Russia under the Old regime

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In old-regime Russia, therefore, corruption of public servants was not an aberration, a departure from prevailing norm, such as is common in most countries; it was part and parcel of the regular system of administration. Russian officials had been accustomed since the founding of the Kievan state to live off the land. The central government, hard as it tried, lacked the wherewithal to change this custom. And so it went on.

During the centuries over which it had been practised, bribery in Russia developed an elaborate etiquette. A distinction was drawn between 'innocent incomes' (bezgreshnye dokhody), and 'sinful incomes' (greshnye dokhody). The criterion used to separate one from the other was the nature of the victim. 'Sinful' were 'incomes' derived at the expense of the crown, such as embezzlement of government funds or deliberate falsification of some data required by a central office. 'Innocent incomes' were obtained at society's cost; they included proceeds of extortion, sums received by judges to settle a trial in favour of one person rather than another, and, most commonly, tips taken to expedite a citizen's business with the government. (The English word 'tip' is actually an acronym formed of the first letters of the words 'To Insure Promptness', marked on bowls in eighteenth-century English coffee-houses.) It was not unusual for the recipient of a 'sinful' bribe to follow an unwritten tariff and return change. Government inspectors could be quite ruthless prosecuting officials guilty of damaging state interests, certainly under Peter and his followers. They rarely interceded where the injured party was an ordinary citizen.

The higher an official's rank, the greater were his opportunities of amassing a fortune at society's expense. The variety of devices used was so great that no more than a few can be mentioned by way of illustration. A Deputy Governor, among whose responsibilities lay certification of the vodka sold in his province, might attest - if suitably bribed by distillers - as unadulterated vodka which in fact had been mixed with water. Since the victim in this instance was the consumer, no prosecutions followed even if by some chance the deed was uncovered. Governors in the more remote provinces sometimes accused a wealthy local merchant of a fictitious crime and then ordered him to be arrested and held in jail until he paid up. Bribing was a subtle and even gracious art. It was considered in better taste to bribe indirectly. For example, one could offer a generous donation to a 'charitable' cause, chaired by the official's wife; or sell him a piece of property at a fraction of its actual value; or buy something from him (e.g. a painting) for a sum far in excess of its value. The novelist, M.E.Saltykov-Shchedrin, who held the post of Deputy Governor in the Tver and Riazan provinces early in the reign of Alexander n, wrote that money was better invested in bribes