Rochlitz, Michael, Anton Kazun and Andrei Yakovlev
2020
Property rights in Russia after 2009: from business capture to centralized corruption?
Post-Soviet Affairs
36
5-6
434-450
Since about 2009, increasing budgetary constraints forced the Russian state to become notably less tolerant of lower-level corruption and predatory behavior by state agencies. In this paper, we argue that after a first stage of decentralized corruption and state capture during the 1990s, and a second period of decentralized corruption and business capture during the 2000s, Russia has entered a third stage of more centralized corruption since 2009. We build our argument on a detailed discussion of property rights relations in Russia, and support it with indicative quantitative data, suggesting that raiding attacks on businesses and corrupt behavior by state agencies have become less frequent and more centralized between 2009 and 2016. The sustainability of this move towards a more centralized mode of corruption remains questionable, however, mainly due to the lack of a long-term vision for the development of the country.