Politicized corruption and models of legal repression of local elites in Russia

In authoritarian regimes elite repression is widely used to preserve power and resolve elite conflicts for access to rents or high office (Bove and Rivera 2015; Davenport 2007; deMeritt 2016; Escribà-Folch 2013; Gel’man 2018). Modern autocrats, however, tend to refrain from violent coercion and instead resort to ‘legal’ repression, i.e. arbitrary (although often technically correct) use of the criminal justice system (Levitsky and Way 2010; Guriev and Treisman 2022). Prosecution of elites on corruption charges – anticorruption repression – is an increasingly popular strategy of this legal repression. In this paper I study legal repression via politicized corruption focusing on criminal anticorruption cases against local top executives in Russia. Since about 10% of Russian mayors were criminally prosecuted between 2002 and 2018 (Buckley et al. 2022), focusing on the local level offers an excellent opportunity to explore this phenomenon with more variance and a larger population of cases (N=85). I build my framework by looking at the interaction of two factors – whether the arrested mayor was involved in an intra-elite conflict and whether the mayor was appointed or popularly elected. I find that different combinations of these factors produce three models of anticorruption repression of local elites – struggle, purge and state(bureaucracy)-driven repression, which are driven by a different logic. I then illustrate these models with detailed examples of criminal cases against Russian mayors, based on media reports and social media posts, to better understand the functioning of legal repression and the use of politicized corruption. I also show how this legal repression becomes a contributing factor to local elite rearrangements, alongside formal institutionalized ways of elite replacement via regular elections and (re)appointments.