ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
Rule of Law, Professionalism, and Cognitive
Dissonance: Providing Support to Lawyers in the
Former Soviet Union
By Melissa Hooper
Melissa Hooper is the Director of Human Rights First’s Pillar Project, focused on incorporating
International Human Rights Standards in domestic litigation, and a former regional director of the
American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI). In this article on aspects of Ms.
Hooper’s experience serving with ABA ROLI in countries once part of the Soviet Union, all
unattributed opinions and statements are Ms. Hooper’s alone, and none of those opinions or
statements are attributable to ABA ROLI.
Melissa Hooper worked abroad for ABA ROLI for seven years. These reflections draw from her
personal experience to illuminate the extraordinary challenges facing ROLI lawyers and others
charged with advancing the rule of law, human rights, sustainable development, and legal ethics in
countries of the former Soviet Union.
Ms. Hooper started with ABA ROLI in 2004 in Uzbekistan, where she worked with defense lawyers as
a legal specialist. After the Uzbekistani government shut down the ABA ROLI office, along with other
foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in 2006, she continued her work managing
programs for defense lawyers and activists in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, working out
of Almaty, Kazakhstan. In 2009, she spent a short time in the Caucasus as a human rights trainer,
and in 2010 she served as interim country director in Ukraine. Most recently, Ms. Hooper lived for
three and a half years in Moscow, first serving as country director for Russia and then as regional
director for Russia and a country in the Caucasus, both of which were, as of this writing, experiencing
crackdowns on local NGOs, journalists, and foreign NGOs.
Aid and development workers who spend a great deal of time working overseas become sensitized to the
need to suspend assumptions and observe local culture and mores in order to better collaborate with
and support the local community. But what do you do when the local culture seems to lack an ethical
compass? . . . When I arrived in Tashkent in 2004, it was just before Christmas, or, as celebrated there,
the New Year holiday. Because of the holiday, and the fact that I was starting a new job and wanted to
begin developing relationships with my team, I brought them small gifts. The gifts weren’t expensive—tshirts from the art museum in my home city and mugs with candy in them—but they were foreign and
exotic to my new colleagues. This small goodwill gesture led me to my first encounter with the fraught
world of gift-giving, bribe-taking, and connection-building in the former Soviet Union. A day or two
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
1
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
after I presented the gifts to my team, a particularly open colleague who later became a good friend
approached me. “You weren’t asking for anything in return for the gifts, were you?” he asked. My initial
confusion turned to dread as the realization of what he was asking sank in. “Oh, no!” I told him, “I
didn’t expect anything in return. I just wanted to do something nice for all of you to introduce myself
and build a relationship.” “I was just asking,” he said, “because my friend told me that I should find out
what you wanted.”
That conversation was eye-opening for me. It taught me that the people all around me in Tashkent (and
later in the Caucasus, Kiev, and Moscow) would often view my actions and intentions through a lens
completely different from mine, based on a set of assumptions widely divergent from my own. It also
taught me that gift-giving had a very different meaning in my new home, and that, as a habitual giftgiver, I’d better figure out this meaning before I made a serious mistake.
I spent the next 10 years inside and outside of the former Soviet Union figuring out that meaning,
achieving comprehension at times and making mistakes at others. I learned fairly quickly that this new
culture I inhabited was an upside-down world for me. The rules were not written down. They were not
based on laws, but on power. That part I understood. Yet they were flexible in ways I did not always
understand. The basic components of power, personal connection or “blat,” and the absence of a sense
of community were apparent no matter the country where I was serving—all part of the legacy of the
former Soviet Union. I learned my lessons in each of them. . .
• In Uzbekistan, for instance, I learned that when you get pulled over in a car, you greet the police
officer with a cheery “Assalom aleikum!” while shoving 1000 soum inside your passport as you
hand it over. This usually buys you your freedom on the spot for any minor traffic offense, real or
imagined. The fact that some “offenses” were simply unabashed attempts on the part of the officer
to rake in money became apparent when a friend of mine, while driving me to Ferghana, flagrantly
ignored an officer’s attempt to pull him over. “I don’t have time to stop,” he said as he waved off the
officer—who did nothing in response.
• In the Caucasus, I witnessed the frustration of NGO lawyers attempting to litigate cases brought by
the government against human rights organizations, journalists, or activists. The cases were controlled not by facts but by politics. Eight youth activists arrested in 2013 for protesting violence
within the military and specifically the death of a conscripted soldier during training exercises,
were each sentenced to six to eight years in prison for the protest. Their lawyer, like many lawyers
representing journalists and NGOs, said publicly that there was little he could do, since the process
was politically motivated from the very beginning.
• In Uzbekistan, I witnessed a trial of a teenager in which a video of his confession was shown to the
judge and everyone in the courtroom. On the video, one could clearly see fresh marks of a beating
visible on the defendant’s face and upper body. Shortly after the video was shown, the judge
announced that there was no evidence to support the teen’s allegation that the confession was
coerced by police violence that occurred just before the video was recorded.
• In Moscow, I learned the intricacies of the education system, including the gifts and bribes required
of those seeking to enter particular programs, to obtain certain grades, and to secure certain jobs
after graduation. The process of bribing was so deeply embedded in the system that the “prices” for
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
2
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
certain grades at university, and later for certain entry-level jobs, were widely known and accepted.
No discussion needed. The concept of having to purchase a position is not confined to entry-level
jobs, but infiltrates the highest reaches of the government. In recent years, according to multiple
reports, the going rate for a position in the Duma was estimated by several authors familiar with
the Duma’s inner workings to be $2.5 to $5 million.1
• Colleagues in Russia complained that the gift-giving expectation even applied to small children
entering school. The more desirable the gift given by the student to the teacher, the more likely a
good grade would be given, or “earned”. Poor students sometimes did not even show up on the first
day of school—a celebrated holiday each year –– because they did not have a proper gift for the
teacher. One colleague even told me a story about how her son’s teacher was not satisfied with the
gift he had selected for her, making it clear, without explicitly saying it, that he would have to provide her with something else for the child to get a good grade in the class.
The ABA Rule of Law Initiative works collaboratively with local lawyers and organizations all over the
world to help local institutions sustainably develop, support the rule of law, and protect human rights.
The organization began its work in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it opened its first office in
Russia in 1992. ABA ROLI now operates in over 60 countries, partnering with judges, defense lawyers,
law professors, non-governmental organizations, law enforcement, and journalists.
Ordinary Ethics as a Foreign Concept
As an American working on issues of rule of law on the ground in former Soviet states, I soon came to
appreciate that growing up in a national culture devoid of ordinary ethics is more than challenging, even
for the most well-meaning professionals who know right from wrong and aspire to building an ethical
society. They understand that submitting to petty corruption on a daily basis is a matter of survival. My
local colleagues, though often not allowed to follow an ethical line, knew where the line was. Indeed,
they could see very clearly how the bribes and personal connections undercut the ability of intelligent
workers to get ahead. And it left them feeling angry and helpless.
One incredibly bright staff attorney, working with me to develop an ethics program for lawyers in Russia, was attempting to get a job as a mediator when she was leaving her position at our NGO. She complained to me that she found bribery so rampant in the process that her refusal to bribe resulted in no
job interviews, and no attention at all from prospective employers. Meanwhile, her coursemates were all
obtaining good jobs at firms, having no qualms about providing the required payments. Despite having
earned a degree from a good school, and despite being remarkably intelligent and analytical, she was
unable to get any positive attention at all.
The lawyers who were my colleagues, and those who attended ABA ROLI courses in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, a Caucasus nation, Ukraine, and Russia, expressed a sense of pride in their work that belied the
degradation of the rule of law that I read about in news media and on social media and heard about in
stories from colleagues and friends when they described the day-to-day bribes required to obtain documents, deal with police, and obtain medical care. Though they acknowledged that in most cases the
client would be required to pay the court some sort of “extra fee” just to get the case to move forward,
the lawyers in our programs swore—to me at least—that they did not bribe judges in criminal cases.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
3
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
Generally, they said, while getting a hearing required bribery in most civil cases, it wasn’t necessary or
helpful to bribe judges in criminal cases, because the lawyers were representing unpopular defendants,
often charged based on political, and not legal, considerations. There was no way a judge would rule in
their favor, even with a bribe. Yet generally, while they wanted to be principled, these lawyers realized
that they had to submit to the system if they were going to get anywhere; they had to pay bribes to survive.
Clinging to Principle When Justice Isn’t an Option
But there was another aspect to their approach that struck me. Many defense lawyers explained that
they felt it was their job to act as ballast to an otherwise completely corrupt and state-driven system.
They wanted to act on principle to shame the corrupt state—even if the shaming did not usually result in
a win for their client, because, truth be told, their client was usually going to lose anyway. They wanted
to do the right thing because, after all of the pressure to conform to a corrupt system, they still knew
what was right.
This tension between being forced into a daily life full of bribes, unwritten requirements, and using personal connections to get ahead, while keenly understanding the wrongness of these things, fascinated
me. I wondered how people, and specifically how lawyers, could exist in such a state of cognitive dissonance essentially their entire lives. I talked extensively with my colleagues about how they survived in
this state of eternal contradiction and confusion. As they explained it, lawyers working in the former
Soviet system did not have a culture that reinforced ethical behavior. They did not understand themselves to be “officers of the court” as we do in the United States, and did not grow up in a culture of community where there was an understanding that one individual ought to, when considering an action, be
mindful of both her own needs and also those of the larger community. I conjectured that with its long
history of multigenerational repression during the Soviet Period, where family members, friends, and
colleagues informed on each other, and where the individual understood that he could trust no one—no
one at all—Russia and many countries of the former Soviet Union have developed a persistent cultural
resistance to the development of a concept akin to Rousseau’s social contract. Russians and many citizens of the former Soviet Union, perhaps still living in the shadow of this culture of mistrust, and past
deprivation, often express the need to take what they can while it is available, irrespective of what others
might think or need, out of a conviction that resources surely will not last.
Defense attorneys work within a system that essentially sees them as inconsequential and powerless, a
necessary but valueless part of a court process. Masha Gessen, in her book about the trial of Pussy Riot,
Words Will Break Cement, writes of how, during the trials of dissidents during the repression, the role
of the defense attorney was to deny the legitimate existence of the tribunal, since the lawyer, and her
client, would not be permitted fair participation in it. In this world, many clients would prefer having a
defense lawyer with connections to the prosecution to having a compelling defense on the merits. The
helpfulness of a lawyer with connections to the prosecution is so widely accepted that there exists in
most countries of the former Soviet Union an industry of “pocket advocates”—so called because they are
chosen by and in the pocket of the prosecutor.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
4
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
ABA ROLI Training and the Commitment to Authentic Lawyering
A minority of defense lawyers in the former Soviet Union, however, want to push the legal system to
function as a true system built on rules and arguments, and not on personal relationships. They believe
that the more that lawyers can present real physical evidence and expert analysis to counter false presentations by the state—especially in an era where the public often sees this evidence (or the lack of it)
on social media, the greater the chance that the legal system will be dragged, perhaps kicking and
screaming, toward legitimacy. Teaching this evidence-based approach has become the specialty of ABA
ROLI in Russia. The office has trained (according to our post-hoc calculations) over 10,000 lawyers
across Russia since it began teaching lawyers to present evidence and arguments at jury trials over 20
years ago.
ABA ROLI trainings have been presented not only in Russia, but all over the former Soviet Union. I personally helped train lawyers participating in the first-ever jury trial in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, to
conduct voir dire to select fair-minded jurors for a murder trial. In Uzbekistan, I helped organize trainings in forensic evidence for defense lawyers who previously believed—with good reason—that they
could be arrested for attempting to examine the state’s evidence outside of the courtroom.
The evidence and argumentation trainings we provided were based entirely on local law, and taught by
skilled local lawyers. The goal was not to import a new set of laws, but more a new legal culture. Only
the foundational idea for the trainings—the idea that the defense lawyer, and the fact finder, should
apply a critical eye to the prosecution’s evidence—was American. Unfortunately, this concept proved to
be all too foreign because analytical reasoning was not, and still is not, taught in most local law schools,
which instead base their curricula on rote memorization and recitation of one legal code or another.
ABA ROLI jury trial trainings have decreased in Russia recent years, in part due to the tightening of
requirements for jury trials. In 2008, it was noted that the conviction rate—long hovering around 99
percent in the Soviet period—had begun to drop with the advent of jury trials, even down to the 80 percent range. 2Apparently, jurors were more fair-minded than judges and more likely to find a defendant
not guilty. In response, the government began reducing the types of crimes for which a defendant could
elect to have a jury trial, restricting their availability to defendants. First, Russian policy-makers
removed serious crimes from the jury trial eligibility list—crimes such as terrorism, sabotage, armed
insurrection, and mass disturbances—arguing that jurors were falling prey to clan politics and letting
serious criminals escape punishment, according to news accounts and scholarly articles on jury trial
reform.3 Subsequently, extremism was removed, and then President Medvedev argued that crimes such
as conspiracy and organized crime should be removed as well, due to the lack of juror expertise and
knowledge of these issues, and again, due to their lack of professionalism. Defense lawyers and rule of
law advocates fought the limitations, arguing that jury trials were the best way to ensure fair trials in a
country where law enforcement was notoriously corrupt, and ultimately kept conspiracy and organized
crime on the jury trial list.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
5
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
Despite the reduction in use of jury trials, other ABA ROLI skills courses remain in high demand among
lawyers wanting to present high-quality advocacy, such as analytical reasoning and argumentation.
These lawyers approach ABA ROLI regularly to ask for additional training on various aspects of evidence presentation, motion practice, and argument development. Working with some of these lawyers
from outside Moscow in 2009 and 2010, ABA ROLI helped them develop first their analytical skills, and
then their teaching skills, and finally helped them open their own lawyer training centers in Krasnoyarsk (in Siberia) in 2011 and in St. Petersburg in 2012. Shortly thereafter, additional centers were
opened in Stavropol (in Southern Russia) and in Ulyanovsk (a poor area in the Volga region, known as
the birthplace of Lenin). These centers still function today, without ABA ROLI assistance, teaching
young lawyers the basics of evidence-based analytical argumentation that were missing from their lawschool curricula. Some centers, such as the St. Petersburg center, even offer advanced courses in criminal law argumentation and human rights law based on European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence,
which is binding in Russia.
Sadly, the lawyers that seek out this training are not the majority. Most lawyers’ skepticism of the
applicability of the rule of law and analytical reasoning is understandable when viewed through the lens
of recent Russian court case outcomes. In the case against Pussy Riot, a protest aimed to call attention
to the dangers of a close relationship between the country’s president and the leader of the church, the
court failed to acknowledge the protest aspect of the event. Instead, the participants were convicted of
“hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”—turning their protest intent on its head—and sentenced to
two years in prison. They each served a bit over one year. Since the 2012 passage of a law requiring registration as “foreign agents” of NGOs that receive foreign aid and engage in “political activity”—a term
the definition of which seems to encompass any attempt to create any change in society or the
law—hundreds of NGOs have been raided, brought into court, and threatened with closure if they did
not either reject foreign funds or acknowledge their “foreign agent” status, tantamount to advertising
themselves as spies for foreign governments. As of this writing, the most famous Russian NGO, Memorial, which for years has engaged in painstaking documentation and publication of the crimes of the
repression, is being threatened with shutdown. The court proceedings in which the fates of NGOs are
determined would be comical, if not so sad. In one I witnessed, the attorney for Human Rights Center
Memorial, one of the leading human rights lawyers in the country who has also worked internationally
as a human rights lawyer, presented an argument on behalf of the organization in a Moscow court. During argument, he asked the prosecutor, who was obviously inexperienced, to cite Russian constitutional
law in support of his position. His request was met with silence. The lawyer again asked the prosecutor
to name the provisions of the Russian constitution to which he was referring in his complaint. The prosecutor, unable to make any argument in support of the pleadings he had offered in the case, remained
silent. The audience—and the judge in the case—tittered with laughter at the embarrassment of the
prosecution. Yet even after this embarrassment, and after a masterful legal argument by counsel for the
NGO, the judge ruled against Moscow Memorial and in favor of the silent, embarrassed prosecutor.
All of these incidents and institutional failures serve as backdrop for our attempts to promote the concept of ethical lawyering, and the idea of an ethics code for lawyers in Russia. I suppose it is not surprising that we faced many obstacles. One of the main obstacles in working with lawyers—advocates and
jurists—in Russia and the former Soviet Union, is that they hold little power over the outcome of a case.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
6
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
Asking them to hold themselves to a non-binding ethical standard was asking the powerless to bind
themselves to rules blatantly and regularly violated by the powerful. They understood the benefit to be
realized if the norm were to be widely accepted and applied, but had little hope or belief that such a
norm would be adopted and followed where it really mattered, at the upper echelons of power by policymaking members of the political system, by judges adjudicating political cases, or by prosecutors making decisions about whom to prosecute (i.e., NGO workers or members of the government). While we
argued that adoption of a norm had to begin somewhere, they rightly argued back that the best place to
begin is at the top. They stated that they would bind themselves to these ethical rules and codes when
prosecutors did so. ABA ROLI had been able to work with advocates in Russia to develop a Code of
Ethics for licensed lawyers in 2003. Yet our attempts in 2011 and 2012 to establish something similar
for unlicensed lawyers (jurists), who can also practice in Russian courts, met with resistance and ultimately went nowhere.
Systemic State Oppression of Lawyers Who Dare Do Their Jobs
Despite the odds stacked against defense lawyers in the former Soviet Union, many took their role as a
ballast seriously, and it may have helped them overcome the dissonance engendered by a corrupt system and stand up to it by clearly arguing for what was right. And if what was right was not clear under
Russian law—as was often the case—at least local lawyers found some clarity in international standards,
which were discussed extensively in ABA ROLI programs and cited by Russian human rights lawyers. I
imagined that these bright lines outlining right and wrong provided some comfort to my Russian colleagues, who could finally point to something—a rule or a principle—that demonstrated clearly that the
government action was dead wrong, even if the ultimate local court decision applied through-thelooking-glass logic to come to the opposite conclusion.
While this may have provided some relief for the ethical lawyers’ psyches, of course it was often not
good for their health or security. I witnessed lawyers being threatened physically and with prosecution
for false crimes, lawyers targeted with smear campaigns, and lawyers hounded by the security service of
their country with interrogations and pressure to stop their work. One of my colleagues—a highly ethical
lawyer—was even politically prosecuted on the basis of false evidence that he accepted a bribe from a
client. As a result of their work, many lawyers who have attempted to argue for what is right, and to
stand up for others that act to protect human rights, have been jailed, lost their licenses, or had to flee
their countries.
In the months following the Andijan events in Uzbekistan, one of the junior lawyers who had represented the businessmen on trial in the case that sparked the Andijan protests actually hid in our office
for a day because she was frightened, anticipating her fate at an impending interrogation at the offices
of the National Security Service. A number of the lawyers working at the ABA-supported Public
Defender Centers in Uzbekistan were targeted with smear campaigns and political prosecutions because
they represented clients who practiced religion outside of the narrow confines of acceptability as
defined by the government. Their clients were identified as extremist simply for expressing their Muslim faith in the most innocuous ways, such as praying five times a day, or wearing a beard, actions that
indicated that they did not follow the strict guidelines of “state-approved” Islam. Lawyers representing
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
7
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
them were deemed guilty by association. In some countries of the former Soviet Union in recent years,
governments have deemed any NGO that is not established by the government (i.e., that is not a
government-organized NGO or GONGO) to be an “opposition NGO,” and used this rhetoric to smear all
human rights and election-monitoring NGOs that have attempted, in 2013 and 2014, to monitor elections or police action during demonstrations, or to educate communities about concepts of human
rights. In one country, lawyers that cooperated with these NGOs, or led them, were pressured to stop
these activities, and several of them were jailed, having been targeted with criminal prosecution for
their activities. In Russia, lawyers for human rights and LGBT NGOs have been pressured by tactics
such as stripping one lawyer’s wife of her Russian residency, and by threats and physical violence. The
lawyer leading the defense strategy of the 30 Greenpeace activists arrested while staging a protest on
and around Russian Gazprom’s Prirazlomnoye oil drilling platform in 2013 regularly told me during the
case that he was considering quitting because the pressure from the state was just too overwhelming.
I recently asked one of the top litigators and human rights lawyers in Russia what the United States
might do to improve the human rights and rule of law situation in Russia now. He acknowledged that
with U.S.-Russia relations having taken a nosedive, the United States cannot do much bilaterally to
improve the status quo. But he did have a suggestion: “The U.S. should use the UN system more, refer
to those widely-agreed-upon norms and standards as universal, and even hold itself accountable under
them.” The United States, he offered, should “lead by example.”
Popular Voices of Protest Emerge
It may not be surprising that this culture of cognitive dissonance—knowing what’s right while witnessing blatant corruption at every level of government—did begin to take a toll, not only on poor and powerless communities who suffered disproportionately, but also on professional communities who saw the
corruption as a degradation of their work. A great deal of interest in ethics and accountability has begun
percolating up during recent years in Russia. But it did not come from a discussion of legal codes.
Rather, it came from a political movement. December 2011 saw the beginning of the anti-Putin demonstrations, where Russians went out into the street to protest the lack of free and fair elections. The impetus for the protests was an announcement by then-President Dmitri Medvedev and then-Prime Minister
Putin in September 2011 that they had all along planned for Medvedev to hold the presidency from
2008 to 2012 at the behest of Putin, solely so that Putin could take the presidency again in 2012, which
would foil the term limit law that prohibited him from serving more than two consecutive terms. Russians were outraged, and eventually that outrage led to large demonstrations across many strata of society, including protests by many lawyers and professors with whom I was working.
The protests continued through the end of 2011, and into the spring and early summer, until Putin was,
not surprisingly, reelected in March 2012. One of the leaders that emerged from the protests was blogger Alexei Navalny, known for his blogging about the corruption of Russian leaders. In a radio interview
around the time of the protests, Navalny decried the rampant corruption in the Putin regime, calling his
party, United Russia, the “party of crooks and thieves.” This epithet struck a chord with the population,
and propelled Navalny to leadership in the protest movement.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
8
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
Navalny continued during the Putin presidency to publish reports of corruption by members of the
Duma and other members of the Russian government. In January 2014, on the eve of the Winter
Olympics in Sochi, he worked with another opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov (who was recently assassinated in Moscow), to release a report mapping out and documenting the rampant corruption that lay at
the foundation of the construction of nearly every structure of the Olympic facilities. This kind of
accountability was popular with the public, and the map was the subject of much discussion on the
streets of Moscow, as well as in international media. But even this level of embarrassment and public
pressure seemed unlikely to drive the deep cultural change needed. And it didn’t.
Russian Businesses Engaging the Anti-Corruption Movement
One sector that has continued to express a great deal of interest in Navalny is the business community.
This makes sense in light of his principled anti-corruption stance. New businesses and the young business owners who started them witnessed the discussions of Russia joining the WTO and saw the criticisms of the country by Transparency International (Russia rated 136 of 175 countries in 2014’s
Corruption Perceptions Index), and realized that Russia was labeled a “risky” investment location
because the corruption was so rampant. These business owners saw that if they could fight the perception—and actuality—of Russia as corruption-ridden, they could boost the value, and profitability, of
their businesses.
Businesses that must interact on an international level, or that seek to establish relationships with companies in the United States or Europe, have been particularly interested in learning methods of combating corruption in their own ranks, and approached ABA ROLI for help. Over the last three years, the
Russia office saw an exponential increase in the interest of Russian business in what is known in Russia
as “compliance”—a word Russia has borrowed from English.
In Russia, the ABA ROLI program ran compliance courses for lawyers on the anti-corruption laws in
Russia as well as the UK Anti-Bribery Act and the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of the United
States—two laws that Russian companies should comply with if they interact with foreign companies at
all. There was some skepticism around why we were teaching “foreign” laws, especially as Russia began
its annexation of Crimea. Lawyers attending our courses pointedly asked us why they had to learn
American laws, and why we were using the word “compliance”—an English word—to describe the system of investigations and enforcement of anti-corruption rules engaged in by companies. Russia had
not invented its own word for this concept, a fact that is perhaps a telling commentary on the foreignness of the culture of anti-corruption.
At ABA, we worked regionally with chambers of commerce and even at times with the Federal Chamber
of Commerce to train businesses on how to develop their own compliance practice—that is, how to identify risky transactions, conduct their own internal investigations, and root out corrupt employees whose
actions threaten corporate opportunity. Our work extended to education of municipal employees—we
presented trainings on government procurement—and even into the sphere of mass media where one of
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
9
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
our partners developed a protocol for newspapers and media businesses to be used to discern whether
their journalists or other employees were engaging in corrupt practices that could put the company at
risk of losing business.
Our anti-corruption program began to receive more and more requests not from large multinational
corporations—which already have their own compliance divisions—but from smaller mid-sized firms
that either were beginning to work in partnership with companies from other countries, or that were
seeking to enter a more international market. The industry of compliance has gained increased acceptance and practice in Russia. Many companies that seek to do business internationally wish to overcome
Russia’s corrupt reputation by demonstrating that they each have a commitment to clean operations, so
that European or American businesses will partner with them, and offer them opportunities to increase
business, and therefore profit. This trend is largely about making money. The result, however, is that
combatting internal corruption, at least in the business sphere, has not only become fashionable, but is
perceived as a necessary part of any business hoping to compete in an increasingly internationalized
and interconnected market.
Recently, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski
championed what he sees as an opportunity for the United States to promote liberty by fighting corruption, even in countries that might be skeptical of U.S. aid.
In the general population in the former Soviet Union, however, progress toward an anti-corruption culture is still a slow march. At a recent anti-corruption training held for university students in Krasnoyarsk, we asked their perceptions of various hypothetical actions by government officials, and found the
old cognitive dissonance rearing its head. Many students thought it just fine, for example, for a school
administrator to use school funds to purchase himself a car. As they explained to us, he is after all in
charge.
Endnotes
1. ANDERS ASLUND, RUSSIA’S CAPITALIST REVOLUTION: WHY MARKET REFORM SUCCEEDED AND DEMOCRACY FAILED 237 (Peterson Institute 2007) (stating that the “going rate for a safe seat on a [Duma] party
list was $5 million, and the minimum was $2.5 million” and noting it was cheaper to buy a seat in a
single-mandate constituency because the cost was only $500,000 to $800,000); BEN JUDAH, FRAGILE
EMPIRE: HOW RUSSIA FELL IN AND OUT OF LOVE WITH VLADIMIR PUTIN 83 (Yale University Press 2013)
(stating that in 2006 every major political position “had a price tag on it. The going rate for a minister’s
post was $10 million, or that of a governor $8 million. Seats in the Duma cost roughly $2 million with a
seat in the Federation Council between $1.5 and $5 million.)
2. WORKING PAPERS (2002) ORDINARY SESSION, SECOND PART, SUMMARY OF COUNCIL OF EUROPE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY, HONOURING OF OBLIGATIONS AND COMMITMENTS BY THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION ,
Doc 9396 (Apr. 22-26, 2002) (“The co-rapporteurs also recall that in trials in Russia presided over by
judges the conviction rate is extremely high (over 90%) which might be an indication that the presumption of innocence is not systematically respected. In this respect, Mr. Makarov from the Moscow City
Bar Association [who was a colleague of the author when she worked in Russia] told the co-rapporteurs
that this high conviction rate still represented a remnant of Soviet-type justice and added that in the
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
10
ABA Center for Professional Responsibility
The Professional Lawyer Volume 23, Number 1
jury trials (a system which should become generalized according to the latest reforms) the acquittal rate
was around 20%.”); Sergei Tokmakov, Jury Trials in Modern Russia, INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF CONFLICT, IDEOLOGY & POLICY (Jan. 28, 2010), available athttp://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news-cms/
news/?dept=732&id=55374; Ekaterina Mishina, Trial by Jury in Russia, Revival and Survival, INSTITUTE OF MODERN RUSSIA (Jan. 25, 2012), http://imrussia.org/en/rule-of-law/186-trial-by-jury-inrussia-revival-and-survival.
3. Nick Holdsworth, Russia Scraps Right to Jury Trial, THE TELEGRAPH (Dec. 12, 2008),
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3725300/Russia-scraps-right-to-jurytrial.html; Alexander Barinov, Problems with trial by jury in Russia, RUSSIAN LEGAL INFORMATION
AGENCY (Sept. 11, 2012), http://rapsinews.com/legislation_publication/20120911/264633744.html.
Published in The Professional Lawyer, Volume 23, Number 1, ©2015 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with
permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or
by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American
Bar Association.
11