful.39 Corruption often served as a kind of "lubricant," to augment the official system.40
A byproduct of the low work incentive created by the communist system is that people were often lackadaisical and lazy in their work habits. Work discipline in state run factories and businesses was at an "appallingly low level," and people were often did not show up to work, were drunk on the job, and were also negligent on the job.41 This, however, was only at the official jobs. In the second economy there was nothing like that going on. Soviet people spent all their energy in figuring out ways of beating the system and outsmarting the authorities, so much so that a huge percentage of the adult population of the U.S.S.R. was guilty of something. "Knowing that much of decent living depends on illegality, Russians move always in a diffuse mist of vague guilt and vulnerability, understanding that they have done many things on the dark side of the law for which they can be arrested at any moment.42
Even another reason why certain individuals engaged in capitalist activities is the fact that the exchange rate between the U.S.S.R. was so bad. The government tried to make the situation bearable by keeping the official exchange rate at an artificially high level,43 and thus black marketeers were able to profit by exchanging money at a more reasonable rate for foreign businessmen. I myself had exactly this experience in the early winter of 1987 when I accompanied my father on a business trip to Moscow and Leningrad. The first thing that happened to us after we got out of the airport was we had an offer from a taxicab driver to illegally exchange money. The official exchange rate was basically one ruble to the dollar, but the taxi driver gave us eight rubles for the dollar, and it was all the money we needed for the entire trip. My father even had to flush some of the excess rubles down a toilet at a train station on the way out, so that we would not be questioned by the customs officials.44 One of the reasons why we had too many rubles was because many of the stores that we went to only accepted "hard currency" or money from more stable economies of the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries. We ended up using U.S. dollars as frequently as rubles. The Soviet citizens simply knew that there was more to back up the dollar than the ruble.
Another lack of motivation to work hard stems from the fact that there is often a conflict of interests for many Soviet workers. At the hotel where we stayed in Moscow there was a Japanese restaurant that sat empty at dinnertime. One evening my father and I tried to eat there. They told us that they had no room for us, and we looked and saw that the restaurant was empty, and so they said that there was no food. We were finally able to bargain with them and get some steamed rice. We found out later that the employees are able to keep the food for themselves if they do not sell any of it, and therefore they try to discourage business because they can eat much better that way than if they tried to live off their state salaries as waiters and waitresses.
All these problems that we had vexed my father to the point where he said that "it was as if everything had been taken over by the Department of Motor Vehicles."45 He may have been thinking of all the people we saw who would line up as soon as they saw a line forming somewhere, and later ask their neighbors what they were standing on line for. It was a system built on bureaucracy.
Bureaucrats, no matter what country they are in, tend to bend the rules for their own personal gain,46 and the large organizations in the Soviet Union were perfect breeding grounds for corruption.47 There was no power over the bureaucracies and party officials; they did not have to answer to the people because the press was censored.48 "If the old adage 'power corrupts' is true, then the highly concentrated nature of power in [the Soviet Union] would be very corrupting."49 The bureaucracies were also very secretive, allowing for all sorts of illicit activities to go on behind closed doors.50 However, the bureaucracies were built up over a long period of time.
The U.S.S.R. had a long history of corruption. Even before the revolution of 1917, Czarist Russia was also a corrupt society.51 In 1908, a count, Konstantin Pahlen, was sent to investigate corruption and malfeasance among Russian colonial administrators, and he ended up taking an entire year going from place to place, and he removed "a number" of individuals from office.52 This tradition of corruption made it paved the way for the revolutionary government of Lenin to engage in corrupt activities.
As soon as the first unit of the new Soviet society became corrupt, which occurred while the revolutionary government was still in its infancy,53 the entire country would soon follow suit, seeing that it offered much, and the drawbacks were few. Thus, the corruption was legitimized through its own prevalence.54 People began to see it as the right of the bureaucrat to have certain perquisites, and that holding public office constituted a legitimate opportunity for personal gains.55 Corruption became so widespread that there was nobody to whom a potential whistleblower could complain.56
One final reason that people engaged in corrupt practices was because they did not like the system. The official system did not traditionally receive much public endorsement.57 There were several reasons why people did not like the system, chief of which was the fact that promotions were based on tenure and the ability of one to act in an obsequious manner, not on a work-ethic, thereby weakening peoples' commitment.58 Given this, some people actually got a thrill from engaging in corrupt acts that went undetected.59 People could vent their frustrations through corruption because they felt that they were getting back at a system that they did not like.60 "It appears that some have felt that if one can neither beat nor join . . . 'the system,' then at least one can cheat it."61
The basic effects of the corruption were to weaken the Soviet system to the point where it collapsed when Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party, tried to reform it with his programs of Glastnost62 and Perestroika63 in 1989. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. led to the end of the "Cold War," and a the end of a bipolarized world. It would appear that a major ramification of this would be a massive nuclear disarmament, especially among the two superpowers involved in the former cold war.
Corruption also made daily life in the U.S.S.R. very bad, because the official system could not provide for all the needs of the masses. Because of all the report-padding that was going on, soviet agriculture could not feed the country.64 Undoubtedly Soviet farmers took what they could before they shipped off the rest to the government. There was no incentive to produce more. The services sector was inadequate as well. "The Soviet population was . . . frustrated by the inadequacy of the service sector and its retailing systems, by lack of efficiency, reliability, and courtesy."65 This drove people to alcoholism, which furthered the cycle of corruption.
Basically, communism failed in the Soviet Union because in such a system people lacked incentive to do real work, and they resorted to illegal methods of personal gratification and advancement. Corruption was a way of circumventing the formal, inadequate, legally devised systems of operations, and it made working in the Soviet Union easier.66 People were looking for a way to get rich or gain power and prestige, as all humans do, and that entailed being a high ranking party official, or stepping outside of the bounds of communism. The system encouraged corrupt activities by the way it was formed, and this is proven by the rapidity that corruption came onto the scene in the Soviet Union, as well as the extent to which it permeated society.
1Konstantin Simis, "Andropov's Anticorruption Campaign," Washington Quarterly Summer 1983: 120.
2The principal policy-making committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.
3Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 33.
4Charles A. Schwartz, "Corruption and Political Development in the U.S.S.R.," Comparative Politics v. 11, July 1979: 441.
5Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. xi.
6Simis Corrupt Society, 145.
7Holmes, 191.
8William A. Clark, Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 44.
9Simis Corrupt Society, 24.
10Clark, 40.
11Simis Corrupt Society, 30.
12Simis Corrupt Society, 10.
13Kevin Klose, "The Cases of Alexei Nikitin and Anatoly Koryagin," in The Breaking of Bodies and Minds, ed. Eric Stove and Elena Nightengale (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1985), 170.
14Simis Corrupt Society, 37.
15Simis "Andropov," p. 120.
16The Soviet Union equivalent to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the United States.
17Simis Corrupt Society, 185.
18Holmes, 46.
19Simis Corrupt Society, 185.
20Ibid.
21Ibid.
22Simis Corrupt Society, 181.
23Simis Corrupt Society, 140-2.
24Clark, 44.
25Schwartz, 432.
26Holmes, 101.
27Simis Corrupt Society, 127.
28Holmes, 191.
29Simis Corrupt Society, pp. 146-7.
30Boris M. Segal, The Drunken Society (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), 513.
31Clark, 10.
32Simis "Andropov," 121.
33Holmes, 181.
34Clark, 47.
35Schwartz, 437.
36Simis "Andropov," 114.
37Simis Corrupt Society, 127-8.
38Simis "Andropov," 114.
39Clark, 58.
40Holmes, 161.
41Simis "Andropov," 113.
42Segal, 277.
43Holmes, 178.
44Exporting rubles was illegal.
45Peter M. Donovan, telephone interview on April 14, 1995 at 8:20pm.
46Clark, 29.
47Ibid., 44.
48Nicholas Lampert, Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 135.
49Holmes, 190.
50Clark, 46.
51James Crichlow, "'Corruption,' Nationalism, and the Native Elites," Journal of Communist Studies v. 4, June 1988: 148.
52Ibid.
53Clark, 10.
54Ibid., 45.
55Critchlow, 148.
56Clark, 45.
57Holmes, 160.
58Ibid., 162.
59Ibid., 164.
60Ibid.
61Ibid., 191.
62Gorbachev's campaign to free the press, which included making previously classified documents available to the masses. A general "opening up" of government. Literally: "Openness."
63Gorbachev's campaign to reform all aspects of government, and rid government of all forms of corruption. Literally: "Restructuring."
64Simis "Andropov," 111.
65Segal, 513.
66Schwartz, 435.
Primary Sources:
Donovan, Peter M. Business traveller, Westport, Connecticut. Telephone interview, 14 April 1995, 8:20pm.
Simis, Konstantin. "Andropov's Anticorruption Campaign." Washington Quarterly, Summer 1983, pp. 111-121. DLC: D839 .W33
Simis, Konstantin. USSR: The Corrupt Society. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. DLC: JN6529.C6 S5513 1982
Secondary Sources:
Clark, William A. Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. DLC: JN6529.C6 C58 1993
Critchlow, James. "'Corruption,' Nationalism, and the Native Elites." Journal of Communist Studies 4 (June 1988): 142-161. DLC: HX3.J65
Holmes, Leslie. The End of Communist Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. DGU: D850 .H64 1993
Klose, Kevin. "The Cases of Alexei Nikitin and Anatoly Koryagin," in The Breaking of Bodies and Minds, Edited by Eric Stover and Elena Nightengale. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1985. DLC: RA1122.8 .B73 1985
Lampert, Nicholas. Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. DLC: JN6529.W55 L36 1985
Schwartz, Charles A. "Corruption and Political Development in the U.S.S.R." Comparative Politics 11 (July 1979): 425-443. DLC: JA3 .C67
Segal, Boris M. The Drunken Society. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990. DLC: HV5513 .S359 1990