MOSCOW — Graft, corruption and bribery have been excused throughout this country's painful post-communist convalescence as unavoidable but short-lived moral compromises on the road to a better Russia.
But a decade into the transformation, it is becoming clearer by the day that epidemic corruption is not a fleeting ailment. More and more, it is looking like an enduring framework for doing business.
Today's bribe-taking, favor-trading cronyism is not the flawed prototype of an emerging democracy but the bedrock of a criminal society that calls itself the New Russia.
As the economy staggers from crisis to crisis and the Kremlin leadership rotates figureheads like board-game pieces, those Russians who have managed to grab a share of this country's considerable natural bounty are increasingly concluding that crooked capitalism is here to stay.
Yet while the government agencies that control every license and liberty may seem impervious to reform, the roadblocks they throw in the way of private enterprise are not necessarily insurmountable. Ordinary Russians, long accustomed to cutting corners, now routinely break laws and shirk taxes to help their business endeavors survive.
As a result, the economy and government of the New Russia lack any concept of the common good, an ingredient that the architects of democracy elsewhere would argue is essential for any sound society.
From the booming port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan to Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast, nine time zones to the West, Russians busily making new lives for themselves are wasting little time on legal, moral and ethical considerations. And such indifference exacts a toll.
Already, Russians exude a resigned tolerance of widespread thievery, the result of centuries of property deprivation. Even in czarist times, land and resources were in the hands of a greedy aristocracy. In the communist era, everything belonged to no one--and thus everything, then as now, was up for grabs.
Inured to that culture of theft and stripped of any surviving social values by morally broken institutions, young Russians emerging from today's underfunded schools and the disgruntled army have been seduced into the cynical disrespect for authority displayed by their elders, as convinced as any previous generation that rules are made to be bent, if not broken.
