IV. Say how you interpret the headline of the article.

V. Render the above article into English.

VI. Points for discussion.

1. Was justice done in William’s case or was an innocent person executed in California?

2. Why wasn’t the man granted clemency? Was it because the state’s governor didn’t want to disappoint his electorate or were there any other reasons?

3. Would you show mercy to your acquaintance who happened to become a gangster if you were in a position to do so?

4. What’s the right penalty for crime lords?

5. As is known, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be actors before they went into politics. Do you think a former actor is quite able to become a savvy politician?

 

Part III. Modern Crime.

STATE POWER AND CRIME

There is no use complaining of a lack of respect for the law in some citizens if the state itself is essentially criminal

Much has been said, and very convincingly too, about the criminalization of contemporary Russian state, i.e., about corruption among the bureaucracy and the corps of deputies on all levels. The first address of the President of Russia after the adoption of the Constitution of 1993 contains the admission that corruption “penetrated the state machinery” (1994). That is certainly true, but it is not the whole truth. What is much more terrible is that the state itself, as organized public power, as a corporation of professional managers and mechanism for maintaining public order became a source of violation of law and of limitation of human and civil rights and freedoms and, in a number of spheres, also an incubator of criminal offences and persons committing them.

 

Two twins: state power and crime

When a state, whose Constitution has declared it social and law-governed, i.e., serving society and citizens, guaranteeing their freedoms and rights and acting strictly in the framework of law, tramples upon this law, violating its own legislation and civil rights, it is described as a law-violating state. However, when a state is not only unable to resist criminal lawlessness by minimizing it at least, but engenders lawlessness and crime, not as individual cases but en masse, then such a state must be considered criminal.

It is wrong to believe that antisocial and illegal actions by state power, its representatives and structures both in the capital and in the provinces, are engendered by the evil will of individual state servants or appear as if from nothing. The present Russian state is corroded by heavy diseases of the whole society, by the crisis of its transition from one state to another and, lastly, by its heredity: social, moral and psychological – by genetic diseases of the social organism itself.

Added to it must be the indisputable fact that the historically unprecedented task of overcoming the all-pervading heritage of the totalitarian regime, the most prolonged, inhumane and powerful in the entire contemporary history, fell to the lot of the present state power, no matter if it is good or bad. Violation of human and civil rights (more than that: the denial of such rights) both in prerevolutionary and Soviet times and especially during “proletarian dictatorship,” was a specific feature of Russian society. It is impossible to make a leap into the kingdom of freedom and law (freedom can only be legal freedom in civilized society) overnight, or in “500 days” or even over five years. Especially because a considerable part of society grasps on outlived economic and administrative institutions by inertia.

At the same time, explanation is not justification, and it does not relieve state power and its representatives of responsibility for erroneous decisions of national importance and for concrete infringements of law, committed by state power and its representatives.

It is especially dramatic that state power not even fails to cope with the criminal outrage adequately, not only condones it to a large extent, but also engenders certain kinds of infringement of law and some categories of criminal offences.

 

Lawlessness as the basic law

What is really dangerous is not that bureaucrats take bribes, although this is bad enough too. Socially dangerous is the anti-social, consequently, anti-legal orientation of a number of state functions. As violation of rights (first of all, of subjective human and civil rights) was passed of as observance of socialist (proletarian, revolutionary, Soviet) legality under socialism, so now the slogan of law-governed state made a constitutional postulate is objectively (independently of its positive orientation and the good-will of those who worked out the Constitution of the Russian Federation and republics and statutes of regions) used to conceal the orgy of lawlessness in the country.

Naturally, the powers of the state are not unlimited, nevertheless it is within its power to localize and cushion the consequences of the processes resulting from the logic of the extinction of socialist values and principles, as well as negative manifestations of the spontaneously appearing market and competition. Or at least not to aggravate them. Evidently, political, economic and personal freedoms which are appearing an a country which knew neither civil society nor civilized laws and individual freedom, cannot fail to engender lawlessness, individual, collective or state and administrative. It is the latter that encourages the legislation vacuum and is encouraged by it in turn: firstly, thanks to controversial laws and, secondly, due to political collisions between the central and regional authorities. Which means that the state and state power, responsible for legislation, fail to cope with their duties.

There are manifestations of the state’s criminogenic effect on society also outside the effective sphere of these factors. This concerns the state’s criminal role in its tax, social, law-enforcement and normative legal activities. In other words, its criminogenic nature has been programmed on the political level, publicly and officially. As well as on economic, when state structures act as a light-fingered entrepreneurs.

Taxes and levies reaching 95 percent of the profit of enterprises with various forms of property ownership not only throttle production and entrepreneurship – they directly engender criminal fiscal avoidance. In the meantime, according to contemporary tax legislation of civilized states, taxes must be of a reasonable and sparing size and stimulating nature.

The ineffectiveness of the state institutions of social control and human rights protection (courts of justice, the court of arbitration and rights protecting organizations), their poverty and vulnerability provoke the spread of arbitrary “regulation and control” in the form of criminal settlings of accounts, forcible recovery of debts, armed self-protection and retaliation carried out by non-state structures with the use of illegal means.

The state reacts indifferently or languidly to the formation and activities of unofficial illegal armed groups of criminal political nature. Right-radical assault groups are outlawed, but enjoy connivance and even patronizing of the “servants of law” (who in a number of cases merge with them). Retired “law-enforcers” join them eagerly. The decree on fighting political extremism is sabotaged. The state in the person of the army regularly supplies criminal and criminal political groups with weapons and equipment both in the form of formally prosecuted but practically uncontrolled activities of servicemen (embezzlement and sale of army property) and officially, in the form of the transference of weapons to the governments and “authorities” of warring sides in hot spots of the former USSR (and outside it too). True, the latter was more widely practiced when the CIS was being formed.

 

The stepdaughter of the budget

Similarly to social and cultural policy, the defence of rank-and-file citizens is carried out in conformity with the vestigial principle and the law-enforcing policy of the state and budget assignments. In any case, the legal sphere was and remains a stepdaughter of the state budget, while the guard of top state officials is ensured in a cynical priority order. Russian citizens remain unprotected both against street bandits and deception by financial pyramids.

The penitentiary system is in a wild inhumane state; it is the hotbed of crime and criminal corrosion of society. Even remand detainees are kept in worse conditions than animals in the zoo.

This is criminal privatization of state power as such, corruption on all the levels of the state mechanism.

The transparency of Russia’s borders attracts transnational criminal structures smuggling in drugs, weapons and so on. The wrongly interpreted principle of transparency of borders leaves the country unprotected against international criminal groups.

Efforts made by the authorities to check the tide of crime by strengthening law-enforcing structures are not supported by the corresponding measures to improve the work of these structures, especially at the selection of invited personnel and the purge of the already employed. What is being done in this direction is insufficient. What is worse, mass corruption has involved a number of structures: traffic police, tax and especially customs services. The most terrible thing is that a number of special police services have developed contempt for civil rights; violence against those detained, suspected, arrested and convicted is widespread. Law-enforcing bodies have largely become repressive bodies violating law.

Many experts believe that the system of the Ministry of the Interior has acquired the features of a largest criminal syndicate which has merged with criminal business and which violates the rights of rank-and-file citizens daily. Which does not, of course, imply the wholesale criminalization of all the staff who include also many honest people too.

Thus the share of “official” and “semi-official” criminal world in the totality of the Russian gangland prevails over “unofficial”: street and everyday crime (if not numerically, then at least as to its social danger and the destructive effect on society). Although possibly debatable, this thesis is not ungrounded.

To sum up: the criminal “perestroika” of civil society, the criminalization and criminogenic nature of state power is the most dangerous challenge to the country’s reforming and updating. The demoralization of the very fundamentals of the life of the nation, of its present and future, is taking place. Is it possible to oppose it effectively? And if it is, what is the general path to the sanitation of public life and the state itself? Because individual measures taken for this purpose are ineffective. However, it may be the subject-matter of a special publication.

Vladimir Guliyev

/ New Times, February, 1997/

 

Set Work

I. Say what is meant by the words and word combinations below:

the President’s address, an incubator of criminal offences, to be engendered by the evil, to be corroded by heavy diseases of the whole society, all-pervading heritage of the totalitarian regime, to make a leap into the kingdom of freedom, to grasp an outlived economic and administrative institutions, bureaucrat, to cushion the consequences, criminogenic nature, to throttle production, fiscal avoidance, to enjoy connivance, hot spot, vestigial principle, transparency of borders, to check the tide of crime, purge, the Russian gangland, updating.

 

II. Find in the article the English for:

попирать закон, чьи-либо чувства; диверсия; ошибочный; разгул беспорядков; противоречивый; «нечистый на руку»; выплата задолженностей; «горячая точка»; в соответствии с; очаг преступности; умеренного размера; щадящий; изживший себя; остаточный принцип; порождать; вызывать какие-л. чувства; по привычке, по инерции.