Zhaloba (Russia)

Zhaloba 🇷🇺
Location: Russia
Definition: Lit. "lamenting", an appeal to power holders often seeking competitive advantage rather than justice
Keywords: Russia – FSU – Petitioning – Problem solving – Collusion
Clusters: Gaming the system – Economies of favours
Author: Elena Bogdanova
Affiliation: European University at St.Petersburg, Russian Federation

By Elena Bogdanova, European University at St.Petersburg, Russian Federation

Over centuries the complaint (zhaloba) has preserved its important role of mediation between the society and the authorities in Russia. The Russian monarchy enjoyed a centuries-old tradition of appealing to the tsar’s mercy, a personalised mechanism of complaints. It was meant to be destroyed by the 1917 revolution. However, the practice was restored by the Bolsheviks in one of the first decrees of the Soviet government in 1919, and operated until the very end of the Soviet period.

Labeling all applications to the authorities as “petitions” adapts the complaint to Western notions but sacrifices an important cultural nuance. Zhaloba of the Soviet period was usually an individual request for justice, reconciled with legitimate political discourse. Emphasizing obedience and loyalty was an important technique used by the authors of complaints in order to increase the chances of having their problem resolved. While a petition is, as a rule, a collective demand, compiled in accordance with the rule of law. Petitions had never been encouraged during the Soviet period, and in the late Soviet period they were officially forbidden. Specific terms for zhaloba in Russian signify the diversity of the practice, embracing kliauza or navet (“slander”), telega (“wheel-cart”), sutiazhnichestvo (“barratry”) and many others that capture the spirit of the phenomenon, the cultural and linguistic context, and even the historical period in which they were invented. Such context-bound terms remain untranslatable, or used without translation into English.

Non-democratic regimes are characterized by combining the functions of governance and restoration of justice in the complaint mechanisms as, for example, in the xinfang complaints system in China (Minzner 2006). The number of complaints addressed to petitioning bureaus in China is almost double the total number of appeals to the courts (Ibid:105). This familiar and free mechanism performs the function of justice for the poor. Similarly, in the conditions of Soviet society, complaints to the authorities performed several important functions at once: a feedback channel, necessary for the management and stability of the administrative-command system; a legitimate route for communication between citizens and authorities, and a way of rectifying the shortcomings of the Soviet judicial system.

Institutions designed to resolve judicial disputes in the early Soviet years were organically consistent with the Soviet understanding of law as a means of fighting for socialism and punishing the enemies of socialist society (Vyshinskii 1934:18–20). They relied on the mechanism of complaints to identify the enemies and to take care of issues, classified as civil and administrative offenses such as consumer rights, problems of housing and communal services, labor disputes. Zhaloby have effectively underpinned the system of ‘second justice’, existing outside the official judicial system (Lampert 1985). They served as checks and balances in administrative and organizational contexts, as well as foundation for established quasi-legal mechanisms, such as comrades' courts.

The 1968 Decree introduced universal rules and procedures for the functioning of the complaint mechanism throughout the Soviet Union. The decree defined to whom zhaloby can be addressed, the timeframe in which authorities had to respond, and the follow-up procedure for complainants in the absence of a response. At the same time, the procedural part of dealing with complaints – particularly in terms of enforcement of punishment and supervision – remained underdeveloped throughout the Soviet period. The broad interpretations of formal rules and the lack of clear criteria undermined the functioning of the complaints mechanism. On the one hand, it relied upon multiple official normative documents, drafted in order to regulate its functioning. On the other hand, in practice, compliance with these rules was not enforced. In practice the rules were respected in some cases but ignored in others. This paradox determined the semi-informal modus operandi of the complaints mechanism.

On the receiving end of complaints, the authorities had found a rescue in the semi-informal workings of the system, juggling the rules according to the situation. The arrangement of the mechanism allowed it. Employees of executive committees, party functionaries, and media editors were usually involved in the consideration and investigation of complaints – often the same very officials that complaint was about. The investigations were not professional, and those conducting them had no training. The law prohibited the executive authorities to ignore appeals, and, therefore, various informal strategies were developed to reduce the amount of letters for consideration, and to avoid unwilling consequences of complaining. Complaints were rejected on formal grounds, forwarded to lower levels, or “lost” at any opportunity. A 1973 study of complaints addressed to a particular executive committee in Moscow found that among the 15,000 complaints composed by citizens, 10,000 did not go further than the local level of bureaucracy due to “poorly articulated statement” (nevniatnost’ izlozheniia) (Friedgut 1978:470). Bureaucratic sabotage was implemented by the authorities in various forms. They came up with sophisticated templates in correspondence (otpiska), which entailed a formal response to a complaint that did not deny the request, but at the same time did not resolve the issue. Another way of sabotaging became known colloquially as “launching a fool” (zapustit’ durochku), which meant redirecting the complaint to a wrong addressee or responding inadequately.

The 1968 decree envisaged a special role for the media in the complaint mechanism. According to paragraph 11, any complaint received by the editorial staff of a newspaper or radio station had to be recognized as delivered to the state authorities. This innovation made the mass media hugely more influential. A complaint published in or forwarded by a mass media editor to an executive body could turn into a weapon against all bureaucratic tricks and sabotage. In the 1970s–1980s, the media received from 60 to 70 million letters a year. Each of the national dailies with the largest circulation—Pravda, Izvestiia, and Trud—received about half a million letters of complaints annually (White 1983:52).

Reading of individual zhaloby from the Soviet period leaves the impression of very personal, emotional, bitter appeals to the authorities. However, a study of typical strategies for solving problems through complaints reveals the late Soviet zhaloba was rather pragmatic act on the part of citizens, cleverly maneuvering among the rules. They skillfully selected addressees, combined them with each other, and prevented “empty” replies from officials. Some of them managed to use the restricted resources of the judiciary in solving civil problems and used court decisions as additional arguments when filing complaints (Bogdanova 2021). The others turned for help to the so-called professional complainants – people having rich experience of appeals to authorities.

With the uncertainty and flexibility in the rules for filing and handling complaints, it was extremely important to impress the person into whose hand it fell with details and specifics of the problem. Accordingly, the fate of the problem identified in the zhaloba directly depended on how it was formulated, what methods and arguments were used to enhance its significance. Throughout the Soviet period, the narrative form was preserved, involving a lengthy presentation of the problem and the selection of arguments at the discretion of the applicant, using not only factual data, but also moral argumentation and emotional component (Ibid).

The government had supported the complaints mechanism throughout the entire Soviet period. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of the mechanism became apparent as the Soviet system weakened. Since 1990, the People’s Control – a governmental body in charge of complaints has lost its power almost entirely. In May of 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the law “On the Control Chamber of the USSR,” which replaced the People’s Control, but the processing of complaints was excluded from the chamber’s mandatory functions (Kabashov 2010:144).

Officially, the mechanism was not liquidated, but the radical post-Soviet changes in the 1990s turned the work with complaints into an unmanageable burden for the officials. With the development of judicial reforms, the civil and administrative legislation significantly improved, and problems that had been attempted to be addressed through complaints began to be resolved in the courts. From 1995 to 2018 the number of administrative cases tried in Russian courts increased more than threefold, while the number of civil cases increased sixfold (Judicial Department 2019). The courts have absorbed what used to be the Soviet mechanism of complaints, but not the practice of complaints. The pattern of complaints in Russia are comparable with those in post-communist societies and China. The adoption of the 2006 Law No. 59-FZ provided a new impetus for improving the work with citizens’ appeals at all levels of executive authority and opened a new page in the history of the Russian complaints mechanism.

References

Bogdanova, Elena. 2021. Complaining to the Authorities in Russia: A Trap Between Tradition and Legal Modernization. Routledge

Federal Law “On the Order of Consideration of Citizens' Applications in the Russian Federation” from 2 May 2006 No. 59-FZ. KonsultantPlus (http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_59999/)

Friedgut, Theodore. 1978. “Citizens and Soviets: Can Ivan Ivanovich Fight City Hall?” Comparative Politics 10(4):461–477, 466

Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. 2019. (http://www.cdep.ru/index.php?id =79&pg=1)

Kabashov, Sergei. 2010. Organizatsiia raboty s obrashcheniiami grazhdan v istorii Rossii. Moscow: Flinta

Lampert, Nicholas. 1985. Whistle-Blowing in the Soviet Union Complaints and Abuses under State Socialism. London: Palgrave McMillan

Minzner, Carl. 2006. “Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions.” Stanford Journal of International Law 42:103–180

Volkov, Sviatoslav. 1974. Leksika russkikh chelobitnykh XVII veka: Formuliar, traditsionnye etiketnye i stilevye sredstva. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta

Vyshinksii, Andrei. 1934. Revoliutsionnaia zakonnost’ i zadachi sovetskoi zashchity. Moscow: Redaktsionno-izdatel’skii sector mosoblispolkoma

White, Stephen. 1983. “Political Communications in the USSR: Letters to Party, State and Press.” Political Studies 31(1):43–60