[CivilSoc] Online Document: "Russia's Road to Corruption"

[Moderator]

In March 2000, the Speaker of the House of Representatives tasked the
leadership of six committees of the House to assess the results of U.S.
policy toward Russia during the Yeltsin years. "Russia's Road to
Corruption--How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of
Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People" is the result of that effort.
It can be read in full at http://policy.house.gov/russia/home.html
The report makes numerous recommendations which are not as partisan as the
report's title might suggest and remain pertinent today.  Here, for example,
are two of the report's fifteen recommendations:
"3. Engage the Russian people, not just the Russian government.
U.S. relations with Russia should be more broadly based than institutional
relations among governmental bodies. The Advisory Group endorses expansion
of existing people-to-people exchange programs such as the Library of
Congress' Russian Leadership Program and the Center for Citizen Initiatives
program, as well as programs run by the State Department such as the
Fulbright Program, the Internet Access and Training Program, the
Russian-U.S. Young Leadership Program, and the International Visitors
Program. Such programs give individual Russians the opportunity to observe
American democracy and the market economy, while helping Americans better
understand the opportunities and challenges in Russia, and allowing both
host and guest to share experience and expertise. Such programs are
particularly valuable to the extent that they promote contacts with Russians
living outside of the capital. The Advisory Group particularly endorses an
expansion of the number of Russian exchange students at American
universities, especially where the exchange programs assist students
studying economics, business, marketing, and agriculture.
"4. Enlist the support of the U.S. private sector for the establishment of a
cooperative surveying and titling project in each of Russia's 89 regions on
a far more urgent basis than has thus far been undertaken.
The enactment of sturdy legal protections for private property,
privately-made contracts, and commercial transactions is a fundamental
prerequisite to the development of free enterprise in Russia.
Entrepreneurial activity and the growth of competitors to the "privatized"
monopolies will be severely stunted without the capital that private
property rights will make available to the Russian economy.
The availability of marketable title to privately-owned real estate is an
essential--and still missing--ingredient of the free enterprise system that
Russia seeks to develop. Russia's land is a source of enormous potential
wealth, both as security for commercial lending and as a valuable asset in
its own right for the development of Russian housing, agriculture, commerce,
and recreation. To permit Russia's citizenry to tap this existing source of
wealth, a nationwide effort must be undertaken to precisely describe the
boundaries and ownership history of all potentially marketable state-owned
and privately-owned land in Russia--and to do so on a far more accelerated
basis than has been considered feasible in recent years.
The legal descriptions of surveyed property and the complete record of its
ownership, including all legally valid claims, liens, and rights of others
besides the recorded landowner, should be published on the Internet, as well
as stored in publicly-accessible land title registries within each region.
The project should draw upon the expertise of American surveyors,
cartographers, abstracters, title insurers, and other real estate, civil
engineering, and land title professionals, and should have as its objective
the establishment of the basis for a flourishing competitive market in
private title insurance and real estate services throughout Russia by 2005."