CoRRuptIon, Global SECuRIty phần 5 potx

more authoritarian than democratic, again, the effects, particularly, on neigh- boring states, are likely to be unhappy. In this chapter, however, the argument is bolder and more direct. It is that corruption at the level enveloping most of the post-Soviet states, in particu- lar Russia, poses a direct threat to the world outside—a threat not merely to international welfare, but to international security. There is a corollary: If corruption in and among the post-Soviet states poses this kind of threat, then it no longer deserves to be treated as a secondary issue and given passing attention by all but those who have a special professional interest in the sub- ject. It should be front and center when thinking about the core security chal- lenges facing the international community, and a key concern for major pow- ers when designing their foreign policies toward Russia and the region. Corruption in Russia and surrounding states influences, for the worse, most of the crucial facets of the international security agenda: issues of war and peace, including regional conflict; global terrorism; and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). No less important, corruption is a burden when facing issues of global welfare: the risk of failed or failing states; the abuse of human and minority rights; threats to health; the flow of “con- taminants,” such as drugs, trafficked humans, and illegal arms; and the dam- age done to national economies by illicit trade, money laundering, and transnational crime. Concepts and Causal Arrows As is evident throughout the essays in this volume, conceptual problems begin with the word itself. Not that perfectly serviceable definitions do not exist. The standard dictionary definition is “the inducement of a political official by means of improper considerations to commit a violation of duty.” Fair enough, but what then are “improper considerations” and what constitutes a “violation of duty?”Social scientists have tried to remove this ambiguity with ever more elaborate formulations. Some would define corruption as “behav- ior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private- regarding (personal, close family,private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influ- ences.” 4 In all cases, however, the meanings that analysts attach to the word fail to capture the meanings that different peoples in different societies at differ- ent times attach to actual behavior. One person’s corrupt action is another’s socially acceptable transaction. To some what seems a blight on economic and political progress for others serves as an inevitable, even necessary, aspect Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 195 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 195 of change in chaotic and uncharted periods of transformation. 5 Add to this conceptual ambiguity the shaky nature of the data that are used to measure corruption and the analytical challenge grows exponentially. As a result, even the basic questions are not easily answered: How bad is the problem? Are things getting better or worse? Without gainsaying these difficulties, here they are set aside. First, because despite imprecision in the data on corruption in Russia and the region, no one—insider or outsider, analyst or victim—doubts that corruption exists there on a grand scale. Second, there is no question that in virtually all of the post- Soviet states, with the questionable exception of Georgia, corruption is grow- ing, not receding. This chapter offers instead conceptual distinctions to help one think about the specific nature of corruption in the post-Soviet region. The first of these distinguishes among categories: the criminal state, the criminalized state, and public corruption. The criminal state, as used here, refers to places not merely where criminal activity has penetrated widely within the state, but where the core activity of the state is criminal; that is, where the state depends overwhelmingly on the returns from illicit trade to finance itself and, therefore, not only protects, but, in fact, conducts the bulk of the business. None of the twelve internationally recognized post-Soviet states—and certainly not Russia—fall into this category. But several of the so- called de facto mini-states left in the wake of separatist struggles within the post-Soviet states—Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Transdniestr in Moldova, and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan—fit this description. Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet states belong in the middle cat- egory: the criminalized state. Corruption in their case is too extensive and, above all, too entwined with the state to treat it as in the category of public corruption; that is, states where bribery works with some agencies or where “bad apples”among public officials turn up more than sporadically, but where core institutions remain uncontaminated. 6 The concept of the criminalized state, in contrast, implies a qualitatively different level of corruption, one in which the state itself is suffused with corruption. The state’s core activity may not be corrupt, but the process by which the state acts is. Of the various formulas invented to represent this phenomenon, the notion of “state capture,” introduced by officials at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank, is one of the most helpful. 7 State capture occurs when, in contrast to mere bribe-making, to secure access to a good or an exception to existing rules, interested parties exploit the malfeasance of officials to change the rules (laws, judicial rulings, or bureaucratic regulations). Rather than state officials and bureaucrats 196 Robert Legvold 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 196 extorting business firms or ordinary individuals, powerful individuals or groups use material rewards or physical threats to reshape the state. Alterna- tively, the criminalized state can be thought of as one where much, if not most, state activity has been “privatized”; that is, where either those in power or those with leverage over those in power use state agency to advance their private interests at the expense of the broader public good. 8 One can also distinguish between systemic and non-systemic corruption, systemic corruption being broader than the criminalized state. Because sys- temic corruption entails wide swaths of civil society together with the state, not simply a state suborned by powerful but select private stakeholders, it can be both more extensive and more deeply rooted than the criminalized state. I say “can be”because in the literature systemic corruption often simply refers to the debasing of the state by a bureaucracy or a wide swath official- dom that is up for sale, but without indicating at what point a canker in the state becomes its very essence. Take, for example, the contrast between the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and Russia and other post-Soviet states, on the other: to categorize corruption in both cases as systemic without noting where corruption metamorphoses into the criminalized state obscures the sad real- ity distinguishing the present from the past. Divided further into centralized or decentralized systemic corruption, the concept captures important differences among the post-Soviet states. As used by Stefes, when systemic corruption is centralized, the state controls the “net- works of corruption,” deciding who gets what, when, and how; when decen- tralized, networks of corruption have free rein, and they—often in chaotic and violently competitive fashion—define the shape, scale, and impact of cor- ruption. 9 A related contrast is between locally based and nationally based cor- ruption, that is, whether the heart of the problem is the wayward conduct of government at the center or, alternatively, more commonly in the regions and towns. Those who stress the distinction between centralized and decentralized systemic corruption contend that decentralized corruption is more difficult to contain and redirect or correct as well as more threatening to political stabil- ity. The same can be said of corruption centered on local and regional gov- ernments. In the post-Soviet states, however, corruption thrives at both lev- els, and there is often a symbiotic relationship between the two. Many of the more important players in the private sector act on both levels or do their business with local political officials who have entrée at the national level. Or national figures have private interests in the regions that benefit from what the traffic will bear locally. In other cases where the two domains are separate, usu- ally because national authorities have only a weak writ over local politics, the Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 197 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 197 center would have trouble attacking corruption, even if it wished to, because it lacks adequate leverage. These notions suffer much the same conceptual ambiguity as the concept of corruption itself, but they have the utility, even as rough hewn tools, of cre- ating qualitative distinctions missing from broad quantitative indicators. They also provide at least primitive guideposts, allowing one to focus on the sources of the problem, if only by revealing essential aspects of its nature. Hence, they serve as a starting point for wrestling with the question of what it will take to see change in these societies, and, by extension, what policies on the part of others can have an effect, if any. Contours Pick the measure, and by it Russia and most of its post-Soviet neighbors will score badly. It is not merely their shoddy showing in Transparency Interna- tional’s widely cited rankings or the fact that from 2005 to 2008, with the exception of Georgia, their standing in all cases slid—often by 15 places or more (Russia from 126 to 149). 10 By another standard, in an effort to assess how strong a country’s institutions are for fighting corruption, of the nine post-Soviet countries included in the 2007 Global Integrity Index rankings, only Kazakhstan has an overall score placing it in the “moderate” category. The other eight all fall in the “weak” or “very weak”category (Armenia and Tajik- istan). 11 In this case, Georgia is among those that have slipped a full category from moderate to weak. No matter which survey—the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey, the IMD’s World Competitiveness Yearbook, or the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment—most of the post-Soviet states, including Russia, end up toward the bottom, and where there is progress, rarely is it in mitigating the more serious forms of corruption, such as state capture. 12 Before digging further into what may gradually come to seem to the reader one grim statistic piled on another, until the situation begins to look unre- deemable, two qualifications deserve noting. First, while corruption in Rus- sia and the other post-Soviet states is at a qualitatively different level from cor- ruption in the Russian past or from what one sees in most other societies and, indeed, that now exists on a scale that poses a threat to the outside world, this does not mean the problem is insoluable. Nor even less does it diminish the remarkable change that has occurred in many of these societies—change that has made life better and richer for a sizable portion of their populations. 198 Robert Legvold 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 198 The other qualification confesses the obvious. The story that follows is told with facts and figures, but, as anyone who works in the murky world of meas- uring corruption knows, the data are disturbingly imprecise. They are not a last word, but a loose approximation of the problem—some looser than oth- ers. The data suggest rough magnitudes, and only by adding them together do the contours of the threat emerge. This being said, more telling than cross-country statistical rankings are the manifestations of corruption—the forms that it takes, the scale that it reaches, and the place that it occupies. Stefes, who has written the most thorough com- parative study of corruption in Armenia and Georgia, reports that under the prior Shevardnadze regime, mafia groupings, protected by public officials, cornered 30 percent of Georgian banking revenues, 40 percent of hotel and restaurant income, and 40 percent of the construction industry. 13 In Armenia 60 percent of the country’s industrial infrastructure was “sold” for $800,000. 14 In Georgia a high percentage of foreign aid and loans was embezzled by sen- ior officials in the Ministry for Fuel and Energy, including $380 million, roughly half the foreign aid given to refurbish the energy sector. 15 In Armenia, between 1991 and 1998, Telman Ter-Petrosian, the brother of the president, was said to control “construction and other industries.” The ministers of inter- nal affairs and defense controlled “the import and distribution of food and oil products,” while “several other ministers” grew rich by embezzling humani- tarian aid. Under Ter-Petrosian’s successor, the brothers Serge and Aleksandr Sargsian—the former, Armenia’s current president—have a lock on the gas and fuel market, and “are the main exporters of scrap metal.” 16 In almost all cases, these spheres of the economy are said to be rife with corruption. Before the Rose Revolution, working-level officials in the Georgian tax department “paid around $20,000 to get their jobs”; an Armenian wanting a traffic police officer’s post, $3,000–$5,000; a judge’s position, about $50,000; and “ministerial appointments could cost between $200,000 and several mil- lion USD, depending on the ‘profitability’” of the portfolio. 17 In the case of the Armenian traffic officer, his monthly pay is $35–$50 a month. “He,” Stefes explains,“can make an additional $500 a month through bribes but needs to pay his superior about $10 a day to keep his job,” thus recouping “his initial investment in about two to three years.” 18 The system worked much the same way in Georgia, and it does so in most of the post-Soviet states, varying only in the cost of a given position or a given service. In Russia in 2005, to elude the military draft, a Moscow resident expected to pay $5,000; a resident of central Russia, $1,500. 19 Bribes to get into Russia’s most prestigious universities have ranged from $30,000–$40,000; Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 199 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 199 into second- and third-tier institutions, much less. 20 When bribery exists not only on this scale, but according to established schedules of payment known to a broad customer base, one distinguishing feature of the criminalized state is in place. In the case of Ukraine, one 2007 survey found that 67 percent of Ukraini- ans confessed to “corrupt transactions” in dealing with government officials. 21 “In the last two to three years, around 2,500 Ukrainian enterprises have allegedly been raided,” (as in, stolen through the courts). 22 And despite the hopes engendered by the Orange Revolution and the modest improvement in the months after, in 2007 the World Bank reported that between 2005 and 2006 according to governance indicators, including corruption, Ukraine had fallen from the 35th percentile to the 28th. 23 The Atlantic Council study that assembled these signposts stresses how much of Ukraine’s corruption amounts to what the World Bank–EBRD authors call state capture in all three branches of government, including, in particular, the legislative branch.“The price of passing a bill,”it says, citing “some investigative journalists may be as high as a few million dollars.” 24 It is not surprising then that 52 percent of Ukrainians think that “corruption is justified in most situations to get things done.” 25 This sentiment doubtless marks popular attitudes in most post-Soviet states and represents, if not the criminalized state, then, at a minimum, sys- temic corruption. In the Russian case, an Information Science for Democracy (INDEM) sur- vey, the most in-depth study that has been done to date on corruption, con- tends that from 2001 to 2004, Putin’s first term in office, what it classes as “business corruption” (the price of doing business, as opposed to the petty and sometimes not-so-petty bribes that the average person pays to get through life) increased nine-fold. 26 If measured against federal budget rev- enues, the returns from corruption were a third less in 2001; by 2005 they were reported to be 2.6 times larger. The INDEM survey, unlike any other done among the post-Soviet states, measured both extortion and the willingness to yield to it in “everyday cor- ruption.” Everyday corruption includes everything from arranging medical treatment to getting a passport or driver’s license, from securing a favorable court ruling to obtaining a title to property. According to the survey’s results, in 2004 the total for everyday corruption remained at roughly $3 billion (up slightly from $2.8 billion in 2001), but paled in comparison to business cor- ruption, which was estimated at $316 billion, nine times the figure in 2001. Within these broad parameters, the survey uncovered significant secondary phenomena. For example, at the level of everyday corruption, the results indi- 200 Robert Legvold 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 200 cated that while public officials pushed harder for bribes in 2004 than in 2001, in general the public was less willing to pay them (the only exception was in the willingness to bribe to avoid military conscription). 27 When explaining why the public bribed, the most often cited reason (54–56 percent) was that the individuals involved knew in advance that they needed to do so—one more manifestation of systemic corruption. The INDEM data on business corruption did not include either the pres- sure for bribes or the willingness to pay, but it did stress the exponential increase in the size of the bribes paid (the average bribe increased from $10,200 to $135,800 over the four years) and the annual amount paid in bribes (from $22,900 to $243,750). The study also measured which branch of gov- ernment exacted the largest share of the pie, with the executive trumping the others several times over (being the choice in 2004 by more than 76 percent of the respondents, compared to 6.2 percent for the legislative and 4.8 percent for the judicial). That said, the latter two branches had gained a point or two on the executive branch in the intervening four years, although the percent- age of those saying “it was difficult to say” had increased from 2 percent to 12.4 percent, which was interpreted as meaning that it was too risky to say. Causes Corruption in Russia and the other post-Soviet states arises, as it does in any state, in the nexus between opportunity and risk. When public officials have discretion over the distribution of benefits sought by private citizens or costs that they wish to avoid, the temptation to welcome or demand a bribe arises. When the risks entailed in offering or taking a bribe are lower than the pay- off, the temptation often prevails. 28 Risk depends on the odds that the trans- gression will be detected, the magnitude of the penalty if it is, and the likeli- hood of the penalty actually being imposed. Thus, one-half of the cost-benefit analysis at the heart of corruption comes back to the strength, probity, and predictability of political institutions. The other half features the reward side: first, how valuable is the favor, award, permission, or punishment over which a public official presides, or how valuable can it be made by manipulation; sec- ond, how exclusive is his or her control over it; third, in how many facets of economic and social life do bureaucrats or politicians have benefits to confer or penalties to apply; and, fourth, how many bureaucrats or politicians are involved in the act. The matrix that these calculations yield makes room for several useful con- trasts. Some of the contrasts are at the level of bribe frequency and size. Susan Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 201 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 201 Rose-Ackerman makes the point that if punishment is harsh, swift, and sure, political agents or would-be bribers are normally deterred, and instances of corruption shrink, but those that remain are likely to involve larger bribes, reflecting a higher risk premium. 29 Conversely, where most bribes are small but common, enforcement may be spotty or toothless. Various combinations among the multiple factors, however, create the basis for a typology at the systemic level. In countries where the spheres in which public officials have benefits to grant or punishments to inflict are limited and so too are the benefits or punishments within their control; where penalties and their certainty are great, because institutions and mores ensure both; and where organization, resources, and technique permit a high rate of detection, corruption is not a serious blight on the political and economic systems. Their closest approximations are the countries at the top of Transparency Interna- tional’s rankings. Most fall somewhere in between. The line dividing those countries that suffer from attention-deserving public corruption and those burdened by systemic corruption is more blurred. Presumably it lies some- where between cases in which the regulatory framework, anti-corruption measures, and tradeoffs against the costs of enforcement leave the country exposed to sporadic, at times sensational, instances of corruption, versus cases where many, if not most, parts of government are contaminated, because gov- ernment has a wide range of favors to dispense, particularly in forms prone to illicit bargains, enforcement is lax even if anti-corruption legislation is in place, and a “culture of corruption” has taken root. That is, people accept cor- ruption as in the nature of things and the only way to transact business. The post-Soviet states, however, reside further down the spectrum. These countries suffer from the worst version of the matrix: weak states with bloated, semi-autonomous bureaucracies; elaborate overlapping but contradictory regulatory frameworks; political agents at multiple levels of government with either excessive discretionary power or a capacity to manufacture it; half- formed or easily subverted institutions that observe or implement law only on some days; an unusual degree of concentrated but unconsolidated wealth in the hands of political leaders at both the national and regional levels; and a culture of corruption in the broader population. It is a poisonous mix, limn- ing the criminalized state while predicting the obstacles to dismantling it. Still, to catalogue a dismal configuration is not to explain its reason for being. The route to the criminalized state in the post-Soviet era has been cleared by the cumulative impact of three phenomena: the Soviet legacy, the transition (from one economic order to another), and the more recent trend toward political il-liberalism. One influence has been added to another 202 Robert Legvold 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 202 creating a powerful, albeit far from uniform, impulse to the deformed mod- els that these states have become. None of the new states that have risen from the ruins of the Soviet Union, of course, emerged de novo. All bore the imprint of a system shot through with elements of corruption. It is fair to say that corruption in the Soviet Union was systemic; that is, it was a regular and essential feature of political and eco- nomic life, not simply an episodic or marginal deviation from standard norms. At the most mundane level, scarcely any of life’s simple activities— such as getting one’s apartment plumbing fixed, or a room added to the dacha, or a better position on the waiting list for an appliance in short supply— transpired without a few bottles of vodka or some other welcome gift, includ- ing head-turning sums of money. The practice was called blat, and every Soviet citizen knew the word as well as when and how to engage in it. So com- monplace was it that few thought of it as anything other than the norm. Sim- ilarly, nearly all Soviets at one point bought a pair of jeans, a CD, a pair of knockoff Nikes, or sometimes considerably more expensive items, naleva, that is, on the black market. Because by the 1970s the second or shadow econ- omy was estimated to constitute close to 25 percent of GDP and involve more than 80 percent of the population in buying or selling, all of it illegal, cor- ruption in this form was, indeed, systemic. 30 The second economy flourished in the Soviet Union because of scarcity, and scarcity was the product of a physically planned economy that denied consumers the goods that they wanted. It also generated a third level of cor- ruption that arose from over-taut planning. Factory managers faced the unre- lenting pressure to achieve assigned production targets—targets that rose if met—while constantly menaced by bottlenecks and delays in the supplies needed to turn out their products. As a result, they often directly sought out suppliers and cut illegal deals to short circuit the process, and they put peo- ple, called tolkachi (or “pushers”), on their payroll to head up the effort. Never mind that the authorities tolerated to a considerable extent the mas- querade, because, as noted by Western analysts, it smoothed the functioning of an economy that otherwise would never have managed to get things when and where needed. By the rules of the system the abuse was corruption and, when egregious, punished, but so widespread that it added immensely to what made corruption in the Soviet Union systemic. It also frequently became damaging or, worse, utterly dysfunctional. It was damaging when a manager could pay off an official to look the other way when targets were not met or met with defective goods. It was dysfunctional when party officials, some- times senior party officials, simply faked production results, as when over Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 203 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 203 time virtually the entire apparat of the Uzbek communist party and govern- ment falsified their republic’s cotton yields worth an estimated $6.5 billion, leading to the arrest and prosecution of many hundreds of officials in the mid-1980s, including every national minister except one. 31 The effects of over-taut planning and scarcity, in turn, were magnified by the pathologies of an authoritarian system in decline. Patron-client relation- ships flourish in settings where power is concentrated upward and political success depends on networks of mutual support. When the values that once gave the system integrity faded and cynicism or, at best, self-seeking set in, these relationships became natural channels for corruption, each a potential mini-pyramid distributing up through the network’s hierarchy the gains extracted at ground-level. Or, when formed at the very top around a senior official or his or her family members, they siphoned into private hands large chunks of state resources. While scarcity and clientelism, when combined with the moral decay aris- ing from long-lost ideological idealism, led to widespread corruption throughout the system, the Soviet Union never became a criminalized state; although it can be argued that some of the republics during certain periods (e.g., Georgia and Uzbekistan) did. 32 Legislators were not for sale, not least because they had little power to legislate, and the authoritarians who did, for the most part, did so to keep the system going, not to fill their pockets. Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law may have stolen on an impressive scale, but few thought Brezhnev or his colleagues on the Politburo were plundering the state. In part they had less incentive to do so, because they, like others atop the party and government ranks, already enjoyed privileges unavailable to the public (spe- cial stores with access to scarce foreign goods, exclusive health and resort facilities, chauffeured automobiles, and elegant apartments and dachas, etc.). At times a local official or a court could be bought, but for the most part they operated within the norms of the system; alas, norms that sanctioned great political injustice when faced with dissent. The second economy, while illegal in its very nature, operated alongside, not inside, the state. Officials again crossed the line, and more than a few availed themselves of its opportunities, but their misdeeds were surreptitious, not the daily fare of the bureaucracies within which they operated. 33 Hence, the Soviet Union provided a base for the criminalized state, but not its essence. That required the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the chaotic transition from one economic order to another. Beyond the leavening effect of disintegrating rules and institutions, the other crucial impulse to the crimi- nalization of the state was the appearance of private property; private property 204 Robert Legvold 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/15/09 3:49 PM Page 204 [...]... tainted or fake pharmaceuticals reach these markets .51 Far more pernicious, however, are the other components of illicit trade, and here Russia and its neighbors figure still more prominently Start with human trafficking: one study suggests that in the decade between 19 95 and 20 05 as many as 50 0,000 to 850 ,000 women may have been trafficked out of Russia .52 In Ukraine, a country with a little more than a... while Chinese and Russian counterfeiting and piracy may be as high as 20– 25 percent of the U.S market, the lost revenue, estimated at $200– 250 billion, is less than 2 percent of GDP ($13.84 trillion in 2007) Nonetheless, this total represents a considerable burden on legitimate business and significant job losses (estimated at 750 ,000) .50 The same can be said for Japan and Europe, the two areas that follow... to global welfare, let alone international security, it is worth noting how some of the money earned gets spent In Bangladesh, those eager to profit from the trade in rare wildlife include groups like Harkat-ul-Jihadal-Islami, which is linked to al Qaeda, and Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, led by a figure once close to Bin Laden’s World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders .55 “In... from 20 05 to 2008 (in “starting a business” from 59 to 10; “doing business” from 112 to 18; “dealing with licenses” from 152 to 11, and “trading across borders” from 149 to 64).90 Georgia’s success has been accomplished by taking many of the steps outlined above Since the Rose Revolution, government bureaucracy has been whittled down from eighteen to thirteen ministries, and the staff, reduced by 25 percent.91... Anti -Corruption, and Economic Development,” chapter 18 in this volume 4 This is Joseph Nye’s widely employed definition from Nye, “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis,” in Arnold J Heidenheimer (ed.), Political Corruption: Readings in Comparative Analysis (New Brunswick, 1978), 56 6 56 7 For an extensive exploration of the definitional problems, see John Gardiner,“Defining Corruption, ... the acreage in the Taliban era and more than 21 times that after the Taliban cracked down on cultivation in 2000 .57 From this, Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, making it “practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug (93 percent of the global opiates market). 58 The porous borders of Tajikistan and its northern neighbors and the easily co-opted police and border officials... arms Each year between 300,000 and 50 0,000 people die by small arms and light weapons, mostly civilians, and many women and children. 65 As the team preparing for the third biannual UN meeting on curbing this trade stresses, “Small arms and light weapons destabilize regions; spark and prolong conflicts; obstruct relief programs; undermine peace initiatives; exacerbate Corruption, the Criminalized State,... as the “Demavand project,” which illegally delivered F-4 fighter planes, more than 2,000 anti-tank missiles, and parts for 2 35 Hawk missiles to Iran in the 1980s. 85 To believe that the country—at least segments of society—is merely an innocent object of these scourges, and not Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 217 an agent would be naïve Countries still struggling to escape... little more than a third of the population of Russia, from 1991 to 1998, an estimated 50 0,000 women were victimized .53 More shocking, in Moldova, parallel estimates in the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union were 200,000–400,000 women, which, if true, is close to 10 percent of the female population .54 Add to the human trafficking Russia’s new role in the multi-billion-dollara-year trade... the legality of the use of state property, including the use of state funds by local government, and that reports bi-annually to the parliament In 20 05, it sent 378 reports of irregularities to the prosecutor general’s office. 95 Overall during 2004–20 05 more than 1,000 criminal cases were investigated by this special department, and a number of high-level officials were indicted, including the head of . necessary, aspect Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions 1 95 08 0328-0 ch8.qxd 7/ 15/ 09 3:49 PM Page 1 95 of change in chaotic and uncharted periods of transformation. 5 Add to. human trafficking: one study suggests that in the decade between 19 95 and 20 05 as many as 50 0,000 to 850 ,000 women may have been trafficked out of Russia. 52 In Ukraine, a country with a little more than a third. portfolio. 17 In the case of the Armenian traffic officer, his monthly pay is $ 35 $50 a month. “He,” Stefes explains,“can make an additional $50 0 a month through bribes but needs to pay his superior about $10