The Corruption Trap: Why Putin Needs Bribes to Rule Russia

Officials are arrested. Criminal cases make the news. Putin regularly demands that state money be protected from theft. Every few years, another anti-corruption campaign begins.

And yet corruption remains everywhere.

The reason is not that the Kremlin has been trying to defeat it and somehow failing.

At the highest levels of the Russian system, there is very little intention to eliminate corruption at all.

For many people, access to government power is valuable precisely because it creates opportunities to make money. A state position gives you influence over contracts, permits, budgets, companies, land, investigations. Everyone inside the system understands this.

And within the elite, becoming rich through your position is not treated as something shameful or extraordinary. What matters much more is whose interests you serve, whom you share with, and whether you remain loyal to the people above you.

But corruption in Russia is also much more complicated than somebody taking a bribe. Over time, entire chains of relationships have grown around it. Remove one piece, and you may disrupt everything connected to it. Without these informal relationships, people would no longer know how to get anything done.

Today, we're going to look inside this machine: how Russian corruption actually works, how the different parts depend on one another, and why a government that constantly promises to fight corruption has built a system that cannot easily function without it.

Here's our roadmap for today.

Three Main Words — three Russian words that explain how corrupt deals actually work.

The Price of Access — Why doing business in Russia requires a political patron.

Built for Theft — Why the Kremlin loves mega-projects.

When the Official Is the Customer — How state funding rewards pleasing the patron instead of the audience

Why the System Needs Putin — How corruption replaces institutions and makes the elite dependent on the ruler who protects and balances their networks.

Three Main Words

To understand corruption in Russia, you need three words: zanos, otkat, and raspil.

They sound like criminal slang because they describe criminal practices. Yet in Russian business and government, everyone understands them.

Zanos means bringing money or a favor to the person who can open a door.

In Russia, businesses depend heavily on permits, licenses, inspections, land decisions, and access to infrastructure. Formally, there are procedures. In practice, an official has enough discretion to help you, delay you, or block you.

That is where zanos comes in.

Sometimes it is a direct bribe. More often, especially at higher levels, it is disguised as something else: hiring an official's relative, giving business to a friendly company, donating to the right foundation, or paying for an expensive vacation.

Often, nothing is requested immediately. The businessman is simply building a relationship.

Suppose several developers want to build on the same valuable plot of land. On paper, they compete. In reality, the decisive question may be which one has the better relationship with the official.

Once that choice is made, the paperwork can be arranged around it.

Then comes otkat — the kickback.

Suppose a company receives a state contract worth ten billion rubles. Part of that money is expected to return to the people who helped secure it.

The contractor builds the kickback into the price from the beginning. That means the winner is not always the company that can do the job best or cheapest. It may be the company from which the kickback can be collected safely.

Trust matters. You need people who will pay, stay silent, and not suddenly create legal problems.

I know of a case in which a lawyer received an apartment in the center of his city for acting as an intermediary between a construction company and an official who approved the project.

The official's mistress received an apartment nearby. No envelope of cash. Just expensive property transferred to the right people.

This creates a tight connection between business and officials. They protect each other and keep outsiders away. Competition falls. Innovation matters less. Quality suffers. And the cost is passed on to the state, the company, or the consumer.

The third word is raspil. Literally, it means "sawing something apart."

A state budget is allocated for a road, a stadium, city renovation, or a major event.

Formally, the goal is to complete the project. With raspil, the budget is also treated as money to be distributed among insiders.

The project may still be real. But contracts go to the right companies. Prices are inflated. Work is subcontracted. Extra expenses appear. More money is requested.

Large public projects are especially convenient because they are complicated enough to hide inflated costs.

So the three words describe three parts of the same system.

Zanos buys access.

Otkat returns part of the money to those who arranged the deal.

Raspil distributes the public budget among connected people.

Together, they create the network in which officials, businessmen, intermediaries, and contractors depend on one another.

That is the corruption machine.

The Price of Access

Corruption in Russia does not consist of isolated deals. It creates clans that operate like huge corporations with many affiliate companies.

At the top of each clan is a powerful patron: a senior official, governor, security chief, head of a state corporation, or someone with direct access to the Kremlin.

Below him are people who depend on his protection: officials, businessmen, contractors, lawyers, intermediaries.

The relationship resembles a patron-vassal system. The patron gives access; the people below him return money, favors, political loyalty, and services.

This is why a successful Russian businessman needs more than a good company. He needs krysha — literally, a roof. Someone powerful enough to protect him.

You may legally own a factory, a construction company, or an oil business. But regulators can suddenly discover violations. Prosecutors can open a case. A court can challenge an old privatization. A competitor with stronger connections can take your contract or even your company.

Your patron helps make sure this does not happen, and in return, you become part of his network.

A businessman without protection is not competing only against another businessman. He competes against an entire political network.

This is why corruption in Russia is so difficult to dismantle. The people inside these networks have spent years building them. Their careers, wealth, status, and security all depend on those relationships. Break the network, and many of them lose everything. And outside the system, they often have little to fall back on-including the skills needed to succeed without it.

Built for Theft

Putin's system favors concentration. It is easier to control a few large companies than thousands of independent ones.

But large monopolies need large contracts only the state can provide, and this changes the logic of investment.

These projects are usually initiated by insiders close to the state. To move forward, they need to look patriotic, strategically important, and useful enough to win the backing of an official who controls the money.

That official has his own reasons to approve them. He may expect a share of the benefits, but he also gains politically: a major project makes him look effective and ambitious in front of his superiors. And very often, the ultimate audience is Putin himself.

The larger and more complicated the project, the better. A pipeline, a cosmodrome, or a strategic bridge requires construction, equipment, roads, power, security, and layers of subcontractors. Billions can pass through dozens of companies.

And it does not even have to be commercially profitable. It is a state project, after all; profitability can always be secondary to some strategic or political goal.

Better yet, the costs can keep growing along the way.

Once construction begins, there are many ways for the budget to grow. Designs change. Additional work becomes necessary. Deadlines approach. More money is allocated.

Vostochny Cosmodrome shows what this can lead to.

Russia had a legitimate reason to build its own civilian spaceport and reduce its dependence on Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

But in 2019, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged that 11 billion rubles had been stolen from the first 91 billion allocated to Vostochny.

People were prosecuted. Putin complained publicly about the theft.

But the system that produced it remained in place, because the problem was never one dishonest contractor. The problem is the model itself: the state concentrates resources and business opportunities, suppresses honest competition, and gives top officials enormous power to distribute national wealth for their own benefit. That privilege, in turn, helps secure their loyalty to the leader above them.

When the Official Is the Customer

This system produces a lot of activity, but not necessarily good results.

The reason is simple: the real customer is not the person who will use the product. It is the official who approves the project and releases the money.

Russian state-funded cinema is a perfect example.

A filmmaker seeking government money does not have to ask first what audiences want to watch. He needs to understand what the officials distributing the money want to hear.

So he offers them the right Russia: patriotic soldiers, grateful citizens, traditional families, evil Ukrainians, a decadent West, and a wise state defending the country from its enemies.

If the proposal fits the political agenda, it can receive funding. Whether people actually want to watch the finished film becomes a secondary question.

The 2023 war film The Witness cost about 200 million rubles and presented the invasion almost exactly through Kremlin propaganda: Ukrainians as Nazis committing atrocities and Russia as the force exposing the truth. After two weeks in theaters, it had earned less than 14 million rubles.

Then came Tolerance in 2025, a state-backed film about a fictional European country destroyed by immigration and liberal values. It reportedly cost at least 200 million rubles. Only 192 people came to see it during its opening weekend.

In a normal commercial industry, results like this are a warning: you made something people do not want.

In this system, they do not necessarily mean failure. The producer received the money. The film was made. The ideological assignment was fulfilled. Everyone involved can report that another patriotic project has been completed.

And this is where corruption begins to affect more than money.

Artists and producers quickly learn what the people above them want to see. If portraying Russia as prosperous, united, powerful, and morally superior brings contracts and funding, that is the Russia they will produce.

The same logic works far beyond cinema.

People below create the picture their patrons want. Their patrons show that picture to the people above them.

Eventually, the leadership is surrounded by an alternative reality created to please it.

And after seeing that reality reflected back from every direction, it begins to believe it.

Why the System Needs Putin

The most important function of corruption in Russia is that it substitutes for institutions.

In a functioning institutional system, you do not need to know the right person to protect your business. Property rights do that. You do not need a patron to settle a dispute. Courts do that. Government money is distributed according to rules that remain in place when ministers and presidents change.

In Russia, many of these functions are performed through personal relationships instead.

A businessman needs someone who can protect him. An official needs someone who can protect his position. Competing clans need someone powerful enough to settle disputes between them.

At the top of this structure is Putin.

His role is not to stop everyone from stealing. His role is to decide who is allowed to benefit from the system, who is protected, and who is no longer protected.

This is why anti-corruption campaigns do not weaken the system.

If everyone at the top has participated in questionable deals, corruption charges can be used selectively. An official may become enormously wealthy for years without consequences. Then he loses political protection, and suddenly investigators discover the corruption.

The message to everyone else is clear: your wealth is safe only while the system protects you.

This gives the ruler enormous power. But it also makes the entire elite dependent on his continued presence.

Even replacing Putin with another authoritarian ruler is dangerous for them. A new ruler would have his own people, his own obligations, and his own networks. Nobody can be certain that old guarantees will survive.

Putin, by contrast, knows how the existing clans fit together. He knows who owes what to whom, who can be rewarded, and who can be punished.

That makes him more than a president. He becomes the guarantor of the arrangement. And this helps explain why the system has such difficulty imagining Russia without him.

Institutions are designed to survive the people who run them. Personal networks are not.

If Russia had strong institutions, changing the president would not threaten the fortunes of thousands of people around him. But when the state operates through personal favors, protection, corruption, and informal agreements, changing the person at the top can threaten the entire structure.

That is why corruption does not merely enrich Putin's system. It helps keep Putin in power.

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Originally published at https://elvirabary.com on September 2, 2026.