Corruption: Greasing the Wheels of the World
One December evening in the late ’90s, I met a friend in a Moscow restaurant. I drank two zero-alcohol beers that night—an eccentric posture, in a Russian-Georgian restaurant—and then drove back to my borrowed flat in a car lent to me by my successor as the FT’s Moscow Correspondent. In Russia, no alcohol is permitted at all when driving—a law fashioned, it would seem, to allow the city’s GAI (Gosurdarstvennaya Aftomobilnaya Inspektsiya, or state traffic police) to supplement their low pay. As I was passing one of the new luxury hotels, a thick bundle of clothes propelled on boot...
Source: quillette.com