Greasy Palms Are Rampant in Russia

Health care is supposed to be free in Russia, but when Gleb was born Oct. 4, his father gave the obstetrician $300 to make sure the boy and his mother received the best possible care. For the doctor, it was like getting nearly a year's pay.

Earlier this year, Alexei D. Krykov, 72, was laid to rest in keeping with the same custom. His widow, Zinaida, paid for a plot and a funeral at the state-run Khovanskoye Cemetery and then gave the gravediggers a bottle of vodka each to make sure they dug a proper hole.

From the cradle to the grave and at every conceivable stop along the way, bribery is an indispensable part of Russian life. It softens the edges of an authoritarian society and enables citizens to circumvent a ponderous state bureaucracy. It is an example of market forces working in a country where the government doesn't.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with paying bribes for good treatment," said Gleb Khokhlov, 36, little Gleb's father, who makes $100 a day in the construction business. "When the life of your baby is at stake, you don't count your money. You pay what they tell you."

While investigators search from Moscow to Switzerland to New York for evidence of high-level Russian corruption, the Russian people cope with graft as a matter of everyday existence. The Bank of New York money-laundering scandal has alarmed the West, but ordinary Russians are more concerned about finding money to pay what they call vzyatki.

You want to enroll your child in the best school? Give the principal a $500 donation. You want to avoid the draft? Spend $5,000 for a medical exemption. It's time to pass a university exam? Chip in to get the professor a new TV. Need a driver's license? Don't bother with the driving test. Pay $400.

"The practice of graft has become pervasive and universal," said Sergei A. Arutyunov, a leading anthropologist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Everything is bought and sold. Everyone who is in charge of something in this country, even something small and insignificant, is in a position to take bribes."

The practice of bribery dates back at least 450 years, to the time of the first czars. Despite Stalin's efforts to stamp it out, bribery survived Communist rule to flower in the past eight years under gangster capitalism.