Russia

"While official anti-corruption campaigns are at best a PR exercise, the opposition’s drive to weed out corruption rests on the idea that corruption is an incidental addition to the system, which could be made to function more fairly and rationally without it. Yet this is to mistake a feature for a glitch: the orgies of illicit enrichment Navalny and others rightly attack are not simply a product of the personal greed of Putin’s colleagues, they are part of the system’s very architecture. Far from being an extraneous or incidental aspect of contemporary Russian capitalism, corruption has been built into it from the outset."

Russia's appointed billionaires