Effects of the Corruption and Human Rights Violations - Coursework Example

It makes a passing reference to President Putin’s handling of affairs of Russia’s second-largest oil company Yuko which has since been taken over by the Government.4New Left Review 44 of March-April 2007 says in response to the Vladimir Popov’s “Russia Redux’ account of what he calls Russia’s “Shock therapy era” characterized by huge economic, political and human costs that the country is far better than it was seven years ago but worse than it was twenty years ago alluding to Boris Yelstin’s turbulent years marked by moral bankruptcy.

Russia’s GDP, investment and life expectancy figures have yet to reach 1989 levels. President Putin’s priority has been to regain the lost institutional capacity of the state and stability via re-centralization. Wealth concentration in Russia is marked in that 46.6 per cent of total income is in the hands of 20 per cent of the population. The informal practices which Georgi Derlugian attributes to ‘persistent under-institutionalisation of Russian life’, have been the breeding ground of corruption at all levels in Russia.

The absence of institutions has opened up avenues of personalism and nepotism. During the years from 1996 to 2000, Oil company of Kursk Oblast, pharmacies, public security and cultural affairs were under the control of the then-governor Alexander Rutskoi’s relatives. And Bashkortostan’s entire economic activities are under the active control of the family of Murtaza Rakhimov. Murder rate in Russia is 20 per thousand which is three times and ten times that of the U.S. and the group of Western and Eastern Europe, Canada, China and Japan respectively.

5Levin and Satarov 6 state that transitional years for Russia have been turbulent because of the state’s weakness for private profit complicated by the persistence of traditional institutions. According to them, corruption has been an integral part of Russia’s economy highlighted by least 3000 newspaper and magazine articles.