The beginning of March 2009 marked one year since the election of Dmitry Medvedev as president of Russia. Although he announced from the outset that the fight against corruption would be one of his main priorities, his first year in office has shown that these words—as in the years of presidents Yeltsin and Putin—were nothing more than propaganda. Medvedev occupies the highest post in a state in which corruption is neither a secondary feature nor an aberration, but rather its essence. From top to bottom, corruption in post-Soviet Russia permeates the bureaucratic apparatus, the security structures and big business. Like a virus in the blood of a diseased organism, it is present in all commercial and government relations. For the "system" it is everything—its foundation and true ideology, which can be summarized with the banal formulas: "Everything is for sale" and "Get rich."
Putin is the Prime Minister of Russia.