Russia corruption costs $318 billion – one-third of GDP

President Dmitry Medvedev has pegged his political reputation to an official assault on corruption, which he labeled “public enemy No. 1” shortly after arriving in the Kremlin last year.

“Corruption is one of the main obstacles to [economic] development.... the fight against it must be waged on all fronts,” Mr. Medvedev told Russians in his second annual State of the Nation speech earlier this month.

From 147th to 146th on Transparency International's ranking list

But Viktor Korgunyuk, an expert with InDem, says there have been no “serious” efforts to fight corruption so far – only words. “The whole system is based on corruption, and no one is going to cut off the branch upon which they are sitting,” he says.

The only touch of faint praise for Medvedev’s efforts comes from the global corruption watchdog Transparency International, which this year bumped Russia up one-tenth of a point in its Corruption Perceptions Index, so that it now stands at 146th (up from 147th last year), alongside Sierra Leone, in the group’s 2009 list that ranks 177 countries according to the perceived levels of corruption.

“I wouldn’t call it any kind of improvement, but the situation has stabilized,” says Yelena Panfilova, director of the Moscow Transparency International Center.

She says the group’s index, which is compiled from expert surveys, could be tracking a more hopeful reaction on the part of businessmen and political insiders to recent developments, such as a new law on corruption passed by the Russian parliament this year, which may set the stage for real change. Russia has never before had a comprehensive law that defines categories of corruption and sets criminal penalties for each, Ms. Panfilova says.

“There’s been lots of anticorruption rhetoric in the past, but now we see the development of an institutional and legal framework to actually fight corruption,” she adds. “Everything, of course, will depend on implementation in the future.”

Read about how police officer Alexei Dymovsky went public on YouTube with corruption charges against his superiors. He got fired, but his actions spawned a grass-roots anticorruption movement that's gotten a lot of attention on Russia's still-uncensored Internet.

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