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Why Russia Locks Up So Many Entrepreneurs

173 points by ytNumbers 14y ago

skrebbel 14y ago
3 million people? i have a very hard time believing that Russia has locked up 2% of their population the last 10 years - oh, and those were only the enterpreneurs, so the total figure is even higher.
- rorrr 14y ago
  You're assuming at one time. Russia's overall incarceration rate is 0.522%. You're right however, the 3 million figure seems very high. Russia is a lost cause. Police/government can (and regularly do) take over any business, especially any small business. Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    Not only is it not 3 million at one time, there's also no definition provided of what it means for them to have been locked up. It could presumably be a whole load of one week sentences, or maybe even a night or two in jail?
  - its_so_on 14y ago
    >Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country. So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution? This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.
    - unimpressive 14y ago
      > This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that. While I'm not supporting his assertion that this is the case, if such a thing were to happen anywhere, well...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia
    - rdl 14y ago
      The corruption, like corruption in other countries (including the US), hurts the poor and wage-earning directly and indirectly as well. It's not like it's the populace vs. business owners, it's the powerful and capricious vs. everyone (including other powerful people), using the state and security apparatus as a tool. Aside from a few people who made a lot of money a couple decades ago from rapid deregulation, I don't think business owners in Russia are worried about taxes, reasonable regulation, etc. hurting their businesses -- they're worried about totally random extortion. Very few businesses would rather operate in Equatorial Guinea or Somalia instead of (heavily regulated country of choice: depending on context, could be Germany, the US, Denmark, ...).
    - chrischen 14y ago
      He didn't say there is a class struggle. He said a full scale revolution may be the only way the country can be fixed. Conditions will deteriorate until the point where there will be a class struggle though.
    - rorrr 14y ago
      Stealing businesses is a much smarter idea than stealing money. Russian government thugs have figured it out. I do see why it may seem funny and Monty-Python-like, but it's extremely sad. It's a huge country ruled by thugs and talking heads, and they want more and more for themselves, while talking about helping the population.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    >> Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country Thank communism, because corruption was the only way for business to do any kind of transaction
    - valisystem 14y ago
      While I agree that it probably did not help, you don't need communism to have such large scale problems, all you need is just a badly run country.
    - pyre 14y ago
      Communism as we know it? Yes. Communism as Marx envisioned it? No. It's all just semantics really: 1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid. 2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China." 3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup. 4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different. 5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
      - danenania 14y ago
        I think all these semantic contradictions reveal a much more important truth: what -ism your government operates under or claims to operate under is about 1/1000th as significant as whether it aims to serve the people and respect the law. A corrupt communist state has much more in common with a corrupt capitalist state than with a respectable and well-run communist system, and vice versa. We should really focus a lot less on ideology in our politics and a lot more on basic ethics and accountability. Once we start getting those figured out, we can worry about the -isms.
        ajuc 14y ago
        Agreed, execution matters. But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China). We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious. Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
  - yaakov34 14y ago
    Yeah, absolutely. Revolutions have worked out so well before, especially in Russia. What Russia needs right now is some serious destruction and civil war, followed by a few decades of rule by hard men who know that their Cause comes before anything. Oh yeah.
    - PGenes 14y ago
      A revolution is not guaranteed to fix it. Unfortunately a revolution(of some sort) is the only thing that has any chance of fixing it.
    - rdl 14y ago
      I think they'd be best off with a "revolution" in thinking by the government and public security services. If they put rule of law as a high priority, and are able to extract enough. Everyone would be better off with Putin and the FSB crowd having their own licit and overt wealth, power, and perks, but then using their power to enforce fair laws on everyone else in exchange, vs. the system where they officially don't get as much benefit from their jobs, but extract personal benefit through corruption, and where others in society can use the state as a tool against other people. (which is why it makes sense to pay police, judges, etc. quite well, and to give them high social standing, in exchange for competence, professionalism, and lack of corruption) You could probably get that from the top echelon (I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did), but it's hard to get that down to the lowest level of law enforcement.
      - cousin_it 14y ago
        > I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did Haha. Here's a little about Putin: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/WikiLeaks-Putins-secret-billions.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/... And here a little about his former minister of health: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html There's much more where that came from. You can pretty much pick any high-ranking official in Russia and start digging.
  - ajuc 14y ago
    Or maybe low level stats are falsified in each prison/police station to show better "effectiveness" of cops. Only when it's aggregated it's stuppidly big number. The same happened with recent elections to Duma (over 100% people voted in many regions of Russia).
- perfunctory 14y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... This is ~0.5% at a given moment. 2% over 10 years doesn't sound too much.
  - wavephorm 14y ago
    USA Number One! Hoo-ah!
    - Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
      Up there with Georgia and Russia and Rwanda and Iran.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        Iran has, like, 2.5x times less.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - molmalo 14y ago
    Well, we are 102. And not because of benevolence (even when we have a lot of soft judges lately, that seem to prefer to look after criminals instead of the population), but because our prisons are old and full of people, and there's no political intent to build more. (The government even destroyed some cuz they were too old, but didn't replaced them) I bet that a lot of poor countries down there share the same reasons (and maybe, some lack the money to build more).
- rizumu 14y ago
  There is no freedom of speech, and a pervading censorship of all media, including more and more of the internet. Speak out, go to jail. "Just today (june 29) a Court ruled the feminist punk rockers must remain in jail while police slowly investigate them for the crime of allegedly chanting a 'punk prayer' against Putin from a church pulpit." http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120627165225580 http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120627165225580
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    "and a pervading censorship of all media" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor#Saturday_Night_Live_performance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor#Saturday... "NBC did not edit the performance out of the West coast tape-delayed broadcast that night, but reruns of the episode use footage from the dress rehearsal" Where's the difference? Talking about media.
    - Retric 14y ago
      during the dress rehearsal she held up a photo of a refugee child.
    - rizumu 14y ago
      Well you are talking about NBC censoring, this on the other hand is the goverment putting people in prison. Since the govt controls the TV and papers you wouldn't find much information about the Moscow protests that took place a few months ago. You'd have to look to the internets, which are next in line to be censored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_the_Russian_Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_the_Ru...
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        I'm just saying that there are multiple ways of having censored media. Some of which feature govt controlling said medias, some don't, some might be pure commercial, but the end result might look surprisingly the same.
- rb2k_ 14y ago
  According to Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...: > The incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world. As of 2009, the incarceration rate was 743 per 100,000 of national population (0.743%).[2] In comparison, Russia had the second highest, at 577 per 100,000,
prostoalex 14y ago
It's a natural progression of corrupt regimes where 1) An entrepreneur pays off someone in the position of power (police, local government, tax collector) to facilitate quick problem resolution. 2) The aforementioned person in the position of power realizes that instead of the paltry fee they could lay claim on a large share of the business or entire 100% stake.
sasoon 14y ago
3 million per in 10 years is 300,000 per year, or 820(!) per day. I doubt they lock up 820 entrepreneurs per day.
- diminish 14y ago
  Can someone from Russian, please confirm the 3million number? It seems so unbelievable.
  - vborovikov 14y ago
    Titov talked about 13000 entrepreneurs.
  - shadchnev 14y ago
    In other sources Titov mentions 13,000 entrepreneurs who are currently in jail. A quick search in Russian for "Titov entrepreneurs three million" doesn't give any other results but the BBC article.
    - diminish 14y ago
      I am no Russian or friend with their current government , but this perpetual flow of dubious information on ft, ftd or bbc is remarkable; I would really like to profile, such dubious information based on author etc.. but have no time..
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
hastur 14y ago
Now, compare that to Putin's pipe dreams of creating his own version of Silicon Valley in Russia. Obviously, even he can't be that stupid. So it's all PR, Putin doesn't want Russia to go anywhere, he just loves presiding over the vast criminal empire of intelligence services, organized crime and oligarchs.
- BadassFractal 14y ago
  What ever happened to that, by the way? So far the only big companies to come out of Russia were basically local language counterparts of Yahoo, Facebook and Norton.
  - krasin 14y ago
    Please, define "big"? What's about Parascript (acquired for $50M in 2008)? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript Abbyy? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy Evernote? Badoo? Parallels?
    - BadassFractal 14y ago
      Evernote/Badoo were not founded / grown in Russia as far as I can tell. It would be like saying that Google is a Russian company because Sergey was born there. Also, the fact that a 50m company even needs to be mentioned among the "top" should be sufficient proof of the country's impact on the rest of the world (again, I'm not counting Russia-specific Yandex/Rambler/Odnoklassniki/[...] here)
    - krschultz 14y ago
      Your own link says that Parascript is now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
      - ajays 14y ago
        Parascript was a Russian company, but they moved en masse to Boulder in 1994 (IIRC). They are (were?) a group of very smart engineers, very strong in DSP.
marcuspovey 14y ago
When I went to visit my then girlfriend's family in Russia a few years ago there was what was known as the $100 rule - basically that nobody ever left the house without $100 US in their pocket, because that amount would be enough to get you out of pretty much any trouble. Bribery of police is so endemic in Russia that the state's most effective counter to this so far has been to simply bribe the police more and reclaim the losses from the perp - so for a traffic offence, the policeman would get a bonus from the state for not taking the bribe and the offender would have his car sold. Paying police more in the first place might be a good start.
- cousin_it 14y ago
  Russian person here. Why do you think paying the police more would reduce corruption? Highly paid government officials in Russia are just as corrupt.
  - da02 14y ago
    I agree. Bank tellers are not that highly paid, but the local banks have no problem with massive theft. Here in the US, police are paid quite well and retire with a nice pension. They also win a free-paid vacation if they kill an unarmed civilian. They call it "suspended with pay". Despite all that, they also taser the elderly and teens half their size: https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+elderly++&oq=police+taser+elderly https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+elderly++&o... I read a blog for priv. prop. anarchists and they never run out of stories like those.
    - mjwalshe 14y ago
      You would rather that some one being investigated went back to work and potentially adjusted the evidence that is why when your investigated for a serious offence at work you are suspended.
rdtsc 14y ago
> Businessmen have complained for years that people have been able to frame commercial rivals Corruption is like an infectious disease. It infects the body from the head to the toes. Corruption is involved in every stage of a person's life. When a person is born, in the hospital bribes need to be doled out to nurses, doctors and staff if appropriate care is expected. In school starting from kindergaden and all through highschool teachers and principles are bribed to ensure good grades are assigned. Then bribes are given to government officials. Say, if you take a driver's exam (this happened to me) they will fail you on purpose expecting that you will realize that you need to pay them a bribe in order to pass it. It is not that are you good or not, it doesn't matter, because others pay, pay is expected always and those that don't pay get failed until they pay. There is a price you can pay to get away with murder. There is a price you pay to the court DNA tester to either fabricate or deny a paternity test. There is a price for every single piece of certificate or license issued for conducting a business( and, not surprisingly the number of said certificates and licenses never decreases ). It is not just bribes. It is also nepotism. There is so much freakin' incompetence because people who are not qualified are put in position just as a result of being related to some higher-up. This corruption is also transmitted to offspring. Children observe their parents interact with the corrupt system and they learn to do the same, in the process also become corrupt. To get back to the article. I think a lot of businessmen get locked up because they did not play by the un-official rules and thought, perhaps some thought, they could function like they would do in the West or in America.
- smsm42 14y ago
  It's actually worse. There are no rules that would prevent that from happening. If you have money, you are a target for criminals, and bigger organized crime syndicate is the security services themselves. If you're lucky, you lose some money, if you're less lucky - you can lose everything, including your freedom. Since judicial system and law enforcement as a rule do not protect potential targets from attacks, but rather facilitate and sometimes initiate them - there's nothing to prevent that from happening. You can bribe someone, of course, if you have money - but somebody else can pay more, or threaten, or the bribed official may decide to take the money, but do nothing to help you. What you're gonna do, sue him? Another part of it is that the laws are purposely built in a way to ensure it's impossible to not have some problems with them. This way, of course, the officials can solicit more bribes - but also more people would be imprisoned because there's always something he can be accused of. Or, as famous Russian saying goes, if there's a man, there's always a criminal code article for him.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
guard-of-terra 14y ago
You have in one article two kinds of businessmen mixed up: First are the owners of small- (and medium-) scale businesses which they built by themselves. Second are the owners of companies which were previously state-owned during USSR and then they were suddently privatized and "somehow" landed into a hands of very select few. I don't think it's correct to call the latter group "enterpreneurs". I think it's bad for the former group to have both groups mixed together in one article. What you really have is using some real and ugly problems of the first group to pitch some ongoing cases featuring persons from the second group. Those cases being ugly too not makes this spin a good thing. My mother owns a small cloth shop, she has quite a few problems as a small business owner, but I doubt she wants to be used as a lever in the favour of Hodorkovsky or Kozlov. She might sympathise them, she might not. She's NOT on the same field anyway.
kinleyd 14y ago
Whoa, that is some statistic! Eventually the best entrepreneurs are going to vote with their feet and that cannot be good for Russia. High time for Putin to fix the broken legal/police system.
- obtu 14y ago
  Indeed. According to the UN report on inclusive wealth ( http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/article/iwr http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/article/iwr via http://www.economist.com/node/21557732/ http://www.economist.com/node/21557732/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196895 ) Russia's wealth is all natural resources, and decreasing mostly due to a fast drop in human capital.
maga 14y ago
What I love about English-speaking communities is that articles like this one receive real comments from real people. It might sound strange, but try to put this kind of article somewhere in Russian and you're guarantied to receive first 10 comments telling you that it's just America trying to destroy the Mighty Russia with this kind of falsehood. And those comments are rarely from common people, even though Cold War ideas are strong in their heads, mostly they are written by paid pro-Kremlin activists or just simple bots.
- obtu 14y ago
  Well, these astroturfers are a message in themselves. They do exist in the English web as well, though.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  When did you see Youtube comments the last time? Anyway, you are wrong. Five of that ten comments would be about how their authors hate Russia and are eager to abandon it. And you are wrong twice because both kinds of comments seem to originate from real people. This is much more sad than any propaganda machine.
kalmsy 14y ago
Makes me appreciate living in Scandinavia (Denmark). Corruption here is barely measurable. Found this: http://blog.transparency.org/2011/12/07/what-makes-new-zealand-denmark-finland-sweden-and-others-“cleaner”-than-most-countries/ http://blog.transparency.org/2011/12/07/what-makes-new-zeala...
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Depends on how you count it. All those government IT contracts which goes over budget because they keep getting awarded to the same incompetents can't be pure stupidity. The most important thing though is that people think bribery is wrong which means they won't hesitate to report and prosecute you.
schiptsov 14y ago
who is John Galt?) It's Bydlostan, stupid.
debacle 14y ago
> "You don't know him, you'll never see him again, and you get a financial reward - so why do you care?" That sums up the ethical viewpoint of most of the Russians I know.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  You hang around with wrong Russians.
  - debacle 14y ago
    My wife tells me that all the time.
agentgt 14y ago
I'm curious how "free" the news organizations are in Russia. I recently was accused of something here in USA along with a ton of other people (copyright troll... I share my internet connection w/ my tenets). The local news found out about it rather quickly and wanted to do an investigative report. I have to say I have never really liked local news but I'm glad things like this attract their attention. Is whistle blowing a cultural thing? In other words can Whistle Blowing be a counter virus to the Corruption virus?
aleyan 14y ago
Are they really talking about "entrepreneurs"? I have hardly heard that word in Russian media. Now if they talking about the people whom Russians call "businessmen", I can believe it. "Businessmen" has become a generic term for people involved in uncertain economic activity, often shady. It is not uncommon to hear on the evening news of a few "businessmen" resolving their differences with guns. Having so many "businessmen" locked up is not that unusually, especially considering that many criminals simply refer to their activities as business. I am not making light of corruption in Russia, it is one the top three most serious issues that Russia faces. However, the BBC article seems disingenuous in translating an extremely loaded Russian word "businessman" into entrepreneur and dropping its tremendous criminal baggage.
- tlear 14y ago
  Russia is so corrupt that running a business without dealing with criminals is not practically possible. Nobody is "clean" and if you are you will not be running a business anymore or even better end up dead or in prison. That is the cost of doing business there. My dad's university friend ran a small company in Moscow, was too honest for his own good, they threw him out of the balcony of his apartment. Competition in in mother russia is a bit more cutthroat then what people NA can imagine.
antithesis 14y ago
> At the root of the problem is the criminal justice system itself. Statistically, once officially accused of a crime in Russia, there is little chance of proving your innocence. Not to mention that it should be the other way around. People are innocent by default, so it should be innocent until proven guilty.
skylan_q 14y ago
agitprop

173 points by ytNumbers 14y ago

3 million people? i have a very hard time believing that Russia has locked up 2% of their population the last 10 years - oh, and those were only the enterpreneurs, so the total figure is even higher.

rorrr 14y ago
You're assuming at one time. Russia's overall incarceration rate is 0.522%. You're right however, the 3 million figure seems very high. Russia is a lost cause. Police/government can (and regularly do) take over any business, especially any small business. Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.
- corin_ 14y ago
  Not only is it not 3 million at one time, there's also no definition provided of what it means for them to have been locked up. It could presumably be a whole load of one week sentences, or maybe even a night or two in jail?
- its_so_on 14y ago
  >Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country. So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution? This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    > This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that. While I'm not supporting his assertion that this is the case, if such a thing were to happen anywhere, well...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia
  - rdl 14y ago
    The corruption, like corruption in other countries (including the US), hurts the poor and wage-earning directly and indirectly as well. It's not like it's the populace vs. business owners, it's the powerful and capricious vs. everyone (including other powerful people), using the state and security apparatus as a tool. Aside from a few people who made a lot of money a couple decades ago from rapid deregulation, I don't think business owners in Russia are worried about taxes, reasonable regulation, etc. hurting their businesses -- they're worried about totally random extortion. Very few businesses would rather operate in Equatorial Guinea or Somalia instead of (heavily regulated country of choice: depending on context, could be Germany, the US, Denmark, ...).
  - chrischen 14y ago
    He didn't say there is a class struggle. He said a full scale revolution may be the only way the country can be fixed. Conditions will deteriorate until the point where there will be a class struggle though.
  - rorrr 14y ago
    Stealing businesses is a much smarter idea than stealing money. Russian government thugs have figured it out. I do see why it may seem funny and Monty-Python-like, but it's extremely sad. It's a huge country ruled by thugs and talking heads, and they want more and more for themselves, while talking about helping the population.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  >> Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country Thank communism, because corruption was the only way for business to do any kind of transaction
  - valisystem 14y ago
    While I agree that it probably did not help, you don't need communism to have such large scale problems, all you need is just a badly run country.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Communism as we know it? Yes. Communism as Marx envisioned it? No. It's all just semantics really: 1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid. 2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China." 3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup. 4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different. 5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
    - danenania 14y ago
      I think all these semantic contradictions reveal a much more important truth: what -ism your government operates under or claims to operate under is about 1/1000th as significant as whether it aims to serve the people and respect the law. A corrupt communist state has much more in common with a corrupt capitalist state than with a respectable and well-run communist system, and vice versa. We should really focus a lot less on ideology in our politics and a lot more on basic ethics and accountability. Once we start getting those figured out, we can worry about the -isms.
      - ajuc 14y ago
        Agreed, execution matters. But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China). We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious. Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
- yaakov34 14y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. Revolutions have worked out so well before, especially in Russia. What Russia needs right now is some serious destruction and civil war, followed by a few decades of rule by hard men who know that their Cause comes before anything. Oh yeah.
  - PGenes 14y ago
    A revolution is not guaranteed to fix it. Unfortunately a revolution(of some sort) is the only thing that has any chance of fixing it.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I think they'd be best off with a "revolution" in thinking by the government and public security services. If they put rule of law as a high priority, and are able to extract enough. Everyone would be better off with Putin and the FSB crowd having their own licit and overt wealth, power, and perks, but then using their power to enforce fair laws on everyone else in exchange, vs. the system where they officially don't get as much benefit from their jobs, but extract personal benefit through corruption, and where others in society can use the state as a tool against other people. (which is why it makes sense to pay police, judges, etc. quite well, and to give them high social standing, in exchange for competence, professionalism, and lack of corruption) You could probably get that from the top echelon (I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did), but it's hard to get that down to the lowest level of law enforcement.
    - cousin_it 14y ago
      > I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did Haha. Here's a little about Putin: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/WikiLeaks-Putins-secret-billions.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/... And here a little about his former minister of health: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html There's much more where that came from. You can pretty much pick any high-ranking official in Russia and start digging.
- ajuc 14y ago
  Or maybe low level stats are falsified in each prison/police station to show better "effectiveness" of cops. Only when it's aggregated it's stuppidly big number. The same happened with recent elections to Duma (over 100% people voted in many regions of Russia).
perfunctory 14y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... This is ~0.5% at a given moment. 2% over 10 years doesn't sound too much.
- wavephorm 14y ago
  USA Number One! Hoo-ah!
  - Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
    Up there with Georgia and Russia and Rwanda and Iran.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Iran has, like, 2.5x times less.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- molmalo 14y ago
  Well, we are 102. And not because of benevolence (even when we have a lot of soft judges lately, that seem to prefer to look after criminals instead of the population), but because our prisons are old and full of people, and there's no political intent to build more. (The government even destroyed some cuz they were too old, but didn't replaced them) I bet that a lot of poor countries down there share the same reasons (and maybe, some lack the money to build more).
rizumu 14y ago
There is no freedom of speech, and a pervading censorship of all media, including more and more of the internet. Speak out, go to jail. "Just today (june 29) a Court ruled the feminist punk rockers must remain in jail while police slowly investigate them for the crime of allegedly chanting a 'punk prayer' against Putin from a church pulpit." http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120627165225580 http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120627165225580
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  "and a pervading censorship of all media" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor#Saturday_Night_Live_performance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor#Saturday... "NBC did not edit the performance out of the West coast tape-delayed broadcast that night, but reruns of the episode use footage from the dress rehearsal" Where's the difference? Talking about media.
  - Retric 14y ago
    during the dress rehearsal she held up a photo of a refugee child.
  - rizumu 14y ago
    Well you are talking about NBC censoring, this on the other hand is the goverment putting people in prison. Since the govt controls the TV and papers you wouldn't find much information about the Moscow protests that took place a few months ago. You'd have to look to the internets, which are next in line to be censored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_the_Russian_Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_the_Ru...
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      I'm just saying that there are multiple ways of having censored media. Some of which feature govt controlling said medias, some don't, some might be pure commercial, but the end result might look surprisingly the same.
rb2k_ 14y ago
According to Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...: > The incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world. As of 2009, the incarceration rate was 743 per 100,000 of national population (0.743%).[2] In comparison, Russia had the second highest, at 577 per 100,000,

prostoalex 14y ago

It's a natural progression of corrupt regimes where 1) An entrepreneur pays off someone in the position of power (police, local government, tax collector) to facilitate quick problem resolution. 2) The aforementioned person in the position of power realizes that instead of the paltry fee they could lay claim on a large share of the business or entire 100% stake.

sasoon 14y ago

3 million per in 10 years is 300,000 per year, or 820(!) per day. I doubt they lock up 820 entrepreneurs per day.

diminish 14y ago
Can someone from Russian, please confirm the 3million number? It seems so unbelievable.
- vborovikov 14y ago
  Titov talked about 13000 entrepreneurs.
- shadchnev 14y ago
  In other sources Titov mentions 13,000 entrepreneurs who are currently in jail. A quick search in Russian for "Titov entrepreneurs three million" doesn't give any other results but the BBC article.
  - diminish 14y ago
    I am no Russian or friend with their current government , but this perpetual flow of dubious information on ft, ftd or bbc is remarkable; I would really like to profile, such dubious information based on author etc.. but have no time..
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

hastur 14y ago

Now, compare that to Putin's pipe dreams of creating his own version of Silicon Valley in Russia. Obviously, even he can't be that stupid. So it's all PR, Putin doesn't want Russia to go anywhere, he just loves presiding over the vast criminal empire of intelligence services, organized crime and oligarchs.

BadassFractal 14y ago
What ever happened to that, by the way? So far the only big companies to come out of Russia were basically local language counterparts of Yahoo, Facebook and Norton.
- krasin 14y ago
  Please, define "big"? What's about Parascript (acquired for $50M in 2008)? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript Abbyy? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy Evernote? Badoo? Parallels?
  - BadassFractal 14y ago
    Evernote/Badoo were not founded / grown in Russia as far as I can tell. It would be like saying that Google is a Russian company because Sergey was born there. Also, the fact that a 50m company even needs to be mentioned among the "top" should be sufficient proof of the country's impact on the rest of the world (again, I'm not counting Russia-specific Yandex/Rambler/Odnoklassniki/[...] here)
  - krschultz 14y ago
    Your own link says that Parascript is now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
    - ajays 14y ago
      Parascript was a Russian company, but they moved en masse to Boulder in 1994 (IIRC). They are (were?) a group of very smart engineers, very strong in DSP.

marcuspovey 14y ago

When I went to visit my then girlfriend's family in Russia a few years ago there was what was known as the $100 rule - basically that nobody ever left the house without $100 US in their pocket, because that amount would be enough to get you out of pretty much any trouble. Bribery of police is so endemic in Russia that the state's most effective counter to this so far has been to simply bribe the police more and reclaim the losses from the perp - so for a traffic offence, the policeman would get a bonus from the state for not taking the bribe and the offender would have his car sold. Paying police more in the first place might be a good start.

cousin_it 14y ago
Russian person here. Why do you think paying the police more would reduce corruption? Highly paid government officials in Russia are just as corrupt.
- da02 14y ago
  I agree. Bank tellers are not that highly paid, but the local banks have no problem with massive theft. Here in the US, police are paid quite well and retire with a nice pension. They also win a free-paid vacation if they kill an unarmed civilian. They call it "suspended with pay". Despite all that, they also taser the elderly and teens half their size: https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+elderly++&oq=police+taser+elderly https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+elderly++&o... I read a blog for priv. prop. anarchists and they never run out of stories like those.
  - mjwalshe 14y ago
    You would rather that some one being investigated went back to work and potentially adjusted the evidence that is why when your investigated for a serious offence at work you are suspended.

rdtsc 14y ago

> Businessmen have complained for years that people have been able to frame commercial rivals Corruption is like an infectious disease. It infects the body from the head to the toes. Corruption is involved in every stage of a person's life. When a person is born, in the hospital bribes need to be doled out to nurses, doctors and staff if appropriate care is expected. In school starting from kindergaden and all through highschool teachers and principles are bribed to ensure good grades are assigned. Then bribes are given to government officials. Say, if you take a driver's exam (this happened to me) they will fail you on purpose expecting that you will realize that you need to pay them a bribe in order to pass it. It is not that are you good or not, it doesn't matter, because others pay, pay is expected always and those that don't pay get failed until they pay. There is a price you can pay to get away with murder. There is a price you pay to the court DNA tester to either fabricate or deny a paternity test. There is a price for every single piece of certificate or license issued for conducting a business( and, not surprisingly the number of said certificates and licenses never decreases ). It is not just bribes. It is also nepotism. There is so much freakin' incompetence because people who are not qualified are put in position just as a result of being related to some higher-up. This corruption is also transmitted to offspring. Children observe their parents interact with the corrupt system and they learn to do the same, in the process also become corrupt. To get back to the article. I think a lot of businessmen get locked up because they did not play by the un-official rules and thought, perhaps some thought, they could function like they would do in the West or in America.

smsm42 14y ago
It's actually worse. There are no rules that would prevent that from happening. If you have money, you are a target for criminals, and bigger organized crime syndicate is the security services themselves. If you're lucky, you lose some money, if you're less lucky - you can lose everything, including your freedom. Since judicial system and law enforcement as a rule do not protect potential targets from attacks, but rather facilitate and sometimes initiate them - there's nothing to prevent that from happening. You can bribe someone, of course, if you have money - but somebody else can pay more, or threaten, or the bribed official may decide to take the money, but do nothing to help you. What you're gonna do, sue him? Another part of it is that the laws are purposely built in a way to ensure it's impossible to not have some problems with them. This way, of course, the officials can solicit more bribes - but also more people would be imprisoned because there's always something he can be accused of. Or, as famous Russian saying goes, if there's a man, there's always a criminal code article for him.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

guard-of-terra 14y ago

You have in one article two kinds of businessmen mixed up: First are the owners of small- (and medium-) scale businesses which they built by themselves. Second are the owners of companies which were previously state-owned during USSR and then they were suddently privatized and "somehow" landed into a hands of very select few. I don't think it's correct to call the latter group "enterpreneurs". I think it's bad for the former group to have both groups mixed together in one article. What you really have is using some real and ugly problems of the first group to pitch some ongoing cases featuring persons from the second group. Those cases being ugly too not makes this spin a good thing. My mother owns a small cloth shop, she has quite a few problems as a small business owner, but I doubt she wants to be used as a lever in the favour of Hodorkovsky or Kozlov. She might sympathise them, she might not. She's NOT on the same field anyway.

kinleyd 14y ago

Whoa, that is some statistic! Eventually the best entrepreneurs are going to vote with their feet and that cannot be good for Russia. High time for Putin to fix the broken legal/police system.

obtu 14y ago
Indeed. According to the UN report on inclusive wealth ( http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/article/iwr http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/article/iwr via http://www.economist.com/node/21557732/ http://www.economist.com/node/21557732/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196895 ) Russia's wealth is all natural resources, and decreasing mostly due to a fast drop in human capital.

maga 14y ago

What I love about English-speaking communities is that articles like this one receive real comments from real people. It might sound strange, but try to put this kind of article somewhere in Russian and you're guarantied to receive first 10 comments telling you that it's just America trying to destroy the Mighty Russia with this kind of falsehood. And those comments are rarely from common people, even though Cold War ideas are strong in their heads, mostly they are written by paid pro-Kremlin activists or just simple bots.

obtu 14y ago
Well, these astroturfers are a message in themselves. They do exist in the English web as well, though.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
When did you see Youtube comments the last time? Anyway, you are wrong. Five of that ten comments would be about how their authors hate Russia and are eager to abandon it. And you are wrong twice because both kinds of comments seem to originate from real people. This is much more sad than any propaganda machine.

kalmsy 14y ago

Makes me appreciate living in Scandinavia (Denmark). Corruption here is barely measurable. Found this: http://blog.transparency.org/2011/12/07/what-makes-new-zealand-denmark-finland-sweden-and-others-“cleaner”-than-most-countries/ http://blog.transparency.org/2011/12/07/what-makes-new-zeala...

tomjen3 14y ago
Depends on how you count it. All those government IT contracts which goes over budget because they keep getting awarded to the same incompetents can't be pure stupidity. The most important thing though is that people think bribery is wrong which means they won't hesitate to report and prosecute you.

schiptsov 14y ago

who is John Galt?) It's Bydlostan, stupid.

debacle 14y ago

> "You don't know him, you'll never see him again, and you get a financial reward - so why do you care?" That sums up the ethical viewpoint of most of the Russians I know.

huhtenberg 14y ago
You hang around with wrong Russians.
- debacle 14y ago
  My wife tells me that all the time.

agentgt 14y ago

I'm curious how "free" the news organizations are in Russia. I recently was accused of something here in USA along with a ton of other people (copyright troll... I share my internet connection w/ my tenets). The local news found out about it rather quickly and wanted to do an investigative report. I have to say I have never really liked local news but I'm glad things like this attract their attention. Is whistle blowing a cultural thing? In other words can Whistle Blowing be a counter virus to the Corruption virus?

aleyan 14y ago

Are they really talking about "entrepreneurs"? I have hardly heard that word in Russian media. Now if they talking about the people whom Russians call "businessmen", I can believe it. "Businessmen" has become a generic term for people involved in uncertain economic activity, often shady. It is not uncommon to hear on the evening news of a few "businessmen" resolving their differences with guns. Having so many "businessmen" locked up is not that unusually, especially considering that many criminals simply refer to their activities as business. I am not making light of corruption in Russia, it is one the top three most serious issues that Russia faces. However, the BBC article seems disingenuous in translating an extremely loaded Russian word "businessman" into entrepreneur and dropping its tremendous criminal baggage.

tlear 14y ago
Russia is so corrupt that running a business without dealing with criminals is not practically possible. Nobody is "clean" and if you are you will not be running a business anymore or even better end up dead or in prison. That is the cost of doing business there. My dad's university friend ran a small company in Moscow, was too honest for his own good, they threw him out of the balcony of his apartment. Competition in in mother russia is a bit more cutthroat then what people NA can imagine.

antithesis 14y ago

> At the root of the problem is the criminal justice system itself. Statistically, once officially accused of a crime in Russia, there is little chance of proving your innocence. Not to mention that it should be the other way around. People are innocent by default, so it should be innocent until proven guilty.

skylan_q 14y ago

agitprop