Russians see little change in effectiveness of anti-corruption fight, poll shows

(Interfax –  April 12, 2013) More Russians are seeing results of the official anti-corruption campaign, the Interfax news agency reported on 12 April, citing an opinion poll carried out by national pro-Kremlin pollster VTsIOM.

However, according to a detailed breakdown of poll results posted on at http://wciom.ru/index.php?id=459&uid=113912, the number of people who said that a lot is being done to fight corruption has actually remained steady since 2012, at 7 per cent. Similarly, the number of people who said that the results were rather insignificant is also unchanged from 2012, at 38 per cent. Meanwhile, the most popular response continues to be that “there are no real results, everything remains as is”: 41 per cent in 2013, compared to 38 per cent in 2012. At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of people who say the situation with corruption is only getting worse – 13 per cent in 2012, 11 per cent in 2013.

In the press release accompanying the poll results, VTsIOM said that it was most often supporters of the A Just Russia and One Russia (United Russia) parties (54 and 48 per cent respectively) who saw positive results in the fight against corruption. Conversely, the supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (57 per cent) saw no change or a deterioration of the situation (16 per cent), as did those who back the LDPR party (17 per cent).

As regards the most high-profile recent corruption scandal, involving the Russian Defence Ministry and ex-Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, almost half of the respondents (44 per cent) said they made no special effort to follow the course of investigation, but paid attention to such information if they came across it. Another 14 per cent said they made a conscious effort to track all new developments. Thirty-two per cent said they did not follow the investigation and another 7 per cent heard about the probe for the first time during the poll.

The poll was carried out on 30-31 March among 1,600 people in 130 settlements in 42 Russian regions. The margin of error is within 3.4 per cent.