Higher Education Fastest Growing Area of Bribery
By Boris Kamchev
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
A temporary residency permit under the counter without waiting for months in line costs from $4,500, and Russian citizenship can be obtained for the same figure. “I paid nine thousand dollars and I didn’t even stand in line for a single hour. You just go to the Federal Immigration Service office on Ligovsky Prospekt, give them your documents with the money, and they’ll hand over your new Russian passport after one week,” said a Ukrainian woman to her Tajik interlocutor. They were preparing to enter the packed hall of the Federal Immigration Service for St. Petersburg’s Primorsky district for another visit to OVIR — the district department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Sky-high corruption in Russia’s jurisdictional and administrative apparatus has often been the focus of investigations and reports, but according to INDEM, a democracy-orientated research group headed by Georgy Satarov, who was an advisor to former president Boris Yeltsin, corruption and bribery in the Russian educational system are increasing rapidly year after year. A four-year study tracking corruption in Russian society carried out by INDEM between 2001 and 2005 revealed that corruption across the higher education sector accounts for around 21 percent of the total market for that period. Two in every three students and their parents were willing to resort to paying education officials, administrators and tutors to secure places, exam results or other benefits. The study coincided with most of former president Vladimir Putin’s first term and the first year of his second term. The growth of corruption in this period has also been recorded by numerous other studies. President Dmitry Medvedev, a trained lawyer, has vowed to root out corruption and launch a campaign against what he termed “Russia’s legal nihilism.” His most recent comment, made during the presentation of an anti-graft program to federal officials and lawmakers, is that corruption in Russia has become a “way of life.” Researchers confirmed that in 2007, corruption in higher educational establishments moved up to second place, overtaking political parties and courts of law. Approximately $520 million was paid in bribes by parents last year for their children to be accepted into one of the many universities across the country, according to recent research conducted by the Russian School of Economics and Public Opinion Foundation. During the course of the year, parents paid out an additional $100 million to university professors to enable their offspring to pass regular tests and forthcoming exams “more easily.” Yefim Galicki, the author of the research, says the figures are “approximate and probably higher.” One quarter of all bribes are paid at Moscow universities. It is rare for senior lecturers to take bribes personally; usually it is done via an intermediary. “Three thousand rubles ($130) is the price that a student may pay to pass a subject without showing up for any lectures during the semester,” said Sveta, a final-year student at the State University of Service and Economics in St. Petersburg on condition that her surname was not revealed for fear of recognition by her professors. Research into corruption in Russian universities claims that inflation has boosted the size of bribes paid, which are now 150 percent higher than they were four years ago. The cost of passing a colloquium in Moscow is higher — up to $200, depending on the complexity of the subject. In some institutions, bribe-paying is more formalized. An administrator at the Moscow Aviation Institute said that a student who fails to pass an exam in the traditional way can pay 2,000 rubles and attend a couple of lessons in order to obtain a favorable mark. A Gallup survey in 2006 showed that one third of respondents considered it morally acceptable to pay a bribe in order to get their child admitted to college or university. Among Russians aged 15 to 24, 42 percent considered such bribes to be morally acceptable, according to the survey. “I was hoping that I could pay a much more smaller sum in advance for my daughter to study for a total of five years at Nizny Novgorod State University, but I found out that legally I have to pay almost the same price,” said Galina Andreyeva, a resident of the Primorsky district. She added that the total sum named by an intermediary was $8,600 for five years of graduate specialization studies with a guaranteed diploma. Legally, she has to pay $2,200 for each year of her daughter’s university course. Many experts link Russia’s booming post-Soviet corruption to the rapid increase in state bureaucrats, who now number five million. Many senior bureaucrats are powerful figures, and a study last year by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a leading Russian researcher into post-Soviet power elites, found that four out of five political leaders and state administrators in Russia are active or former members of the KGB or its successor security service, the FSB.
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