Despite hearing quite a few nice speeches about the Kremlin’s commitment to fighting corruption, 2009 was most definitely a boom year for graft in Russia.

Earlier this month Transparency International released its Corruption Perceptions Index report, which had Russia coming in at 146 alongside Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.  Then there was the economic crime survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which again put Russia way down near the bottom of the most corrupt countries in the world, with 71% of the 89 companies they surveyed in the country reporting at least one instance of bribery, embezzlement, harassment, or fraud in the past 12 months alone.  On top of all that, we have the death of the innocent lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who was denied medical treatment in jail, the ongoing travesty of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and repeated killings of human rights activists with impunity and zero prosecution success to speak of.

As Jason Bush writes on his Reuters blog, these events “illustrate the huge gap that exists between official rhetoric and depressing reality in Russia.“