I went to Russia with a bunch of other people in my company to check out the feasibility of opening up offices in Moscow for my company.

We were assailed from the minute we got into the airport by people outright asking for bribes to "get stuff done". These weren't just cab drivers or cops but actual officials that were telling us how business was run in Russia.

When it was time to leave there was some question over whether or not the flight would be able to take off because of the some payments that the airport authorities were told we owed the Moscow Mayors office for security.

Needless to say we nixed the deal PDQ when we got home. 13 years later we look like geniuses.

I had the ill-fortune to be the translator for some American businessmen and Russians. After a few weeks on the (part-time) job I quit and told my bosses, the Americans, that they should turn their backs and walk away.

The Russian had too much "pull" back home, too much money, and no obvious source of funding.

Six months later the Americans called and wanted to know what I knew. I repeated the same things to them, but their greed and arrogance got in the way. They managed to transfer funds after paying bribes and every Russian on the horizon vanished. And ceased ever having existed. I told them that they hired me for my knowledge of Russian language and culture, they ignored me because they were greedy, and I hung up on them. I didn't like being an escort interpreter anyway.

On the other hand, that generalization that the '90s were corrupt lacks any sense of nuance. The mid-90s were corrupt. By the end of the '90s things were being tamed. A lot of the high-end corruption was being prosecuted, disavowed, and was unpopular. Resisted, it was on the decline for the last 3-4 years of the '90s. ("On the decline" does *not* mean "gone&quot . The economy's fundamentals were improving--international investment was returning, unemployment flatlined and employment started to trend up.

Then Putin won the election. In short order official, state-sponsored corruption was back and corruption, this time controlled, monitored, sponsored by the state--corruption for which you had to fill out forms in triplicate and file them with the right state agencies--was the norm. And under it informal corruption was driven out of business in a corruption-based form of Gresham's law: State corruption drives out informal-sector corruption. It pays to note that the '90s was really one that saw corruption battling corruption: The CPSU was notorious for official corruption and in the early '90s many of the big "mafia" bosses were former party bosses that had held office. These resented the private-sector corrupt figures and the "new Russians." Putin represented the victory of the stable, official-sector corruption. Russians prefer order to democracy, and want order *now* with autocracy instead of order in 10 years with democracy. Or even distrust democracy, since it's messy and not all that orderly.

Note that doesn't take much to bankrupt a person. Take a person with $1 billion in assets, put him in jail, deprive him of any way to manage his company, make sure his affairs go into pieces and he can't file the necessary paperwork. Then, since his company is in default, he hasn't responded to calls at his official place of residence to validate that he owns his bank and stock accounts they're seized. As is his official place of residence. When the courts find him not guilty a year later, it doesn't really matter. He's ruined by state-run corruption. He can try to undo the damage, but he has to rely on state bureaucrats for this and they lose paperwork or the assets are already moved on to some other place. (Many here call for the same thing against their political enemies, and it's one reason that grand juries existed--to keep corrupt prosecutors from personal vendettas. Their abuse is lamentable; as is the abuse of prosecutorial discretion.)