The Changing of Customs?

The current Russian word for customs, tamozhnya, originated in the times of the Mongol-Tatar yoke. The word tamga, in Tatar, meant ‘a customs tax, the official who collected it, and the stamped seal or statement verifying that it had been paid.’ Each market had its tamozhnya, and the right to collect duties could be purchased from the State. This right was often acquired by powerful merchants.

But the Russian customs service predates even the Mongol Yoke (1237-1480). Some three centuries before, in Kievan Rus, taxes were collected for transporation of goods through the frontiers of its individual princedoms.

Thus, Russia has had a customs service in some form for the past 1000 years. And, for most all of that history, it has been much more than a force for keeping out contraband. In fact, it has been a powerful, highly politicized administrative organ, serving mainly protectionist leaders.

Today, as Russia’s State Customs Committee (RGTK) celebrates its fifth anniversary since the collapse of the USSR, it still fills a weighty role. As in years past, it controls much of the country’s foreign economic activity, determining what can and cannot be brought into and out of the country, what the levels of duties are on imports and exports, e.g. which goods are worth importing and exporting, and which are not.

This task is made all the more difficult when you consider that, as the world’s largest country, Russia has the world’s longest border to police, much of it newly created. As the Federal Customs Development Program for 1996-2000 notes, “The creation of Russian customs was complicated by the fact that, after the disintegration of the USSR, the best-equipped and best-staffed customs services were outside Russia, which had acquired as a result 13,500 km of new borders with former Soviet Republics, including 1,100 km of borders with the Baltic states.”

Increased staffing is one solution. And the RGTK has seen a five-fold staff increase over the past five years. This has been matched by growing organizational complexity. While the old Soviet Union had just two Customs Directorates, Russia alone now has 15.

Protectors

of the realm?

The first Russian customs statute was handed down in 1667. Known as the novotorgovoi (new trade), it was strict towards foreigners, who were allowed to trade only in frontier towns on pain of confiscation. A special tsar’s certificate was required for trading further inside the country (indeed, for 15 years previous all foreigners in Moscow were required to live in the Nemetskaya sloboda — the German Settlement).

Such protectionism held sway for most of the next 300 years. Every tsar from Peter the Great to Nicholas II approved laws limiting the import of foreign goods and defending Russian producers. The commissars were little different. But for limited foreign concessions in the early years of Soviet power, communist rule in Russia was to be equated with state-managed foreign trade and customs policies aimed at maintaining ‘ideological purity.’

Customs officers in the Soviet era had the role of political police and vice squad, preserving the ‘high moral profile’ of Soviet man. They worked closely with the KGB, whose duty it was to oversee the troops guarding Soviet borders. Hapless ‘smugglers’ who were caught bringing in, for instance, forbidden literature could easily end up in the Lubyanka [KGB prison].

Magazines like Playboy and rock records were banned. Customs officers would scrutinize the bags of each incoming foreigner closely, often counting the pairs of jeans and running shoes — popular consumer items in the halcyon days of communism, looking for petty smugglers. Soviet flags, icons and military paraphernalia were routinely confiscated from tourists on their way out.

Customs versus

‘shuttlers’

Today, of course, the ideological imperative is gone, replaced by commercial concerns. And perhaps nowhere are these concerns more starkly illustrated than in the case of chelnoki — shuttle traders.

Since the collapse of communism, most any consumer good could be imported into Russia. But the state, seeking to control (or profit from) foreign trade and under the guise of protecting local industry, has set very high duties on imported consumer goods (the result has been exhorbitantly high retail prices for consumer goods).

Yet a loophole has existed. Russians returning home from abroad can bring back into the country, duty free, some $2000 worth of merchandise purchased abroad. While such a loophole existed even in Soviet times, it has become more useful of late, with the advent of cheap package travel tours to Europe and the freeing of internal commerce.

The ones taking advantage of the loophole have been the chelnoki. They began taking the cheap tours to Turkey, China and elsewhere, buying up cheap consumer goods, then bringing them home to sell in markets throughout Russia.

And the chelnoki serve a definite need. Given the high import duties, Russia suffers from a shortage of medium-priced clothing shops. There are only expensive boutiques or old-style shops full of Soviet-era kitsch. So the chelnoki’s shuttling provides middle income people with fashionable, attractive clothes, albeit not very high quality, relatively cheaply. For many families, Sunday trips to the market have become a tradition.

Needless to say, this unbridled trade does not sit well with 1000 years of history. New rules have been introduced whereby chelnoki will only be able to bring home 50 kg (110 pounds) in goods duty free. Numerous articles have appeared in the press with chelnoki complaining that the new rules have bankrupted them, while others threaten: “Now we’ll have to raise our prices, and again it’s ordinary people who’ll suffer.” The new rules could also cause serious problems for airlines and shipping companies doing charters to ‘cheap countries,’ because their main clients were chelnoki.

Customs officers themselves, however, maintain that nothing terrible will happen — the chelnoki will make a fuss and then quiet down.

In fact, a new storm is quietly brewing — customs rules which will change the entire system of entry and exit into the Russian Federation. These will affect all travelers to Russia, so RGTK officials are being very cautious in their comments, for fear of spreading disinformation. It seems likely, however, that tariffs will be raised on many comsumer goods, like automobiles, and will be directed, again, mainly at Russian travelers bringing goods into the country.

However, many chelnoki do not believe rules make much difference — what counts is the people they have to deal with.

“I only cross the border when my friend is working [at customs],” said Valery, who has been shuttling for over 4 years and who requested that his last name be withheld. “I already know his price, $200, and I pay without a word and can be sure there won’t be any problems with my bags.”

Unhealthy temptations

The ‘price’ of customs officials is, not surprisingly, an extremely sensitive issue. One officer, however, agreed to discuss the subject of bribery in the service, provided he remained anonymous.

“We have to live somehow or other,” the officer said. “So many take bribes. But in the central customs directorates this happens quite rarely, simply because it’s dangerous. The RGTK has its own security service, and the Tax Inspectorate shows an interest, so at Sheremetyevo [airport] for instance, there aren’t many bribe-takers. It happens most often in the regions, further from the bosses. And sometimes the younger ones do something stupid, as they think that customs is somewhere you can make a lot of money. And they get done in by trivial amounts — they end up doing time for the sake of a few hundred dollars.”

The general perception of customs work was always of a very lucrative profession. Behind the Iron Curtain, work in customs gave people a special charm in the eyes of their fellows — they were so close to the border and in contact with foreigners every day. Thus they could get goods like Marlboro cigarettes and just about any foreign magazine available.

Today, of course, things are very different, and the average w

age of a customs inspector is about 700,000 rubles ($130) a month, not much by Russian standards. And the work is quite nerve-wracking, especially dealing with chelnoki, many of whom like shouting if something bothers them and quickly turn to violence. This, perhaps, goes some way to explain the infamous steely or sullen appearance of Russian customs officers.

Over the whole of 1995, the RGTK recorded 250 cases of bribe-taking, half of them discovered by its own security service. High-ranking officials are often among the culprits, like the recently replaced head of Pulkovo airport customs in St. Petersburg, and RGTK first deputy chairman Valery Kruglikov.

Your word is your bond

In the absence of the means to make a material difference in the lives of customs workers, the RGTK has instituted a mandatory oath for all officers as a way to ‘raise moral standards.’ All customs officers must now swear to “respect the Constitution and Russian legislation and protect Russia’s economic sovereignty, execute their duties in good faith and abide by the discipline of the customs service.”

But it will take more than just an oath before today’s customs officers can live up to the standard set by their colleague Pavel Vereshchagin in the classic Soviet film,White Sun of the Desert. Vereshchagin told bandits who had refused to pay duties on a ship full of tapestry, silver and gold: “I don’t take bribes — I’m just sorry that my country’s being robbed.” The bandits then beat Vereshchagin up and reported back to their boss, Abdullah, that ‘customs gives the go ahead’ (tamozhnya dayot dobro — a customs-related phrase familiar to Russians of all generations). Incidentally, the North West Customs Directorate recently voted Pavel Luspekayev, the actor who played Vereshchagin, ‘Russia’s best customs officer.’

Identifying the

real enemy

Despite problems in their own ranks, Russian customs officers do get results sometimes, and the arrest of smugglers or confiscation of contraband is not such a rare thing. One of the recent victims was Michael Jackson, who had received a pre-revolutionary, Russian cavalry officer’s sword worth around $5,000 from former Kremlin security chief Alexander Korzhakov during Jackson’s last visit to Moscow. Apparently Russian customs ‘felt sorry for their country’ and judged that neither man’s power or popularity gave them the right to treat Russian antiques in this way (goods of ‘historical value’ must pass customs ekspertiza before being exported from the country and pre-revolutionary items are virtually non-exportable).

Statistics about more routine cases are equally enlightening. At Sheremetyevo-II airport, on average something illegal is found in passengers’ luggage once every two days. In the first six months of 1996, customs officers confiscated goods worth 265 bn rubles ($53 mn). Topping the contraband list was cars. Food products were a distant second, followed by currency and alcohol. All told, the number of ‘breaches of customs regulations’ during this period is 40% higher than in the same period last year.

A New Drug Route

As their counterparts in many other countries, Russian customs officials are seriously worried by the still increasing flood of narcotics into the country, begun after the raising of the Iron Curtain. Russia is becoming a kind of staging post for the East-West drug route. In Kazakstan, which recently joined the CIS Customs Union, customs control has been reduced to a minimum, and narcotics are brought through literally by the bagful. According to the RGTK, if Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are also accepted into the Union, then the situation with drugs could get completely out of control.

In 1995, Russian customs officers found and confiscated almost 6.5 metric tons of narcotics (vs. just over three tons in 1994). Though customs officers would seem to know all the means used to carry narcotics across borders, drug traffickers continue to outwit them. There was recently a case of an African smuggler who died in a Moscow airport waiting room after swallowing a condom full of heroin, which burst in his stomach.

Cargoes are even more difficult to check than individuals. Officers maintain that they cannot physically search whole trains in the 30-40 minutes they are given at border stations. Moreover, if narcotics are found, it’s often not possible to find their owner. Anyone, passenger or carriage attendant alike, can leave powder or tablets in the bathroom or end of a carriage, and no one can tell who was responsible.

Alcohol smugglers are equally difficult to catch. Twenty thousand bottles of Finnish vodka, hidden in pear boxes, were recently seized at a port in the western city of Kaliningrad.

Most ‘serious’ smugglers, i.e. those carrying narcotics, weapons or currency, are citizens of CIS or Eastern European countries, China or Turkey. But representatives of Western countries also fall foul of Russian customs occasionally. Recently, two 18-year-olds, Dutch citizen Suzanne Vorstenbosch and Briton Karen Henderson were sentenced to six years in a prison camp for attempting to smuggle drugs into Russia. (Both were arrested in February 1996 at Sheremetyevo-II airport by Russian customs officers, when en route from Havana to Warsaw. They had 4.5 kilos of cocaine each in their suitcases. Vorstenbosch immediately pleaded guilty; Henderson was convicted in spite of a not-guilty plea.)

Nevertheless, most Westerners take the filling in of declaration forms very seriously. One Moscow artist who earns a living making copies of famous Russian works of art said that he often found it difficult to sell paintings to foreigners, because they were afraid of being accused of taking out valuable cultural items [potentially valuable paintings, works of art and books must all have the approval of the Ministry of Culture prior to export].

“I promise them certificates from the Ministry of Culture,” he said, “but they’re still afraid of the customs.”

This phenomenon too has its roots in the past, although the restrictions on taking things out were much greater ten years ago. One British student returning from Voronezh in 1986 took elaborate measures to conceal the full army dress he had purchased — in mid-summer he wore it under his clothes, and put the belt under a fur hat on his head, masked from metal detectors by badges pinned to the hat.

Nowadays, foreigners need not worry about taking out such purchases. And as regards art, in the words of one Sheremetyevo customs officer, “we have specialists who are capable of telling a souvenir from a work of art, so be assured that law-abiding citizens won’t have any problems.”

A new profile — holiness,

heroics and hotlines

The positive side to this is that Russian customs have become quite effective in stemming the flood of genuinely valuable icons and paintings from the country. In 1994 RGTK chairman Anatoly Kruglov received from Patriarch Alexy II the Order of St. Andrew First Class for services in returning cultural treasures to the Orthodox Church.

“Our appreciation knows no bounds,” noted the Patriarch.

Altogether, the work of the RGTK has given Kruglov plenty to smile about — in the first six months of this year, it paid 23,426 trillion rubles (almost $5 bn) of customs duties into the state budget. Now plans are under way to remove all existing import and export tax privileges, which would increase revenues by another $50 mn a year.

About 50 staff received awards from the government, some of them military medals. Among them were several North Caucasian customs officers, decorated for disarming criminals who tried to blow up a customs post with a grenade.

In fact, according to deputy head of the RGTK Press Service Vladimir Yemelyanov, serving with customs is no less difficult and dangerous than military service. In one incident this July, a five pound TNT bomb was slipped under the door of the apartment of the Dagestani customs director. On this occasion, the bomb was noticed and defused in time, but others are not so lucky — last year 51 customs officers were killed in the line of duty.

In an attempt to come to terms with these and other phenomena of the modern world, Russian customs officers are currently drawing on the experience of their foreign colleagues — applying them to Russian conditions. According to Professor Sergei Syedin from the recently established Russian Customs Academy, such notions as the intuition of customs officers can be scientifically explained by modern theories, including the American theory of neuro-linguistic programming widely used by the Academy’s teachers. Future officers studying at the Academy are taught to analyse words, reactions and gestures, and determine which psychological approach to use on suspicious passengers — while some may require long and arduous questioning and searches, others will admit to wrongdoing  almost immediately if pressed.

The Academy also relies on some 40 documentary films, licensed to the Academy by US customs representatives who participated in a seminar on drug smuggling in 1995. [In August 1994, the US and Russian governments signed a customs cooperation agreement.]

In order to meet the challenges they are faced with, Russian customs are getting what benefits they can from this agreement. They are learning not only state-of-the-art drug detection techniques and military-style combat-training but also public relations and the complex task of creating a human face for customs.

The most recent creation in this area is a telephone hotline. Now, anyone who considers himself unfairly treated by customs can call up and complain to the Committee’s officials. They promise no delays in dealing with complaints.

Only time will tell whether such innovations are pure window-dressing for an underpaid and therefore often corrupt and intransigent behemoth, or part of a user-friendly service with Russia’s genuine interests at heart.

For now, though, Russian customs are in the midst of a transitional period. Symbolically, passengers are still using old USSR customs declarations. Said RGTK spokesman Vladimir Yermolayev, the reason for still using the old forms is purely economic: “We had a backlog, so to save paper we only started printing new ones when the old ones began to run out.”