MOSCOW -- Bribes are so common here that many people walk around with the prices in their heads, the way an American would know how much it costs to buy a newspaper or a gallon of gas.
Price lists are even published in the newspaper. Recent articles reported on the cost of a passport granted in a timely fashion ($200) and a speedy registration of a joint venture business ($500 to $2,000).
Against such a landscape, the lurid tales of Swiss bank accounts, murder plots, missing millions and other corruption that high-level government officials have been telling about each other over the last few weeks have created little sense of scandal among the average Russian.
"What other kind of government could we have?" asked Natalya Anatolyevna, a 28-year-old Muscovite who can rattle off a litany of bribes she has had to pay over the last month.
Seventy years of communism, she said, had marked government officials and private citizens alike.
Communism, Russians point out patiently to the untutored foreigner, was a system of distribution rather than one of buying and selling.
There was never enough to go around. And the strict hierarchy of party and privilege made everyone dependent on someone else. So while everyone might have the right, for example, to a decent apartment, each person had to find his own way to exercise that right.
A bottle of vodka used to be the basic currency. That might get a repairman to show up to fix your toilet -- for which you would then pay him. You could buy a ticket for an airplane, but to get on the flight (instead of waiting at the airport for a few days) a tube of lipstick might prove handy.
Now that the economy has been freed of artificial restraints, so has bribery. Money talks, especially dollars.
Enormous changes
And the enormous changes under way across Russia have created new growth industries for bribe-takers. Natalya Anatolyevna, for example, estimates she has spent about $1,000 in bribes to privatize her apartment, sell it and buy a new one.
Natalya (who wanted to be identified only by her first name and patronymic) can little afford such an enormous amount of money. The average salary here is no more than $50 a month.
Her husband, an army officer, was developing a business trading in cigarettes. In the course of this work he was murdered -- either because someone wanted to take over his business or because someone owed him money and didn't want to pay.
