Yep. Being a bureaucrat is a guaranteed way of enriching yourself via bribes, so you make lots of extra bureaucratic posts for your friends...
Putin is attempying to cut down the bureaucracy. The number of businesses transactions requiring government licenses -- which usually means paying bribes -- has dropped from something like 1,000 to under 100 (numbers pulled from my ass, but they're something like that).
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 14:01:12 -0800 From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> Subject: Re: Russian take on Bush's State of the Union blather
Really, it is 60% bigger?
Chris Doss wrote:
>
> I do see a possible arms race in the future, assuming the Russian economy
> continues to boom and the bureaucracy -- which is 60 percent larger today
> than it was in the USSR
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