MOSCOW -- Need a business license? Try giving a nice six-place china set to a municipal clerk. For one recent applicant, was the necessary creative touch.
Hoping to dodge the draft on your 18th birthday? An $800 doctor's office visit will buy you a bad case of asthma. Because in Russia, bribery is a way of life.
Tips or gifts will buy a place at the head of the motor vehicle registration line. They will gain a willing ear from apartment landlords; they will secure a child's place in a sought-after public school piano class. For the cost-conscious, Moscow newspapers list the going rates for whatever ostensibly free government service you may need.
"Bribery is a very old Russian tradition," observes Konstantin Zuyev, a philosopher at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "It's illegal from a formal point of view but totally legal in public opinion.
"In the Soviet era, money wasn't exchanged -- it was the right kind of cognac or shoes. And it wasn't so directly and openly done as now."
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the growth of a stratum of "beeznessmen," the million-dollar sums of big-time bribery have become regular fodder for headlines. Last month, the renowned Korov Ballet gained unwanted attention because of the arrests of its director and its chief choreographer for allegedly taking bribes to arrange foreign tours of the company. St. Petersburg police alleged that bribes taken over several years amounted to "millions of dollars."
But it is the smaller, matter-of-fact payments that allow government workers to buy their daily bread, and maybe a little extra.
There is the case of the GAI, the national traffic police who are posted at every major intersection. They prowl lines of backed-up traffic or step into the midst of fast-moving cars and point their baton at an offending driver.
For every driver who is stopped, a member of the GAI collects a few dollars worth of fines. And the officers are universally believed to pocket much of what they collect.
An experiment in August by Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov helped confirm everyone's suspicions. An undercover ministry official was dispatched as a truck driver on a 500-mile trip. He stopped at 24 checkpoints. At 22 of them, GAI officers took bribes.
Crime reporter Maxim Glikin wrote in Obshaya Gazeta about an officer who earns the bulk of his income at what the man described as his "part-time job": He stands in his uniform on a street, flags down trucks and asks $10 for imaginary traffic offenses. In his real job, he has no authority to stop drivers.
