Atrocities according to rank

Galina Sviridova from Moscow spent a lot of time in the offices of officials, so now she gives advice to her friends on how to properly behave with them. “If they send you somewhere, ask them for a written refusal with justification. The waiver must be signed and stamped. In 90% of cases, they will start dealing with your issue because they are terribly afraid of papers, ”Galina shares her experience. In critical situations, Galina advises, heavy artillery should be brought in. “We need an honest prosecutor,” continues Galina, “who, at your request, will call the head of that official and say something into the phone. As a rule, the prosecutor swears there. But after this magic call, your issue is immediately quickly resolved. And her main advice is to study well how the bureaucratic system with which you come into contact is arranged - DEZ, council or MREO, it probably has a lot of flaws that can be used to your advantage.

The problem is that there is no universal method of communicating with officials - except for a banal bribe, of course. Everyone needs their own approach. And we have a million officials who together provide the population with about 2,000 types of services. These services are more like a natural disaster. And citizens treat them as a whim of nature - with fatalism. There is nowhere to go - every official is a monopolist.

Everyone, of course, understands that this is our climate - in most countries of the world the sun is shining, at worst - cloudy with clearings. In the World Economic Forum's International Competitiveness Ranking (GRICS Index), over the past year Russia has dropped from 81st to 89th place in terms of "quality of public services" out of 209 countries. Russia is in the bottom third of the rankings on key indicators such as government effectiveness, legislative quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.

Read the full version of the material in the Russian Newsweek magazine (August 15-21, 2005) No. 30 (60)