Putin's Failures

Amy Knight reviews Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov's supressed report on Putin's administration:

As Nemtsov and Milov rightly stress, their country has "a level of corruption completely unprecedented in all of Russia's history." Indeed, the nongovernmental organization Transparency International ranked Russia in 143rd place (with first place being the least corrupt) in its 2007 worldwide country rating of degrees of corruption. Of course, the authors say, there was plenty of corruption under Yeltsin as well. But today the sums are much larger, measured in billions of dollars, and corrupt officials, who occupy high-level government positions, are protected from public exposure by the Kremlin's control of the law enforcement agencies and the mass media.