Anti-corruption sweep called boon to Putin's party

MOSCOW -- The campaign started last week when Russian officials announced "Operation Werewolves" and arrested seven top-ranking police on corruption charges. Just about every day since then has come a new revelation: Traffic cops on the take. Border guards busted for selling fake passports. Hundreds more police under scrutiny.

On Wednesday, military prosecutors joined in the anti-corruption publicity wave, revealing details about court cases against four senior generals accused of various malfeasance, including allegedly embezzling money meant to feed soldiers and skimming funds meant for soldiers' housing.

The arrests have created an unusually public and frank discussion of corruption in Russian officialdom. But political recriminations began almost as soon as the arrests did last week. For many people here, jaded by more than a decade of police corruption and unfulfilled promises from politicians to do something about it, "Operation Werewolves" had the hallmarks of an election-year publicity stunt.

"The goal of this is publicity, and what we're seeing now is the roll out of all the criminal cases they've accumulated," said Igor Bunin, head of the Center for Political Technologies, an independent research group here.

"It's political theater," added Andrei Ryabov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

They noted that the initial arrests were announced on national television by Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, who is also head of United Russia, a political party that supports President Vladimir Putin. The party has been lagging in recent public opinion polls, which place it almost even with the Communist Party at around 20 percent support heading into December's parliamentary elections.

"They did this to raise the ratings of United Russia and Boris Gryzlov himself and to make it look like they're helping Putin to fulfill his promise to fight corruption," Bunin said.

Seemingly surprised by the criticism since last week's initial raid, Gryzlov has changed his tone about the war on corruption since launching it with the line that they'd arrested a group of "werewolves in epaulettes."

Arrests for show

By this week, after Russian newspapers like Vremya MN trashed the campaign as "Cleaning for Show" and a group of liberal parliamentary deputies declared it illegal for him to run both a political party and the Interior Ministry, Gryzlov was fending off critics. "It was a public relations exercise only in the sense that it is meant to show we will find all the criminals, we will prove their guilt, we will purge our ranks," he told a Russian TV interviewer on Saturday.

Some analysts believe the highly publicized arrests will redound to Putin and United Russia's benefit. "People like it very much --throwing them in jails, exposing their golden toilet seats. Everyone is fed up with the corruption of the law enforcers," Bunin said.

"Right now, United Russia is trying to find its agenda for the campaign," Ryabov said. "If you look at the results of polls, you can see these problems of fighting crime and corruption have the first place. That's why Boris Gryzlov is using it."

The operation began last week with the arrest of the seven so-called "werewolves," six colonels and one general accused of running a racket in which they planted drugs and guns on people then forced them to pay to avoid prosecution. The arrests, filmed live by journalists alerted in advance, captured scenes of high living by the accused, who managed to acquire such things as a custom tennis court, a swimming pool and even a gold-plated toilet seat, while supposedly living on government salaries.

Soon, Gryzlov was on television again, urging drivers to take pictures of corrupt traffic police and send them to the Interior Ministry -- another likely vote-getter in view of the Russian public's view of traffic cops. The research group Transparency International found last year that 70 percent of encounters with Moscow traffic police ended in payment of a bribe.

Next, two top Interior Ministry generals outside Moscow were arrested. Then Gryzlov's men announced they had solved the sensational murder case of a parliamentary deputy, claiming it was a murder ordered by a political rival in his party.

This week, the campaign was still in full swing. On Monday, Moscow criminal police announced an investigation into 700 police officers in the city's elite Criminal Investigation Department possibly tied to the extortion ring. On Tuesday, the news was an undercover sting operation that netted three border guards at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, accused of smuggling criminals on the wanted list out of the country with false passports.

On Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Ganayev, head of security at the Emergency Situations Ministry, and several other of the original arrestees were arraigned. His attorney, Vladimir Levin, called the charges "groundless."