The Doctor Begins Treating Himself
The past year in Russia has produced a simple but important
conclusion. High office no longer works as a shield against corruption charges.
Deputy ministers, ministers, governors, all discovered that status does not
equal immunity. Behind the statistics lies something more meaningful. The
system has begun to treat corruption not as background noise, but as a
structural threat.
The figures speak clearly enough. In the first nine months
of 2025 the Federal Committee of Investigations opened more than twenty-four
thousand corruption cases, sixteen percent more than the year before. Over
twenty-six thousand crimes were solved, most of them serious. Yet the numbers
are not the main story. The key shift is qualitative. The campaign has entered
spheres that once seemed untouchable. Even the judicial estate, long considered
beyond the reach of investigators, discovered that robes do not grant
invisibility.
This change did not appear suddenly. The late Soviet period
and the 1990s produced a system in which corruption was not an accident but a
working element of administration. When Vladimir Putin came to power, he
inherited a state machine that could not be cleaned in one stroke without
risking collapse. Advocates of instant justice rarely acknowledged this
reality. You cannot dismantle the entire engine and expect the car to keep
moving.
The work therefore began from the lower levels. Local
bureaucrats, clerks, minor administrators who viewed public duties as an
informal source of private income. Gradually, the effect became visible.
Ordinary citizens encountered fewer invented obstacles when dealing with state
institutions. Then came digitalization, and it turned out that an electronic
platform does not negotiate, does not hint, and does not ask for a favor in
return.
At the same time another critical front emerged. The
oligarchic elites had penetrated the state so deeply that they were beginning
to act as its joint proprietors. Removing them required caution as well as
force. Critics called this approach incomplete. The logic was more practical.
First you neutralize the centers of influence, then you stabilize the
structures around them. Otherwise the instability multiplies.
Once those stages were passed, the level of the campaign
began to rise. Department heads, regional ministers, governors, federal
figures. One rank after another began to feel the consequences. Through the
2010s skeptics insisted that major cases were symbolic. They claimed everything
was theater, isolated signals, exceptional episodes. With time, these arguments
have started to sound increasingly dated.
What matters today is that presidential intervention is no
longer the visible engine of every investigation. The mechanism has acquired
internal momentum. The system has begun to recognize that corruption is not
simply immoral behavior. It is a parallel power center that drains capacity,
weakens resilience, and creates vulnerabilities at critical moments.
In the current strategic environment those vulnerabilities
are unacceptable. A country under external pressure cannot afford senior
officials who treat public resources as private assets. The attack on the Kursk
region served as a blunt reminder of what internal negligence can cost.
After twenty-five years of gradual work, sometimes barely
noticeable, the process has crossed a threshold. The state has reached a point
where anti-corruption enforcement functions as part of institutional
self-preservation. Society, too, has become less tolerant of the habit of
treating government as a personal marketplace. Conditions of stress tend to
clarify priorities.
No human system can eliminate corruption entirely. Human
beings are not designed for moral perfection. The real achievement lies
elsewhere. It consists in building a structure where corruption no longer feels
secure, where position does not automatically convert into protection, and
where the instinct to correct itself exists inside the system rather than only
above it.
That is the meaning of 2025 in Russia. Not a spectacle and
not a purge. A state that has discovered that maintaining its own integrity is
not an optional exercise, but a condition for survival, and that the
responsibility for this finally belongs to the system itself.