Countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are among the world’s worst for corruption, with widespread impunity driven by the vested interests that dominate many of their governments.
Western European nations fill nine places in the list of the best 10 countries globally in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), but the continent’s anti-corruption efforts have largely stalled in recent years, with the region’s average CPI score dropping quicker than in any other region.
Of the 182 countries ranked in the latest CPI, published in February, the top ranks included Denmark in first place, with Finland and Singapore second and third, while those perceived as the most corrupt included Venezuela at 180th and South Sudan and Somalia tied at 181st.
The world’s great powers each have their own problems. Having declined three places, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is ranked 157th on the index. China did better, coming 76th on the CPI, tied with Kosovo, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. Though struggling to survive, Ukraine has improved from 142nd in 2014 to 104th now, although that has flatlined since the second year of the all-out war in 2023. Once a world leader in anti-corruption, the US fell to 29th, just behind Lithuania.
Two distinct logics apply to the way Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are perceived in relation to corruption.
Russia’s long-time top autocrat has been the object of extensive investigative work, supercharged by revelations in the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers. Putin’s wealth is well disguised and difficult to verify, but it probably runs into many billions of dollars. A more relevant framework is probably structural rather than personal.
Thus, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) chronicles Putin’s rise in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The book describes a system in which licensed rent extraction was the elite compensation scheme, and it is still a source of wealth and influence for today’s oligarchs, who have been rewarded for their compliance.
In China, Xi has made much show of strengthening state capacity and waging a campaign against corruption in the military, the party, and among business elites. The wealth of Xi and his extended family is large but probably small-scale compared to Putin or US President Donald Trump.
In 2012, Bloomberg reported $376m in assets held by Xi’s siblings and in-laws (for which Bloomberg was and still is blocked from the country). Beyond that, the record goes dark, not clean.
There is a methodological trap: What we know about each leader is a function of how much independent investigation is possible. A higher score for honesty could simply demonstrate a more effective screen of censorship.
In short, we have one autocrat with a documented record and one less studied, because the conditions for such analysis do not exist in China.
But both countries have one thing in common – graft is understood as part of elite life and often encouraged. The beneficiaries are able to exploit their position but are also putting an unseen rope around their own neck which can be yanked at a moment of the regime’s choosing. This creates powerful incentives for compliance and conformity.
For Xi, anti-corruption is publicly described as a contribution to state-building, and yet the Communist Party investigates itself with no external check. Since 2012, several million party members have been investigated, both “tigers and flies,” as high- and low-ranking civil servants are respectively described.
Two former defense ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe, have been given death sentences, albeit with a two-year reprieve, while Generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli have been expelled from the Communist Party and the military.
For Putin, anti-corruption is a weapon aimed at monitors, such as Transparency International, officially designated “undesirable,” and critical media such as Novaya Gazeta, compelled to relocate abroad.
Meanwhile, enforcement is highly selective. Enforcement persists as intra-elite discipline while independent detection is criminalized. Many governors have been prosecuted. Alexey Ulyukaev, then Russia’s Minister of Economic Development, was convicted in 2017 of taking a large bribe and sentenced to eight years in a penal colony. Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was arrested in 2024 amid a wide procurement purge.
Neither in Russia nor China did institutions stop the top autocrat from preventing, punishing, or promoting corruption for his own ends. Structural weaknesses existed before Putin and Xi but, after the deaths of Stalin and Mao Zedong, previous leaders did not exploit them so aggressively.
Corruption weakens most political systems, but for now the leaders of Russia and China seem to continue to use it to exert control with few visible consequences.
Walter Clemens is an Affiliate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (2023); The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
