ABSTRACT
Why has a genuine crime-fighting culture failed to take root in Russia? This may seem a strange priority with which to be concerned after ten years of dramatic political and economic change. But it is another way of asking why the promise of justice, an essential part of Russia’s original democratic revolution, has lagged behind the state’s other extraordinary transformations. Of course, Russia has the basic tools a modern state needs to preserve law and order—a powerful police force, a criminal code administered by an active court system, even the repeatedly expressed will by the two post-Communist administrations of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin to make public safety and clean government a national priority. Yet the underlying commitment to a transparent society, one in which justice is administered impartially at every level—the hallmark of crime-fighting cultures in Western democracies— has fallen far short of the state’s rhetoric.
