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  Posted By: Johnsm @ 02/16/2008 8:36:43 AM

  Corruption Still Flourishes under Putin
  
  On February 6, the Russian newspaper Vedomosti released some of the findings of a research project called ???The Nature and Structure of Corruption in Russie.??? Carried out by the Institute for Public Projects (INOP) and the Institute for Comparative Social Research (CESSI), the research revealed that the highest level of corruption is observable in the tax collection service, while the recipients of the largest bribes are members of judiciary, the same judiciary responsible for ensuring that the financial and banking regulations are enforced through the courts. As expected, law-enforcement bodies and public health get also colossal ???cuts.???
  
  The black economy, grown large by dint of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, accounts for 40-50 per cent of the economic activity in Russia and no Kremlin government has shown the will to fight corruption because it is happening on such a massive and all-pervasive scale that it became a norm rather than an exception.
  
  In 2006, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank organization headquartered in Washington, argued that Russia is already a ???criminal syndicalist??? state, comprising corrupt officials at all levels of government, successful full-time professional criminals (the Russian Mafia), and businessmen who seem to regard Russian law and Western norms of commerce, respectively, not as barriers to be respected but as mere obstacles to circumvent.

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  Posted By: baggs @ 12/01/2007 11:23:48 AM

  I have read through the comments and must say that most of you are missing the point of the article. You must remeber that democracy is a concept of freedom,of choice, what works for one country in their time-line may not exactly fit into another country atthat particular time. The concept of democacy is very new to Russia, and yes there is democracy in Russia. It may not be the type of democracy that is in the States. America is not imposes its views on the whole world. America is about freedom. Dispite anyone's view on the war in Iraq there are many people in Iraq that are very happy and grateful that America is about freedom.

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  Posted By: Viva @ 11/05/2007 11:29:07 AM

  First of all, t9900, you should know that I was a little child when communism ended in my country, so I wasn't "brainwashed" by commie ideology. And if you read comments more carefully you will see that we have nothing against democracy, moreover, we support it. But are you sure that Bush's policy can be defined as "democratic"??? Don't you see that "democracy" in the USA is just the myth, illusion??? We are not against democracy, but we are against that America imposes its point of view to the whole world instead of solve its own problems.