How the pro-government United Russia party stole Yabloko’s initiative and passed it off as its own

Press Release, 4.03.2021

Photo: J-Aleks/depositphotos, Moscow, Russia: Entrance to the building of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, street Okhotny Ryad, 1

Since June, the State Duma was supposed to publish parliamentary inquiries on the website. It is a surprisingly good initiative: this way you can track whose interests the deputies are promoting and disclose the use of inquiries for personal gain. However, there is nothing surprising here, the Yabloko’s Anti-Corruption Policy Centre offered the same thing in November 2017. At first, United Russia refused us, and then simplified our idea and passed it off as its own.

At the same time, the start of the “inquiry” campaign began only in January. The reluctance of the deputies to open the letters can be easily explained: this is the main corrupt income for the parliamentarians. Thus, according to the media, the price of a request to the law enforcement agencies was 600,000 roubles back in 2014. In 2017, the inquiries trading was estimated already at $ 10,000 apiece. Certainly all these months the Duma members were hiding their sins and made [inquiries] “sales” with discounts.

MP Andrei Palkin distinguished himself at the inquiries business – he made them in the interests of  his family business. The Public Prosecutor General’s Office asked the Duma to check it four years ago, but Palkin calmly went on keeping his mandate, nothing has been heard about any checks.

There are also examples of obsession. Natalia Poklonskaya sent more than 40 parliamentary inquiries against film director Alexei Uchitel. It is difficult to explain these inquiries other than the revenge of an offended admirer of monarchism [because Alexei Uchitel made a film “Mateilda” about Crown Prince who later became the last Russian Tzar and his lover ballerina Matilda Kseshinskaya, the film provoked a public scandal with calls to prohibit the film as “blotting the memory of the late Tzar”]. And the settling of personal scores with the help of the power is the same corruption.

Transparency is indeed one of the best ways to hit corruption in parliament. Shadow lobbying loves privacy, and online disclosure of parliamentary inquiries hits on the confidentiality hard. Rather, the disclosure would have hit it, if the idea were implemented correctly.

We proposed to amend the regulations with the exact algorithm for disclosing inquiries. The answer was, as always, mocking: supposedly this required a change in the federal law. “There will be a bill, then we will consider it,” [Speaker] Volodin replied. Naturally, not a single deputy would have made such a proposal then.

But three years later, there suddenly emerged an amendment to the State Duma regulations. And it is corruption-prone in itself: the obligation to publish inquiries was introduced without precise conditions, and the procedure was transferred to the regulation of the Committee for Control and Regulations.

So, it is easy to bypass the new duty, if one wishes so. Moreover, now there are almost no inquiries on the Duma website. Even the fake initiator of the idea, deputy Neverov, does not publish any inquiries.

History shows that United Russia itself cannot come up with anything but bans and repressions. So, they have to take the opposition’s ideas and turn them over so that the window for corruption remains opened. But the good news is that changes have to be accepted anyway. And if Yabloko has deputies in the State Duma, it will not be so easy to dismiss sensible initiatives.