Russian authorities who fight corruption often face reprisals, from salary and political interference to beatings and even assassination. The same is true for journalists who report on abuses and judges who sentence fenders. Prime Minister Yevgeny Prikov recently began attacking high-level corruption in the military, regional governments and port authorities. But for the most part, anticorruption campaigns have merely been used to attack political enemies and protect monopolistic fiefdoms, rather than as serious attempts to deal with institutional and economic problems. Most investigations have aimed at low-level officials, a prosecutions for official corruption have declined by more than 90 percent since the Gorbachev era.
Evidence suggests that even low corruption in Russia is part of a larger crime network.
A 1998 survey of inmates in a Siberian prison camp created exclusively for former police and government officials found that 40 perercent of those convicted of taking bribes had been on the permanent payroll of criminal organizations. Of course Russia is not alone. Estimates by the International Monetary Fund suggest that from 6 to 8 percent of the world's economy now consists of money involved in drugs, capital flight and capital evading taxes. But Russia's failure to stem the flow of graft has carried a comparably heavy cost. In many cases, documents show, payments for Russian Government commodities and products are made directly into privately controlled foreign accounts.