Russian statehood in the face of the “corruption of the elites” threat

The article is the final part of the series of publications “From the Editor-in-Chief”, published in 2020 in the journal “Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast”. Its central problem is the unsatisfactory quality of the ruling elites in Russia which, for almost the entire post-Soviet period, has been the main problem of stalling reforms and achievement of national development goals. The authors analyze the causes of this phenomenon; provide expert assessments and statistical data that allow us to assess the current state of the ruling elites in the country. The article examines the trends of public sentiment as an indicator of the negative consequences of the public administration inefficiency and the unrealization of social expectations from the government and from the President personally. We payspecial attention to the content and results of the anti-corruption campaign initiated by the President of the Russian Federation in the mid-2010s. For this purpose, we analyze data of monthly reports of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation on the state of crime in the Russian Federation for the period from 2003 to October 2020, statistics of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on the state of criminal records in Russia for the period from 2012 to the first half of 2020, materials of mass media, and opinions of experts. The authors come to the conclusion that it is necessary to move from episodic, or “demonstrative”, criminal cases with a common motive being an internal political processes to systematic preventive work on the nationalization of the ruling elites. Its purpose is not to maintain a balance of interests within the elite groups but to solve the key tasks of national development: achieving social justice, reducing inequality, dynamic growth in the level of income and quality of life of the population. This approach mostly corresponds to the new socially oriented Constitution of 2020, and, ultimately, it allows hoping for the solution of many problems in the system of state administration, as well as for the development of Russian statehood in the civilizational and historical context.