Are Russian government wages really low ?
No, but that depends on what you compare them to. As a business owner or top manager you can get ways more, as an employee you can get ways less.
And is there a lot of cronyism ? (appointing of friends and relatives) ?
It is not illegal when statesman's friends or relatives are also statesmen. And although there is some, I wouldn't say it is a lot. Because there's little profit in that.
What really is a problem there is a combination of a statesman and his friends or relatives in business whose problems the statesman solves. Example: Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow, and his wife, construction business owner, had a really "nice" tandem screwing the city. This is a temptation few can stand, and it is illegal (was not illegal in Luzhkov's time, I think) and it makes the people effected show circus level of creative equilibristics to get away with it.
From the YouTube comments I read this is quite common, but the bribe money is that your application / problem is processed faster as opposed to those who dont bribe the process would drag on for years.
I think it depends largely on the region and the business area.
In clinical trials, for instance, the Ministry of Health has to approve the trial before you can start it (same thing in all other countries afaik). Compared to, say, 5 years ago, the speed of reviews increased, but so did the number of denials. You get the reply within 30 days, and you can wait that if you plan ahead.
Also, you can receive neither approval nor denial but a list of suggested corrections to implement to get you approval. E.g., the trial submission my wife is involved in came back in 15 days (faster than required by law) with a request to replace a misused term with a more accurate one in the Russian translation of the study protocol. So it isn't even the issue of the pharmaceutical company who created the protocol, it's a translating error. It'll take [ctrl+f] to fix it and maybe an hour or two to proofread it and then resubmit, after which they will get their approval.
Nobody paid anything to anyone there.
OTOH, my company management made a decision to hire an agency to prepare the submission package to register a piece of equipment so that it enters the market.
"Let the professionals handle it for you!" That agency is a nightmare, really. It takes their experts ages to review the paperwork, and then they demand some bizarre corrections and amendments and additions, and many make no sense. It's been a year already and we have nothing ready to submit to MoH yet.
But that's not a corruption case, it's managerial mistake on our company side with unnecessary vendoring combined with poor choice of the vendor. However, I am sure somehow that my boss plays "Russian corruption" card in discussions with his bosses to save his butt.
Someone said it was common if you pay bribes you would goto the Top guys office have tea / vodka while your business problem jumps the queue and is processed for you straight away.
I guess that might work with the agency we've hired, but their fees are so big and their work is so crappy that none in the company is willing to see them let alone drink vodka with them.
And that most Russians dont see this as corruption but its just the way things are.
Well, I think I wrote something like that somewhere around here, too. In the 90s it was true. It probably remains true somewhere. But the generation of managers who did not see the 90s grow up and they don't think this is how things are, or should be.
Living here, I can see things improving.
Someone from West whom moved to Russia wrote that they did not receive mail, and didnt know they had to goto Russian post office to pay bribe and there letters had all made it but were not being delivered.
Hehe, that's rule #1: never use Russian Post. Use TNT, UPS, DHL, DPD, FedEx, Pony, whatever other courier company you can find, but not Russian Post.
That is, if you want your mail to ever get delivered. You may want it get lost, however, for instance when you are legally bound to notify someone about something and then have to wait for a determined time for their protest, and if none received you can proceed. For such cases Russian Post comes very handy.
But that's a state owned company, not the state itself. And that's why they collapsed in 2013 and have been reformed since. I made a habit of never using them though, so can't tell if they got any better.
That said, their express mail courier service worked quite fine.
, got drunken, had an orgy and then had an argument leading to a brawl. The steam-bath personnel tried to calm them down but failed and had to call the police. When the police arrived, the brawlers and their groups sprayed away in all directions much to surprised amusement of local neighborhood inhabitants who were not used to a sight of police chasing naked Africans in mid-winter.
