ABSTRACT
In his final press conference as President of Russia in February 2008, Vladimir Putin acknowledged that corruption had been “the most wearying and difficult to resolve” of all the problems he had had to deal with during his presidency (Putin 2008). Then in May 2008, Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, signed a decree entitled “On Measures to Counteract Corruption” – a move seen by some as Medvedev’s first major act as president. Medvedev had already been making his concern about corruption clear to the public for several months. In his first major presidential campaign speech, he emphasised the need to clamp down on corruption as part of a larger project to enhance the rule of law in his country – “Russia is a country of legal nihilism.… Not a single European country can ‘boast’ of such a level of disdain for the law” (Rossiiskaya Gazeta –Nedelya, 24 January 2008) – and argued that this legal nihilism was impeding Russia’s modern development. Although the term was not coined by Medvedev – legal specialists such as Professor Boris Topornin had explained poor respect for the law in post-communist Russia in these terms in the 1990s, and it was certainly in use in the 1980s – it has since 2008 become very much associated with him.
