Law Is for the Weak: Why Russians Have No Respect for the Law

It has a constitution. It has courts. It has prosecutors, investigators, ministries, regulations, permits, forms, stamps, signatures, inspections, and procedures for every imaginable part of life.

But when real power enters the room, the law often quietly leaves.

A poor person may be crushed by a missing document. A small business may be destroyed by one inspection. A mother may spend months trying to prove that her wounded son is entitled to compensation. But if a powerful man wants someone's company, apartment, freedom, or silence, the law can suddenly become very flexible.

And ordinary Russians know this.

That is why many of them do not respect the law. They fear punishment. They fear being caught. They fear the official behind the desk. But if they believe they can bypass the law safely and benefit from it, many will do exactly that.

Russians are not uniquely corrupt or rebellious by nature. For centuries, Russian history taught them a brutal lesson: law is not a shield for everyone. Law is a weapon in the hands of power, a trap for the weak, and an obstacle to climb over if you possibly can.

Today, we are going to talk about why law in Russia so often feels like a trap instead of protection.

Here's our roadmap:

The Tsar's Rule — why Russian power began with a ruler above the law.

Law as Privilege — how law separated ranks instead of protecting equal citizens.

Paperwork and Feeding — why bureaucracy became both obsessive and corrupt.

The Broken Reform — how the empire built courts but never tamed autocracy.

The Soviet Mask — how Bolsheviks promised equality and created a new caste system.

The Post-Soviet Deal — how modern laws became scenery for informal power.

The Future Test — what would have to change in Russia for law to become real.

The Tsar's Rule

In a normal legal system, the highest official should also be trapped by law. The president cannot simply take your house because he likes it or rewrite the election law in fear of losing.

But the Russian system grew from a different habit.

The tsar stood above the legal order. Law came from him, moved through him, and could be changed by him. In theory, he was the source of justice. In practice, that meant nobody could fully use law against him.

This sounds abstract, but it shaped daily life for centuries.

In Western Europe, the laws restricting the kings' power grew out of struggle. Other holders of power — nobles, cities, churches, and later parliaments — forced rulers to bargain. Rights were forced into existence because these other groups had enough strength to demand them.

Russia had fewer independent centers of power, and those that did exist never had the resources to counterbalance the tsar's authority.

The state grabbed all power early and tightly. A noble family could be old and proud, but its real security still depended on service and favor. The ruler could lift a man up, give him land and rank, and then take everything away.

Geography helped build this system because people adapt to the land they live on.

Russia was huge, poor, and hard to connect. Roads were bad. Sea ports were far away or threatened by hostile powers. Rivers did not lead where merchants needed to go. For these reasons, trade required protection from the state. A large, centralized military force was needed to keep routes safe.

And if normal economic life depends on a giant steel fist, then the person who controls that fist controls everything in the country.

Law as Privilege

For a long time, law in Russia did not teach people, "We are equal before the rules." It taught them, "Find a way to make the rules affect you as little as possible."

For the lower ranks, law meant duties and obedience. For the upper ranks, law meant privilege.

A noble did not simply have more money. He lived in another legal world. He could own serfs. He was protected from punishments that ordinary people feared.

Catherine the Great's Charter to the Nobility in 1785 is a clean example. It confirmed noble privileges, including freedom from compulsory military service and protection from corporal punishment.

That is not a small thing.

When the state says one man can be beaten and another cannot, it is teaching society what law means: not a shared moral boundary but a badge of rank.

Serfdom — the Russian version of slavery that covered most peasants up to 1861 — made this even clearer.

For millions of peasants who were serfs, law did not protect their freedom but restricted it. It tied them to the land they were born on, and to the landowner, in ways that made private life almost impossible.

And this logic went beyond peasants.

Law decided who could live where, who could own certain property and enter certain professions, and who would be denied these choices.

Take the Pale of Settlement. For more than a century, most Jews in the Russian Empire were restricted to certain western territories, with many limits on residence, work, education, and movement. Again, law was marking a group as different and limiting its life.

This is why Russians learned to read law as a map of privilege. Who can ignore the rule and who must follow it?

This habit survived even when the old imperial order disappeared. The names changed, but the instinct remains. Many Russians still see law not a justice but as a barrier to climb over, buy your way around, or use against someone weaker.

Paperwork and Feeding

Some people who have experienced Russian bureaucracy first-hand ask, "How can a country like this be lawless? It's literally obsessed with paperwork!"

But Russia is both.

Bureaucracy is not the same as a rule of law. A real legal system protects the citizen from arbitrary power, while a bureaucratic system protects the official from responsibility.

The old Russian word here is kormleniye, "feeding." Historically, officials could be rewarded by extracting income from the population they governed, and that was absolutely legal. This medieval system of kormleniye was formally abolished long ago. But the habit survived in new clothes: office gives access to resources.

A rich office gives rich feeding, in the form of bribes and kickbacks. But even a poor office gives power.

A low-level clerk may not receive millions, but he still controls access to something scarce. And that little gate can make a small person feel large.

This is why Russian officials so often take pleasure in humiliating people — sending them off to get yet another paper, telling them to come back later, making them wait in hallways for hours. Many people are forced to go through endless cycles of bureaucratic limbo before they finally receive the document they need.

In recent years, this system has improved somewhat thanks to Gosuslugi, the state-run digital platform. But it has streamlined bureaucracy only in those areas where the state wants fees collected and paperwork processed quickly. In other areas — where efficiency is neither convenient nor profitable for the state — the old approach has remained firmly in place.

Red tape is especially notorious in everything connected with veterans of the war in Ukraine. For many wounded soldiers, it is virtually impossible to obtain the papers or the money they are owed.

And this is where Russian law teaches its lesson again.

The powerful person solves the bureaucratic barrier by calling someone. The ordinary person solves it by waiting, paying, begging, or giving up.

This happens because the written rule is only the first layer. It is deliberately written in such a way as to allow very flexible interpretation and unrestrained gatekeeping. Behind it is the real system running on access to power and personal connections.

This system strips ordinary people of their dignity. A citizen stops saying, "I have the right." Instead, he begs, "Can you please help me get it done?"

The Broken Reform

Russia did try to build a modern legal system.

In the nineteenth century, the empire gradually came to understand that arbitrary rule was inefficient. It weakened the country technologically and economically, because business needs clear rules and a functioning system of justice to support long-term investment.

The Crimean War exposed this brutally. Russia lost to Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. The defeat showed that the old system could not compete with modern states.

After that came the Great Reforms of Alexander II.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861. Millions of peasants were no longer legally bound to landlords.

Then came the judicial reform of 1864.

This was one of the most serious legal reforms in Russian history. Courts became more open. Legal procedure became clearer. Jury trials appeared in many criminal cases. Judges received more independence and lawyers gained a real role.

For a while, this created something new in Russia: a public legal culture. Citizens could watch justice happen in the open, at least in some cases.

But the reform had a ceiling.

The tsar remained above the system. Political rights were still narrow. Censorship remained. Political opposition faced surveillance, exile, and prison. And the people still did not control taxation and state spending in a real parliamentary way.

That is one of the deepest differences between Russia and Western constitutional development. In many Western countries, the fight over law was tied to the fight over money: who pays taxes, who collects them, and who checks spending. In Russia, this question never fully matured before the old regime collapsed.

So the empire built pieces of a legal state but kept the one principle that poisoned the rest: supreme power remained above the law.

This is why the reform remained broken.

The Soviet Mask

The Bolsheviks promised to destroy the old world of rank and privilege. And they actually did that. But then they built a new one.

This is the part that still confuses people. Soviet power spoke the language of equality, freedom, and people's rule, similar to the revolutionary language of Europe and America.

But once the Bolsheviks took power, their stance changed quickly.

Freedom of speech was useful when they were fighting the old regime. After victory, it became dangerous. Political competition was useful when they were attacking others. After victory, it became labeled as counterrevolution.

The early Soviet system officially divided people into categories. Some were proper citizens of the new world. Others became "lishentsy" — people deprived of political rights because of class background, occupation, or connection to the old regime. Former nobles, clergy, business owners, police officers, and other "socially alien" groups were restricted that way. Their children could suffer too.

Then came the deeper Soviet split: paper rights and real power.

The 1936 Stalin Constitution declared many impressive rights, such as complete equality between men and women, universal rights to work, rest, education, and material security. On paper, it looked modern and democratic.

In real life, the Great Terror was beginning. Millions of people were arrested on dubious charges and sent to labor camps. Many were tortured to make them confess to atrocities they never committed.

Elections also became a performance. People voted, but the ballots had only one candidate representing the Communist Party. Citizens did not choose power but confirmed it. The state used democratic forms to pretend that power came from the people, while real power came from the party and the security apparatus.

So Soviet citizens learned another lesson. Do not trust whatever the state and its officials tell you. Instead, read the signals.

The law may say you have rights, but your boss or secret police investigator may know better. The newspaper may say the people rule, but everyone understands which office can destroy your life.

This is why Soviet legality was so poisonous. It taught people to live in two realities at once. That habit survived the Soviet Union. I have a dedicated video about how ordinary Russians juggle these multiple realities.

The Post-Soviet Deal

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia received modern laws.

On paper, this was a new country: with private property, independent courts, free press, and a new constitution guaranteeing rights.

At the lower level, law did begin to work in many ordinary cases. Two small businesses could fight over a contract — and have their dispute settled in court.

If no powerful person cared about the result, law could function. But the old Russian rule returned where it mattered most.

When the dispute touched serious money or political power, law stopped being the master and became the servant.

That is the key to modern Russia.

The country created modern laws and procedures, but real power moved backstage.

The post-Soviet elite had a simple fear. In the 1990s, huge property was privatized by people close to party, Komsomol, security, and administrative networks. Much of this wealth did not feel legitimate even to the people who received it.

Then came elections.

What if voters chose communists? What if a new parliament revised privatization and took the property back?

So instead of building independent institutions, the elite wanted a guarantor. A strong president who would protect their property. A controlled parliament would decorate the system. Courts would exist but not rule. Elections could still happen but not truly threaten power.

This was the bargain.

The elite accepted fake law because this fake law protected their stolen property.

But there was a trap inside the deal.

If one man guarantees your property, one man can also take it.

The Yukos case showed this early. Mikhail Khodorkovsky challenged Putin politically. Then the state destroyed Yukos through tax claims, courts, and arrests. The message was clear: property exists while power allows it.

After that, Russian elites became very practical.

When they had serious disputes, they often tried to use foreign arbitration such as London courts. Because they could not trust the Russian legal system to protect them from each other or from the state.

The war has damaged even that escape route. Sanctions and isolation have pushed more disputes back into the Russian system. Now the same elites who avoided real law at home are trapped inside the system they helped build.

And the state is taking more.

Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has seized, nationalized, or placed under state control assets belonging to foreign companies and domestic businessmen who fell out of favor.

The Future Test

Russians will begin to respect law when law begins to protect them.

That is the future test. The question is whether law can become strong enough to stop power.

The first condition is no person should be above the law. Not even the president or security chief. This sounds obvious. But in Russia, it is revolutionary.

The second condition is courts that powerful people can lose in.

The third condition is money.

This is the part people often skip. But law cannot apply equally to everyone when all serious resources flow through political loyalty.

Russia has to change its financial flows.

Regions need real money and real authority. Businesses need property that does not depend on political obedience. Courts need budgets and careers that do not depend on pleasing the same people they must judge. Officials must not be able to turn every permit or inspection into a private feeding place.

The fourth condition is the end of legal castes.

No special class outside the law. No security people who can beat, kidnap, and torture, and still be protected. No officials who can live by one rule while citizens live by another.

This is the deepest Russian habit that must break: the idea that rank changes reality.

A poor person's apartment must be protected by the same law as a rich person's mansion. A small business must have the same right to court as a state corporation. A mother whose son was taken by the army must be able to challenge the state without becoming an enemy.

That is what law means.

And here is the irony. The people who have the strongest reason to want real law may now be the same people who helped destroy it.

Russian elites avoided independent courts because they wanted to protect what they had taken. But now they are discovering the old truth: a lawless system is comfortable only while you are the one holding the whip. Sooner or later, someone stronger takes it from your hand.

Originally published at https://elvirabary.com on August 12, 2026.