Also, is this an either/or question? If corruption was the setting, and the reforms operated as if that were not the case, thus allowing the corruption to metastasize, wouldn't that make corruption both the setting and the product of reforms? ---------- Und ich antworte so:
This is certainly what happened. The rate of corruption in the USSR, even during late Brezhnev, was microscopic compared to contemporary Russia. (Anybody who did business in the USSR and then post-1991 Russia can tell you this.) Before, maybe 20% of cops took bribes; today, it's 70-80%. (That, along with engaging in commercial business ranging in prviding protection services to doing freelance PI work to, in the dark end, running criminal rackets is how they earn money -- a beat cop in Russia earns maybe $80 a month. It is pretty damn hard to live in Russia on $80 a month, let alone raise a family. The current Miss Universe, by the way, is a cop, but she attends one of the elite police schools and is not going to be a street policewoman.)
I am not just talking about upper-echelon bureaucratic corruption -- it extends to every level of society. I am not making a moral judgment, but merely describing how things are done. I am no exception to the general rule.
One primary reason for this is this: Imagine that you are a government functionary working at some post in the late USSR. You earn maybe @200 a month. $200 a month was good money in the Soviet Union. Then, 1992 rolls around. You still earn $200 a month, but inflation rates of 2,500% have set in. Your salary is no longer comfortable; you are no longer middle-class, you are impoverished. You do not earn enough to buy more than buy food, and not much of that. How do you maintain your Soviet living standards? When somebody comes to your desk and wants a permit, do you require an unofficial payment into your pocket? You sure as hell do. I probably would.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal