All the former soviet republics are classified as some of the most corrupt nations on the planet (especially Russia, Ukraine, all the central asian nations and the caucasian Azerbaijan).
Last time I went there with my parents to visit my ill-grandmother in Moscow, helped me understanding further those corruption perception indexes are not exagerations.
There are many cities of the former soviet union(if not the majority) where mafia men, mobsters and other organized crime comodities have openly supplante the police force in the daily task of providing citizens with "security".
Marconi:
Former-Soviet Union´s technology might have been simpler and in fact better than the USA´s in some departments, but the cold war Soviet army suffered from the same anomalies observed in the Great Patriotic War´s Red Army: low quality and poor professionalism of most of their personnel.
I met a Czec military aircraft technician here who migrated to Mexico (married a Mexican girl) who went to Afghanistan in the mid 80s, as part of Czec technical/ground support team in soviet airfields -not for combat duties-; this guy is very familiar with Mig´s and Su´s and he told me soviet regular maintenance and ground damage control was extremely poor, and that is being "generous".
The soviet air force suffered lots of accidents due to such circunstance in Afghanistan, losing many pilots killed in action or missing action.
He recalls soviet fighters and helicopters with battle damage returning to base "hardly received any repairs or overhaulings". Soviet fighter and helicopter pilots and crews were in very "shameful" conditions. There were pilots that would openly admit to the Czecs they had been wearing the same pants and personal gear for weeks and weeks and were incredibly dirty and in sometimes ill-supplied.
Even if he never ever came close to battle action in Afghanistan, he told me the images of those poor soviet air men continues to be an awful sad memory.
