MOSCOW — The two young women showed up at the airline ticket counter without reservations, but in Russia, this is hardly an insurmountable hurdle.
They pressed about $175 into a ticket scalper's hand. He passed on $30 to an airline agent, who held up the 9:35 p.m. flight to the Black Sea resort town of Sochi so that Satsita Dzhebir- khanova could rush aboard.
Her friend, Amanta Nagayeva, was less lucky. The 9:20 p.m. flight she had hoped to take to Volgograd, in central Russia, had already left. She began nervously demanding to get on the next plane, wherever it was going.
Don't worry, the scalper told her, if she wanted to go to Volgograd, she would go to Volgograd. Nagayeva -- and the bomb she was apparently carrying -- boarded the next flight, at 10:20 p.m.
Both planes exploded within nine seconds of each other, at 10:53 p.m. on Aug. 24, killing all 90 people aboard.
In Russia, boarding a fully booked flight costs only a little more than boarding an available flight. Speeding down Moscow's Garden Ring can be negotiated with the traffic police for $35. Canceling a tax audit of your business -- or launching one on your competitor -- costs $30,000. Driving through a police checkpoint in the war-torn republic of Chechnya costs $2.
Corruption is a daily routine in Russia, but no longer is it regarded as a mostly victimless crime.
Suspicions that law enforcement corruption played a role in recent terrorist attacks -- including the Sept. 1 school seizure in Beslan, where some witnesses said heavily armed terrorists crossed a police checkpoint -- have prompted a new look at the relationship between graft and violence in today's Russia.
"The problem of combating corruption has moved to a new level in this country," said Yelena Panfilova, head of the Russian branch of Transparency International, which monitors corruption around the world. "After the events in August and September ... corruption has turned into a problem of survival for every individual, every day in this country."
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin underscored the problem a day after the Beslan tragedy, when he blamed the country's weakness for a siege that left 340 people dead. "We have allowed corruption to undermine our judicial and law enforcement system," he said.
Hostages at the school in the republic of North Ossetia said the attackers told them they had easily reached the school by bribing police along the way.
