A Nation of Swindlers

After great tragedies, when people are most moved by compassion, crooks often set up fake charities claiming to collect money for the victims and their families. It happened after Sept. 11 and after the Beslan hostage tragedy. The deadly fire in Perm in early December, which killed 150 people, has similarly been followed by reports about fraudulent collections of funds on the Internet.

It may be a petty crime, but there is something particularly base about it, as though the moral degradation involved puts its perpetrators beyond the human race. But in the case of the Perm fire, it has been the authorities charged with preventing such tragedies — namely fire safety inspectors — who are making the biggest and quickest bucks off the pain and suffering of others.

Over the past decade, Russian officials have been rarely dismissed for incompetence or neglect in some of the country’s worst tragedies. Even in the few cases when punishment was meted out, the offending bureaucrat was likely to pop up in some other position.

President Dmitry Medvedev believes that things can’t go on like this. In Perm, heads rolled even at a relatively high level, and the inspector who had signed permits for the unfortunate Khromaya Loshad (Lame Horse) nightclub may be charged with a criminal offense.

This has jolted other municipal officials and fire inspectors — especially ahead of an intense two-week partying period starting with New Year’s Eve.

Activity has been particularly frantic in Moscow, where a slew of inspections have been announced and many clubs are expected to be shut down.

Russia’s culture for basic fire safety is woefully primitive. Many public spaces in Russia lack adequate safety provisions, such as marked fire exits, smoke alarms and sprinklers. Windows are often barred and doors locked in order to make crowd control easier. Nevertheless, all have signed, stamped and updated fire safety certificates on file. How does this happen? The old-fashioned Russian way, of course: bribing the inspectors.

Now, new inspections are uncovering a long list of violations, not because standards have been tightened after Perm, but because old rules are finally being applied. Most club managers sincerely want to implement safety measures. Nobody wants to see people die or follow Khromaya Loshad’s proprietors to jail. The paradox is that fire safety rules are apparently nowhere to be found. That’s because the bureaucracy always makes the institute of taking bribes far too easy and unpunishable. When official rules are unknown, fire inspectors can apply arbitrary ones — and collect bribes. Now, however, they are themselves in a bind. They can’t suddenly shut down a place for gross violations that they had overlooked in the past.

As a result, both sides fall back on the old practice of citing clubs for minor violations and taking bribes — now on a far greater scale — for ignoring major ones.

Russia’s fire inspectors are no better than those despicable swindlers on the Internet. But they are only one link in a long line of officials — big and small — who extort Russian businesses for bribes and who can’t carry out their direct functions.

The Perm tragedy once again reminds us that the government is incapable of performing its basic duties of protecting its citizens. This is particularly worrisome as the world enters a second full year of economic uncertainty, when the people rely on the federal government more than ever to mitigate the crisis.

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.