Abstract
After the collapse of the Soviet system, corruption in post-communist countries surged. Some of the post-communist nations were more successful in dealing with corruption than others. Do you believe that corruption was and still is a big obstacle to the development of these nations? Please explain why. How has a high level of corruption and certain forms of it damaged the transition? In the beginning of the 1990s, new countries emerged in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Communist Bloc, and they broke from the socialist ideology. They began a difficult economic transition from a planned communist economy to a market ruled economy. It was not a short and easy process because there were a lot of economic, social and cultural resistances to it, and among them was the problem of corruption. At this time, corruption was a widespread practice in almost all the former Soviet countries. It could have taken different forms: bribery, trading in influence, graft, patronage, embezzlement, kickbacks etc. Corruption is still present in some of the former Soviet countries today. It can be seen as a bad cultural habit inherited from the past especially from the system of the Nomenklatura. However I think that corruption can only be partially explained by cultural factors and that each society needs to have fixed rules for it to develop.
