Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1994, Covering the Former Soviet Union and East Central Europe
Economic Crime and Perestroika of the Human Heart
Leading Russian and Western specialists on post-Soviet economic crime,
speaking at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, April 21-23, gave an alarming
picture of criminal elements now in control, or unduly influencing not
only banking, retail business, and foreign trade, but law enforcement,
the courts, the customs service, the media, the economic privatization
process, and local, provincial, and central bureaucracies.
Organized crime in Russia increased between 1992 and 1993 by 28
percent; crimes causing serious bodily injury were up 24 percent; and
crimes committed with firearms were up 250 percent. Since 1987
homicides in Moscow have increased 800 percent. Organized crime's
ready access to weapons, its willingness to use them at the slightest
provocation, and the growing inability or unwillingness of authorities
to stem the tide of lawlessness is nowhere more evident than in
systematic gangland extortion of Russia's commercial businesses.
According to a January report prepared for Boris Yeltsin by the
Analytical Center for Social and Economic Policies, criminal elements
now extort 10 to 20 percent of earnings from some 75 percent of
Russia's private enterprises. (Celestine Bohlen, "Graft and
Gangsterism in Russia Blight the Entrepreneurial Spirit," New York Times International, 30 January 1994, 1; "The High Price of Freeing Markets," The Economist, 19 February 1994, 57; Paul Podolsky, "Bring on the Tax Police," Moscow Times, 25 February 1994, 10.)
On the other hand, proliferating taxes--up to 80 percent of
profits--are so burdensome that they all but doom any business unable
to evade a significant portion of them. "In reality, two tax
systems function simultaneously: the mafia's 'unofficial' taxes,
which are widely observed, and the government's, which are widely
ignored" (Podolsky). According to the report prepared for Yeltsin,
"Protection money is paid as regularly as taxes are evaded" (The Economist).
While speakers at the Wheaton conference made it quite clear
that widespread corruption also characterized the tsarist and Soviet
regimes, they did suggest two distinctives of the current criminal
blight: 1) it receives far greater and far more penetrating media
exposure than was the case under tsars or commissars; and 2) the
government's present weakness - to the point of near paralysis - gives
criminal elements freer reign than they have enjoyed since the Civil
War of 1918-21.
It is absolutely necessary to analyze the role of economic
crime in Russia's current malaise. But at some point, to be of
any earthly use, description must be coupled with prescription. I
believe Christians in particular have a moral obligation to offer the
people of the former Soviet Union support, encouragement, and when
asked for, culturally sensitive counsel.
In the modern academy that word moral is often made to
seem incompatible with rational, scientific analysis, as if such a
thing as value-free research actually existed. But there are
scholars who argue otherwise. Robert Fogel, University of Chicago
economic historian and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for economics,
said on the day his award was announced, "There is such a thing as
morality." Otherwise, he could not explain the abolition of
slavery, which his calculations determined were profitable, apart from
"a force even stronger than the laws of economics: a moral
revulsion against a system that denied humanity." Fogel thus
argues unapologetically in learned circles that the "intense beam of
morality...can change history." (R.C. Longworth, "Morality:
It's Time for a Closer Look," Chicago Tribune, 17 October 1993, 1, 4.)
It is interesting to note the expression of a similar ethical
imperative coming from the U.S.S.R. in its last gasps. A number
of prominent Soviet intellectuals came to regard the sickened state of
their own society as a product of lost faith and abandoned
morals. Two years ago the Institute for East-West Christian
Studies published Ethics in the Russian Marketplace: An Anthology,
which quoted writer Viktor Astafyev to this effect. His
soul-searching comments seem even more poignant and relevant to
Russia's plight today than they were when first published in May 1986:
What happened to us? Who hurled us into the depths of
misfortune, and why? Who extinguished the light of goodness in
our soul? Who blew out the lamp of our conscience, toppled it
into a dark, deep pit in which we are groping, trying to find the
bottom?...[In the past] we lived with a light in our soul...so that we
would not wander in the darkness,...scratch out each other's eyes, or
break our neighbor's bones....They stole it from us and did not give
anything in return, giving rise to unbelief, an all-encompassing
unbelief....To whom should we pray? From whom should we ask for
forgiveness? (p.8)
Speaking in much the same vein this past
November Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned, "If we do not learn
to...subordinate our interests to moral criteria, we, humankind, will
simply be torn apart, as the worst aspects of human nature bare their
teeth." ("To Tame Savage Capitalism," New York Times, 28
November 1993, E11.) And Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav
Havel would see the widespread moral bankruptcy of post-Communist lands
as the direct product of the moral bankruptcy of Marxism in power: The
worst thing is that we are living in a decayed moral environment.
We have become morally ill because we have become accustomed to saying
one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in
anything, not to have consideration for one another, and only to look
after ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion,
humility, and forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension....Few of
us have managed to cry out that the powerful should not be all
powerful. (Ethics, 15-16.)
Father Alexander Borisov
of Moscow's Russian Orthodox parish of Saints Cosmas and Damian likens
Russia's present dilemma to that of the Old Testament exodus.
Just as the Hebrew children, after their liberation from Egyptian
bondage, wandered 40 years in the wilderness, he fears Russia as well
may require 40 years to produce a generation born free, which does not,
like the ancient Hebrews, "look back with nostalgia to the security of
slavery." (Leonid Kishkovsky, "Russian Orthodoxy: Out of
Bondage, Into the Wilderness," Christian Century
110 (6 October 1993), 936-37.) Hopefully, a truly free spirit
will come much sooner than four decades. Toward that end, another
Russian Orthodox priest, Father Georgi Edelstein of Kostroma, shared at
the Wheaton conference on economic crime that in the wake of
Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's failed perestroika, the only form of
restructuring that is likely to spare Russia incalculable troubles
ahead is a perestroika of the human heart and soul. Certainly, Russia desperately needs to effect all manner of
structural and systemic changes to control crime and to ensure a
workable market system. But I believe Father Georgi is correct in
contending that effectual reform must begin from within, with an inner,
personal transformation. Russia today unquestionably is
undergoing profound change. Yet to be determined is whether mafia
godfathers or believers in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
will be more successful in capturing and fashioning the hearts of
Russia in flux. 
Mark Elliott, editor
For a listing of tapes available from the Wheaton conference,
"Economic Crime and the Prospects for a Market Economy in the Former
Soviet Union," contact the EWC&M Report office.
Mark Elliott, "Economic Crime and Perestroika of the Human Heart," East-West Church & Ministry Report, 2 (Spring 1994), 15-16.
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© 1994 East-West Church and Ministry Report
ISSN 1069-5664
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