The figures came in a statement released by the Russian Federal Investigative Committee on Sunday.

“Within the period analyzed, investigative agencies worked before filing charges to determine compensation for the state, citizens, and legal entities in return for damages caused by corruption,” said the statement. “The damages consisted of 7.9 billion rubles, compensated by 1.3 billion rubles [42.1 million USD]. Property totaling 1.2 billion rubles [38.9 million USD) was seized.”

According to the investigation, there were 16,603 criminal corruption cases against civil servants in 2012. Among these figures were some who held particularly high legal statuses:

• Sub-federal legislative agency deputies: 13
• Municipal electoral agency deputies: 210
• Municipal agency election officials: 261
• Judges: 2
• Electoral commission members: 19
• Prosecutors and prosecutor aides: 19
• Federal Investigative Committee employees (the same committee that released this report): 13
• Russian Interior Ministry preliminary investigation managers and investigators: 56
• Federal Drug Control Service investigators: 7
• Lawyers: 39

The release of the report coincided with International Anti-Corruption Day, which began under the auspices of the United Nations in 2003.

The report also comes on the heels of a wave of corruption cases against members of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The cases evoked such a wide resonance in Russian society that the Investigative Committee asked the ministry to refrain from “spinning” the case and turn over all relevant information to the committee.

“There, behind my back, in the past, remains bribery, abuse of authority, corruption and all that is negative – today there is none of that,” he announced during a meeting with Kostroma city police.

A ministry-administered “reassessment” of Russia’s police officers was carried out across the country on August 1, during which “issues of questionable declarations of income, real estate and financial transactions came to light,” Nurgaliyev explained.

Of the more than 875 thousand officers who underwent the reassessment, about 183 thousand were fired.

According to the minister, “only the best of the best remain in the new structure.”

Worth noting is that Vice Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Gerasimov admitted on August 2 that there had been incidents of corruption during the reassessment procedures, albeit “minimal” ones.

The new federal law “On the Police,” Which went into effect March 1, renames Russia’s police forces from the “militsiya” to the “politsiya” and tightens control over how they operate. Part of the reforms involves cutting 22% of the force by 2012 down to 1,106,472.

On Monday night, the victim, Mikhail Vinyukov, explained the situation to a correspondent with the Kasparov.ru news portal. Vinyukov says he was walking to the store around 9 pm that night when an adult man came up and began whacking him with an metal bar for no ostensible reason. Vinyukov initially managed to fight back, but another man with a metal bar then approached him from behind and began hitting him over the head. The rights advocate eventually managed to escape and ran to a hotel and office complex, where an ambulance was called for him.

Vinyukov was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with “a concussion, a closed head injury, contusions and lacerations of the scalp,” as well as puncture wounds near his shoulder and bruises and lacerations on both legs, according to trauma nurse Mira Kheyshkho. The rights advocate was told he would have to remain hospitalized for an extended period of time.

Additionally, Vinyukov’s mother said that she was called after the attack by an unknown man who asked where her son was.

The activist said he believes that the attack was “organized by a criminal gang” that is working “against those who hinder corruption within government agencies” in the area.

Mikhail Vinyukov is the head of the local Public Service for the Defense of the Rights and Interests of Citizens. About two months ago, he was threatened with murder after releasing an audio recording of a conversation between the city’s resort service and tourism department head, Vladimir Shiroky, and the director of the Lazarevsky Otdykh tourism company, Gavina Panaetova. The recording resulted in Shiroky’s arrest on August 26 for taking bribes from Panaetova.

The recording itself was later posted on the website of well-known whistleblower cop Aleksei Dymovsky. It was recorded by accident when a local resident, sitting in a park near the Lazarevsky Otdykh building, overheard the conversation while making a recording of nature sounds. Dymovsky said the attack on Vinyukov was no doubt “an ordered crime. People don’t just attack people with iron bars. The task was either to kill him or cripple him.”

A host of social activists expressed certainty that the attack on Vinyukov was connected with his efforts to fight corruption, which has risen as a result of preparations for the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Valery Suchkov, founder of the Public Assembly of Sochi, said that Vinyukov’s attack was extremely similar to other recent attacks on anti-corruption public figures. “The cases known to the whole public of reprisals against Communist Party Deputy Lyudmila Shestak, Mestnaya newspaper Editor-in-Chief Arkady Landerov, and now the case of human rights advocate Mikhail Vinyukov, speak to the fact that these attacks were ordered,” he said. “Moreover, all the crimes have the same signature. The public must demand that both the perpetrator and the person who ordered the attack be found, and the situation be put under public control.”

In the organization’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, Russia’s transparency rating fell from last year’s 2.2 to 2.1, on a scale of 0.0 (“highly corrupt”) to 10.0 (“very clean”). Additionally, it’s country ranking fell from 146 out of 180 countries to 154 out of 178 countries, landing between Papua New Guinea and Tajikistan.

Within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Russia was ranked 16 out of 20, with the only countries more corrupt listed as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The organization estimates that the market for corruption in Russia is worth $300 billion a year.

While authors of the report did not comment on individual countries, they advised overall that “governments need to integrate anti-corruption measures in all spheres, from their responses to the financial crisis and climate change to commitments by the international community to eradicate poverty” in order to combat corruption.

Political commentator Anton Orekh responded to the report by saying that Russia would continue to fall in the ratings “until honest people become the most powerful ones in the country.”

“To say it plainly, take away the bureaucrats’ unlimited authorities, leave them with only the most necessary functions, and you will defeat corruption,” said Orekh. “Because corruption is the way of life for parasites, and our bureaucrats have become precisely parasites.”

The countries ranked in the report as the most transparent were Denmark, New Zealand, and Singapore, while Somalia, Myanmar, and Afghanistan were seen as the most corrupt. The United States came in at 22nd place, and China at 78th.

Transparency International noted that since “corruption – whether frequency or amount – is to a great extent a hidden activity that is difficult to measure,” the level of the perception of corruption in any given country was chosen as a telling alternative. “Over time, perceptions have proved to be a reliable estimate of corruption,” says the organization.

Ryabinin had originally been accused of abuse of authority back in March, having allegedly forced real estate businesspeople contracted with the city government to give his daughter a free 200-plus square meter apartment in the center of the capital. However, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov spoke out in his deputy’s defense, and a week later the case was dropped.

The new bribery charges were revealed yesterday when Chairman Alexander Bastrykin of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office was quoted in Rossiyskaya Gazeta regarding the real estate scandal.

“It’s difficult for me to assess the reasons and motives for the decision taken by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office to annul the decree to file a criminal case against Ryabinin,” said Bastrykin.

He then added that, as a result of additional investigating, a criminal suit had been filed against Ryabinin for taking bribes. Given Ryabinin’s status as a government official, the charge carries a sentence of between 5 and 10 years in prison.

However, Bastrykin went on, “at this time the suspect has already managed to successfully flee the territory of the country.”

The Moscow mayor’s office issued a denial that the deputy mayor had left Russia entirely, saying that he was simply on vacation. But on Tuesday, a source in the city administration told Gazeta.ru that Ryabinin was definitely abroad.

“There’s a terrible panic in the mayor’s office now,” said the source. “Measures are being taken to return Ryabinin to Russia. As far as I know, Bastrykin was given the go-ahead from the top to make an open statement: Ryabinin is a person who is close to Luzhkov.”

Russia has long suffered from widespread corruption and bribery in particular. A 2009 survey by Transparency International ranked Russia at 146 on the global Corruption Perceptions Index, noting that 29 percent of Russians had given a bribe at least once in the past year. The most recent comprehensive study on the topic, conducted in 2005, estimated that ordinary Russians exchanged more than $3 billion in bribes annually – a figure that doesn’t include the $316 billion paid by businesses and entrepreneurs.

On March 29, officers Veniamin Sagalakov and Yevgeny Ivanov flagged down a truck carrying four tons of scrap metal, whose driver, as it turned out, lacked the proper documents for the cargo. “During the document check, the truck driver attempted to give the police officers a bribe in the amount of 1000 rubles (about $34), which the honest officers refused,” says a press release on the local government’s website on Friday.

As a reward for “resisting temptation,” both officers were given 10 thousand rubles at a celebratory ceremony.

Despite being a ubiquitous stereotype of Russians, bribing is indeed an illegal offense in Russia punishable by as little as a small fine or as much as up to eight years in prison. The truck driver in question faces up to three years in prison.

According to the press release, the award was part of a regional initiative begun in 2008 to try and cut down on the amount of bribes accepted by traffic police. Upon reporting an attempted bribe to their superiors, officers in Khakassia are awarded an amount ten times what had been proposed to them. Fourteen such cases were recorded in 2009, with another seven recorded in the first three months of the current year. “In these cases, all conscientious officers were awarded,” the press release says.

Fighting corruption has been one of President Dmitri Medvedev’s primary stated policy objectives since taking office in 2008, but bribery is so entrenched in Russian society that his likelihood for success is questionable at best. At a hearing just last week, the German-based carmaker Daimler admitted to paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to 22 foreign governments, including Russia, to obtain high-level contracts. The U.S. Department of Justice says that the Russian Interior Ministry, Defense Ministry, and regional government officials are guilty of accepting more than $7 million of these bribes.

Moreover, a report released last month from the Russian Interior Ministry’s economic safety department says that the average cost of a bribe doubled in 2009 from the year before. While figures for early 2010 indicate that the costs may be beginning to decline, they have a very long way to fall – the most recent comprehensive study in 2005 estimated that ordinary Russians exchanged more than $3 billion in bribes annually, a figure that doesn’t include the $316 billion paid by businesses and entrepreneurs. A 2009 study by Transparency International put Russia in 146th place worldwide on its global corruption index, only one rank higher than in 2008.

According to the survey, conducted by the professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 71 percent of Russian companies have suffered from at least one instance of economic crime in the past year, and a 48 percent increase in the number of cases.

The financial services sector suffered the most from the prevalence of fraud, with 26 percent of respondents admitting to having committed economic crimes. Following that was the fuel and energy sector (15 percent), manufacturing (9 percent), pharmaceuticals and automobile manufacturing (8 percent), and insurance and retail (7 percent). Last were the technology and construction sectors, with 5 percent each. The survey also found a 66 percent decline in financial performance.

The most widespread form of economic crime found by the survey was asset misappropriation, which includes all forms of theft and embezzlement of cash, supplies, or equipment within a company.

The second most common form of crime was bribery.

Following Russia on the list for highest prevalence of economic crime were South Africa (62%) and Kenya (57%). Those with the lowest levels of economic crime included Japan (10%), Hong Kong (13%), and Turkey (15%).

According to the first survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2003, not a single Russian company at that time admitted to having suffered from even one instance of economic crime.

Russia has long suffered from widespread corruption. A 2009 survey by Transparency International ranked Russia as 146 on the global Corruption Perceptions Index, saying that almost one third (29 percent) of Russians have given a bribe at least once in the past year. Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika announced in early November that 22 criminal cases were being brought against state-owned corporations, most involving the misappropriation of assets.