Ethics Newsline®

On November 7, exit polls in the U.S. midterm elections showed that corruption and ethics were the most important issues determining voters’ choices.

The same day, news services reported Kremlin estimates that corrupt Russian officials were extorting $240 billion in bribes each year — nearly the size of the nation’s entire annual revenues.

Not all journalistic coincidences are noteworthy. This one is. Why? Because some influential Democratic senators and representatives, as they take over leadership roles in both chambers, are putting high priority on congressional ethics reform. Whether the reforms are effective depends on how hard hitting they are. That, in turn, depends on how important corruption is to lawmakers — which depends in part on how they read the lessons that Russia holds for the United States.

Of all the countries that the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) lists on its annual rankings, Russia may be the most relevant to the United States. Its sheer size, its European roots, its history of communist enmity toward the West, and especially its sudden relish for democratic ideals and free-market capitalism make it a fascinating petri dish for Americans to study. The experiment will show whether Western-inspired reforms can create political liberty, social progress, and economic prosperity in a country so unaccustomed to them.

So far the results are dismaying. Over the last four years, Russia’s place on TI’s list of 163 countries — running from least corrupt (Finland, ranked number 1) to most corrupt (Haita and Myanmar) — has slid from number 71 to number 121.

In one sense, that’s not surprising. Russia’s legacy of corruption is legendary, stretching back to the period of the czars. During the Soviet era, corruption became common practice for those who wanted to rise above the grim, gray destiny of the commonplace.

But even history can’t account for the sudden spiraling of graft since president Vladimir Putin came to office in 2000. He had promised to eliminate corruption. Yet a study last year by a Russian think tank, Indem, estimated that the value of the average bribe paid to corrupt Russian bureaucrats in 2005 was 13 times larger than in 2001.

Earlier this month, first deputy prosecutor general Alexander Buksman tallied up the Kremlin’s estimates of the cost of bribery to the Russian economy — $240 billion — and for the first time made that figure public. He also told the Kremlin’s daily newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, that Mr. Putin had put him in charge of a new anticorruption task force after the September 13 mob-style killing in Moscow of Andrei Kozlov, a top corruption fighter at Russia’s Central Bank.

Fortunately, the United States is not even close to Russia’s levels of bureaucratic turpitude. But neither is its immunity from corruption carved in stone. Going to school on the Russian experience, it can extract some key lessons.

First, democracy and capitalism do not in themselves guarantee progress and success. They can be overshadowed by a culture of corruption. Never mind that America’s political and economic history is so different from Russia’s; it can slide deeper into corruption any time it lets down its guard.

Second, political corruption is no mere second-order challenge, but a severe, immediate, first-intensity threat. It already has proved capable of removing Republicans from office. It also kills people — not only Moscow’s Mr. Kozlov, but perhaps also Miami businessman Konstantinos Boulis. The former owner of SunCruz Casinos, he was killed in a gangland-style shooting in Florida that may have some relationship to Jack Abramoff, the former high-profile Republican lobbyist who last week began serving a nearly six-year term for fraud in connection with his purchase of SunCruz in 2000.

Third, corruption has huge but hidden impacts on citizens at large, who may themselves never have seen any hint of graft in their local bureaucracies. But when corruption starts to drain federal coffers, how far do their taxes rise and their services deteriorate? How much of the post-Katrina chaos was due to unwitting incompetence, and how much to deliberate fraud? How much has the Iraqi war been extended, and how many lives have been lost, due to corruption among those supplying war materials and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure? Even if it never comes close to $240 billion a year, corruption in the United States still impedes shared prosperity.

The threat of corruption needs a firm congressional hand. If reforms are to be meaningful, they will address three key issues: campaign financing; the misuse of “earmarks,” those personal projects that legislators can anonymously tack onto spending bills; and the creation of an independent congressional ethics monitoring agency. Such reforms — around how people get elected to office, what they do when they get there, and whether anyone holds them to account — could have made significant differences in Russia, and can do so in America.

Russia’s example is a sobering bookend, reminding us where unchecked tendencies toward corruption lead. The United States isn’t Russia, but it’s on the same shelf as that bookend. Its ability to remain uncorrupted isn’t guaranteed and can’t be taken for granted. It will be so only because it wants to be — and insists that its elected leaders make it so.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics