Greasy Palms Are Rampant in Russia

MOSCOW —  On the day baby Gleb came into the world, his way was made a little smoother by a Russian tradition that is centuries old: His family paid a bribe.

Health care is supposed to be free in Russia, but when Gleb was born Oct. 4, his father gave the obstetrician $300 to make sure the boy and his mother received the best possible care. For the doctor, it was like getting nearly a year’s pay.

Earlier this year, Alexei D. Krykov, 72, was laid to rest in keeping with the same custom. His widow, Zinaida, paid for a plot and a funeral at the state-run Khovanskoye Cemetery and then gave the gravediggers a bottle of vodka each to make sure they dug a proper hole.

From the cradle to the grave and at every conceivable stop along the way, bribery is an indispensable part of Russian life. It softens the edges of an authoritarian society and enables citizens to circumvent a ponderous state bureaucracy. It is an example of market forces working in a country where the government doesn’t.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with paying bribes for good treatment,” said Gleb Khokhlov, 36, little Gleb’s father, who makes $100 a day in the construction business. “When the life of your baby is at stake, you don’t count your money. You pay what they tell you.”

While investigators search from Moscow to Switzerland to New York for evidence of high-level Russian corruption, the Russian people cope with graft as a matter of everyday existence. The Bank of New York money-laundering scandal has alarmed the West, but ordinary Russians are more concerned about finding money to pay what they call vzyatki.

You want to enroll your child in the best school? Give the principal a $500 donation. You want to avoid the draft? Spend $5,000 for a medical exemption. It’s time to pass a university exam? Chip in to get the professor a new TV. Need a driver’s license? Don’t bother with the driving test. Pay $400.

“The practice of graft has become pervasive and universal,” said Sergei A. Arutyunov, a leading anthropologist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Everything is bought and sold. Everyone who is in charge of something in this country, even something small and insignificant, is in a position to take bribes.”

The practice of bribery dates back at least 450 years, to the time of the first czars. Despite Stalin’s efforts to stamp it out, bribery survived Communist rule to flower in the past eight years under gangster capitalism.

Authorities say that more than 6,200 bribes were reported in the first nine months of this year, but they estimate that’s less than half of 1% of the bribes that actually changed hands.

Despite more than $20 billion pumped into Russia by the International Monetary Fund to stimulate so-called reforms, the country still has one of the most bloated bureaucracies in the world. There is no tradition of paying taxes, and the government collects far less than it needs to stay afloat.

Government workers, including doctors, teachers and police officers, are paid so little that they cannot support themselves on their salaries alone.

For underpaid bureaucrats, each contact with a member of the public is an opportunity to extract some sort of payment. The higher an official’s position, the greater the opportunity to collect bribes.

In a sense, it is an alternative system of taxation--a kind of government by tollbooth where citizens are assessed for the specific services they require. The more money they appear to have, the greater the bribe they are likely to pay. It is an echo of the Communist past: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

“The culture of graft is hard-wired in the Russian mentality because the people have never been free in this country,” Arutyunov said. “They have always had a servile psychology. In order to get something, they had to beg for it, even if it was something guaranteed by the state.”

Officials Are More and More Demanding

Some recipients of bribes prefer to think of them as gifts and only hint at the kind of payment they expect. Bribes for small services often take the form of a bottle of alcohol or a box of chocolates. Sometimes, the exchange is not so different from tipping. But increasingly, officials are becoming blunter, asking for and receiving dollars stuffed into envelopes.

Teacher Marina V. Prokhortseva, 32, gave birth in September to Artyom, her second child. At each checkup, she brought gifts of perfume or chocolate for the doctor. During the month leading up to the delivery, the doctor called her every day and told her where she could be reached in an emergency. In the hospital, the doctor stayed constantly by Prokhortseva’s side. After Artyom was born, she and her computer programmer husband paid the doctor $200--a bargain compared with the $600 they paid nearly six years ago when their daughter, Angelina, was born.

Now Prokhortseva knows that paying a vzyatka at the maternity ward is just the beginning. To get Angelina into the right preschool two years ago, Prokhortseva and her husband bought $500 worth of musical instruments for the school. Now it is time to find a new school, and she expects to pay another $500 to get her daughter into a good one.

‘A Long Chain of Bribes You Have to Pay’

“More children, more bribes,” she said. “Their birth is just the beginning of a long chain of bribes you have to pay throughout their entire childhood.”

It doesn’t stop there. Consider what it takes to get into college.

Nadezhda, like some others interviewed for this story, did not want to be identified by her last name. She was 16 when she enrolled last year in a special college preparation course for the 12 entrance exams required to get into prestigious Moscow State University. She soon learned, to her horror, that she was expected to pay the principal a bribe.

“The teachers dropped a hint that even if I were a genius, I would never pass 12 exams with good grades,” she said.

She was sure her father would pull her from the program, but he took the demand for money philosophically.

“We live here, and we have to live according to their rules,” she recalls him saying. “We will not prove anything if we refuse to pay.”

He visited the school and gave the principal an envelope containing $250.

“I had no trouble getting my certificate,” she said. “Those who bribed the principal were given the answers for the written tests in math, physics and chemistry beforehand.”

Another popular method is to hire a tutor who is a university instructor and can guarantee admission. These tutors charge up to $50 an hour for as many as 50 lessons. To ensure a pupil’s success at exam time, the student turns in his pen along with his exam so the teacher can correct any mistakes in the same ink.

Once students reach university, the practice of bribery continues. Sometimes they pay cash, sometimes they give bottles of vodka, sometimes they buy the professor something he or she wants.

“Last winter, 10 of us bribed our teacher of philosophy with a Samsung color television set,” said Yegor, 25, a dental student. “I am not against bribery. I work and study, but I do not have time to learn the whole bulk of questions in literature, history or philosophy. It has many advantages both for students and teachers. They get money, and we pass our exams.”

Over the past eight years, millions of new drivers have hit the streets of Moscow, providing a great source of revenue for traffic inspectors. The method of issuing driver’s licenses helps explain why the city’s motorists are among the worst in the world.

When Irina, a 20-year-old student, enrolled in driving school, the first thing the class learned was that no one would pass without paying $200 to the traffic inspector who gave the driving test, she said.

In the end, she paid the $200, knowing it would be cheaper than flunking and having to pay for the driving course again. When she took the exam, the inspector had her drive 20 yards and then told her to pick up her license in a week.

“During the test, I was really shocked when I saw that half the people could hardly start the car,” she said. “I got really scared when I realized how many bad drivers there were on the roads of Russia. Most of them must never have opened a book of traffic rules.”

Once they are on the road, drivers must run the gantlet of the notorious traffic police, known as the GAI.

In Moscow, officers stand at major intersections and pull over motorists at random. They need no probable cause or suspicion of wrongdoing. If the driver’s documents are not in order, a bribe of $12 can solve the problem. Avoiding a speeding ticket is a bargain--as little as $2. Evading arrest for drunken driving costs at least $100. The more expensive the motorist’s car, the bigger the bribe.

The GAI’s corrupt practices are so widespread that the force has long been the butt of Russian black humor. In one joke, a patrol officer asks his captain for a pay increase because his wife has just had a baby. There is no money for a raise, says the captain, who decides to help out the poor patrolman anyway. The captain goes to his storeroom and comes back with a 25-mph speed limit sign. “Here,” he says. “Take this. You can use it for a week.”

Judicial System Has Its Own Miscreants

For those unlucky enough to land in court, bribes are still an option. Investigators, prosecutors and judges have all been known to accept bribes, though few are ever prosecuted.

“We have a situation where a detective investigates multimillion-dollar cases for just $100 a month, and he doesn’t even have an apartment of his own,” said suspended Prosecutor General Yuri I. Skuratov. “He is in a position to make all sorts of executive decisions on how the case will be investigated. In return, he is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is enough for him to live in affluence for the rest of his life.”

The state bureaucracy is the place where the most money can be made. Clearing goods through customs, issuing government contracts and privatizing state property all offer lucrative opportunities for corrupt officials.

When Mikhail G. Delyagin worked last year as a senior aide to First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri D. Maslyukov, he was paid $100 a month--hardly enough to live on in Moscow. He supplemented his income by lecturing and writing.

“Officials who can’t do that either have to lead a very miserable life or take bribes,” he said. “Any man from the street can come into an official’s office with a draft document and get a signature and a seal for a bribe. That is probably why the government sometimes issues regulations that contradict state law.”

Throughout the government, Delyagin said, bribery is an organized activity in which officials receive money and pass it up through the chain of command.

“Some state agencies may actually function as smoothly working bribe-taking mechanisms, where bribes are distributed from the lowest-level bureaucrats to the very top of the organization,” he said.

In such a department, an employee who refuses to accept bribes won’t have a job for long.

“By displaying such honesty,” Delyagin said, “he will disrupt the functioning of the entire organization.”

For Russians who grew up with the Soviet promise of free health care, it has been difficult to adjust to the new way of doing things. While medical care is still free in name, the quality of care is so poor, and supplies are so limited, that only the truly poverty-stricken venture to seek treatment without paying something.

Vyacheslav A. Kuznetsov, a professor of electrical engineering, was suffering from a kidney ailment and needed an immediate operation. The wait for surgery was five months, and he worried he wouldn’t live that long.

So Kuznetsov met with a hospital official and gave him an expensive bottle of French cognac to start things off. Two weeks later, he was on the operating table. He ended up giving the surgeon $200, a similar bottle of cognac and a car stereo. During his recovery, he paid the doctor $80 a day for two weeks for medicine that was supposed to be free.

“Today, bribes have become morally justified because the salaries are ridiculously low and the ruling elite rips off the country without a twinge of conscience,” the professor said. “This perverted mentality has led to a situation where it is impossible to live in Russia without paying bribes. He who does not pay does not live--he simply muddles along.”

Alexei Krykov died in April. Last Wednesday, his wife and friends gathered at the cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow to remember him. They set up a small table on the empty grave site next to his, laid out pickles, potatoes, bread and a bottle of vodka, and drank to his memory.

Zinaida, his 69-year-old widow and a retired passport office clerk, said she survives on a pension of 500 rubles a month--the equivalent of about $20. The vodka she gave the gravediggers at the time of the funeral amounted to more than a tenth of her monthly income, but it never occurred to her to do otherwise.

“I wanted them to do a good job, and, to get people to do a good job, you always have to give them something, especially at a cemetery,” she said. “It’s a tradition.”

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Svetlana Safonova of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

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Price List

In a country where everything is for sale, Russians pay bribes as a matter of course in their everyday lives. Here is the cost of some ordinary and some not-so-ordinary bribes:

Avoiding arrest for drunk driving: $100 minimum

Getting a doctor’s certificate of disability: $60 to $1,000

Enrolling a child at a good nursery school: $200 to $500

Passing a university exam: A bottle of vodka to $150

Getting a driver’s license without driving school or test: $400

Avoiding military service: $5,000

Obtaining a phone line without a long wait: $600 to $1,000

Getting access to an important official: $1,000

Getting permission to install a police-style flashing light on car roof: $1,500

Clearing an imported car through customs: $3,500

Getting an arrest warrant withdrawn: $10,000

Halting a criminal investigation: $30,000 to $100,000

Canceling a contract killing: $50,000

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Compiled by The Times’ Moscow Bureau from interviews and Russian media reports.