Abstract :
By conventional measures, Russia lacks the ‘rule of law’. For evidence, we need
look no further than the notorious Yukos case, in which its president, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, was railroaded into a criminal conviction and his company was
bankrupted, with the proceeds mysteriously ending up in the hands of Kremlin insiders.
The Yukos case is only the most infamous example of so-called ‘telephone
law’, a practice by which outcomes of cases allegedly come from orders issued
over the phone by those with political power rather than through the application
of law. The media is replete with such accounts. The conclusion typically drawn
by media commentators and social scientists alike is that the omnipresence of
‘telephone law’ makes any reliance on formal law or legal institutions in Russia
foolhardy.
