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Yuly Nisnevich, board member of "Transparency International - Russia"
Corruption is a dynamic process. It proceeds in breadth and depth. Some traditional things that used not to be perceived as corruption ...
Not only in Russia, by the way: a lot of African countries have the tradition of gifts, the tradition of patronage of a family as a cultural tradition.
And today, this cultural tradition faces the fact that it starts to get a corrupt system. This does not mean that the culture of these peoples is corrupt. It is the complete opposite.
I'll give you a simple example: in Soviet times there was such a wonderful mechanism as cronyism.
Something was done for friends and relatives. Notice how this poll shows that today 70% say that familiarity with the authorities is very important.
This is the transformation of this "cronyism" in fact, into another form. But is it a cultural tradition? In my opinion, this is not a cultural tradition. It's just an anti-cultural tradition.
This is what the Soviet authorities imposed on society.
So talking about the cultural tradition - I would still avoid it.
Another problem is that researchers at one time shared the opinion that corruption at the level of communication has a positive effect, because it overcomes bureaucratic barriers.
Researches were conducted that showed that in fact it is not so, because if you count all the costs, then it would still be more expensive than a non-corrupt way.
But we need to explain this to people. You know, corruption seems to be a faster and cheaper way to solve our problems.
Anton Pominov, deputy director of research department "Transparency International - Russia"
We always say that corruption is only an institutional problem. If we say that it is a cultural problem, it turns out that we are culturally closer to Somalia and Congo than to Estonia and Finland.
We believe that this is not the case and that the problem is only in public institutions.
Yuly Nisnevich, board member of "Transparency International - Russia"
In general, all countries can be divided into two large clusters. Some states function on the basis of competition, and as soon as the competition goes away, what appears instead? Corruption.
So, unfortunately, Russia is today a state, the basis of the functioning of which is corruption in all its variety of forms. And second, in my opinion, is an idea that I have long been interested in: corruption is a dynamic process.
It may start with something small, but if you do not destroy this, it begins to expand in breadth and depth.
Here we have, unfortunately, come to a point where almost everything is damaged.
Speaking about whether it is more or less now it seems to me that this is not essential, if we understand that we have all the mechanics based on corruption.
People also say one more important thing. They also evaluate efforts to fight corruption, they see them.
The awareness among people that it is, in general, not a fight against corruption, but rather its imitation, has increased by 20%.
In fact, we can confirm that. I will give a simple example that everyone knows - the story of prosecutors from the Moscow region.
There was a lot of talk and noise, everyone was imprisoned, and what was the result? Ignatenko was left alone, and he was also released.
So where is the corruption case? We have a strata of untouchables.
While it exists, no real fight against corruption will have a huge effect.
Something particular is possible, but globally with a caste of untouchables it is almost impossible to combat corruption.