In case you weren’t aware, today is Anti-Corruption Day, and a majority of Russians think corruption is on the rise there, according to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer. 53% of Russians surveyed said they thought that corruption had risen in past year, despite the government’s anti-corruption efforts. In fact, Kommersant reported that most Russians consider that anti-corruption campaign marginally effective at best. In the survey, the police and public servants scored highest for the segments of society which people thought were most corrupt. Religious figures and organizations, however, only rated 2.5/5 (5 being the highest) on the corruption scale so it’s not all the worst thing ever.

Caption: "The Verkhovnaya Rada (Ukrainian Parliament - BL) has raised fines for traffic violations!"

The most interesting part for BiznessLanch was not this, because let’s be honest, everyone knows the cops and those pesky chinovniki are corrupt as shit. Rather, it was interesting to see how Russia stacks up next to its post-Soviet counterparts in order to provide some much-needed context.

Georgia, interestingly, had a huge decrease in perceived corruption, with 78% saying that they felt corruption had decreased, but the other countries – Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Mongolia, Moldova, Belarus – generally had high perceptions that corruption levels  remained the same or increased. Russia and Ukraine more or less matched up across the 9 segments of civil society in terms of perceived corruption in those areas.

In Ukraine, political parties and parliament were seen as more corrupt than their counterparts in Russia, but it would be interesting to see if this is actually true – how’d you measure this I have no idea – or whether it better reflects Ukrainians’ disillusionment with the political system or a higher standard for the political process. At some level, measuring the perception of corruption would seem to open the possibility for the creation of a kind of ‘false positive’ in that societal expectations for corruption vary; people who are inured to corruption might have a higher base level for corruption than people not as accepting or used to it. Still, owing to the fact that bribe takers typically don’t keep itemized lists of bribes taken for the fiscal year, measuring perception is the best method for tracking how corrupt a society is.

So the moral of all this; while corruption sucks in Russia, it sucks worse in Mongolia.