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.

“We are going to the interrogation on Friday. We are going to demand a return [of the money] because we consider its confiscation to be absolutely illegal,” said lawyer Genri Reznik.

“I am a rational person and I make a good living. I don’t have stock in Gazprom; I earn money through hard work. And where I keep this money – in envelopes, in a box, in jars – that’s my personal business,” Sobchak told journalists.

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, the activist also said that she preferred to keep her money on hand because she doesn’t trust the Russian banking system. “What’s criminal about me keeping my savings in envelopes? Where else should they be, in toilet paper or in magazines?” she asked.

The cash was confiscated on June 11 as part of a ten-apartment raid by Russia’s Investigative Committee. At the time, officials said the money was taken because “the source that the funds were acquired from has not been established.” Investigators now say that they are looking into whether or not Sobchak has paid due taxes on the money, and also checking if it is counterfeit.

The raids, which were mostly on apartments belonging to organizers of a tumultuous May 6 protest, came a day before the largest anti-government protest that Russia has seen in years, with estimates ranging between 50 and 200 thousand participants, 650 arrests, and 47 injured protesters.

As the Moscow Times reports:

A liberal-leaning newspaper claimed Wednesday that the Investigative Committee’s chairman threatened one of its reporters, who has since fled the country for fear of his safety.

Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, in an open letter published on the newspaper’s website, accused Alexander Bastrykin of making the threats on a roadside bordering a Moscow region forest after the reporter had been driven there by Bastrykin’s security guards.

Muratov later told Radio Liberty that the reporter, deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, had fled the country. Muratov has not disclosed the actual threats.

Sokolov was alone with Bastrykin when the threats were made, the letter said. Bastrykin is one of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials.

Recently, Sokolov wrote that he was outraged by the relatively soft sentencing of Sergei Tsepovyaz, a reputed member of the notorious Kushchyovskaya gang, which murdered 12 people, including small children, in 2011.

Tsepovyaz was fined 150,000 rubles ($4,600) for covering up the crime. The court ruled that he did not participate in the murder. Two other men who share Tsepovyaz’s last name were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the article on the crime, Sokolov calls Bastrykin, as well as President Vladimir Putin and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, “servants of countless Russian ‘Tsapoks.'” The Kushchyovskaya gang’s reputed mastermind, Sergei Tsapok, is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Muratov said Sokolov has since publicly apologized for that remark.

In 2006, Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who gained prominence for her reporting from Chechnya, was gunned down near her residence in Moscow. Her murder remains unsolved.

Muratov said in the letter Wednesday that Bastrykin spoke negatively about the paper’s editorial policy and mentioned Politkovskaya in a derogatory way.

Muratov stated that while he took Bastrykin’s words “seriously,” he declined to quote Bastrykin’s words against Politkovskaya in order “not to participate in a clan war of law enforcement officials.”

Muratov was referring to the ongoing struggle between the Investigative Committee and the General Prosecutor’s Office over political influence.

The reformed Investigative Committee now has authority over all the nation’s investigations, whereas the Prosecutor General’s Office has lost its ability to investigate crimes on its own.

The Investigative Committee did not comment on the alleged threats by Wednesday evening.

Muratov called on Bastrykin to “guarantee security” for Sokolov and said the threats were “empty” due to Bastrykin’s “emotional state.”

The alleged threats against Sokolov prompted protests outside the Investigative Committee’s headquarters on Wednesday.

Published three times a week, Novaya Gazeta is jointly owned by billionaire Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Analysts said such threats might have stemmed from Bastrykin’s personal ties to Putin. The two were classmates at Leningrad University Law School.

Vladimir Prybilovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said Bastrykin’s connections to Putin make him “rather powerful.”

Prybilovsky said Bastrykin is someone who would “pursue a hardline course” against the opposition, referring to searches conducted at homes of opposition leaders, including Alexei Navalny, on the eve of Tuesday’s protest march in Moscow.

United Russia Deputy Alexander Khinshtein said at the time that Bastrykin was trying to “serve” Putin by putting pressure on the opposition.

Yelena Pozdnyakova, an expert with the Center for Political Technologies, said Bastrykin is trying to suppress negative publicity against him, which shows that he is “nervous” about the situation.

“Novaya Gazeta has always irritated him,” she said.

But Pozdnyakova added that it is still unclear whether Novaya Gazeta, known for its highly critical articles, might have exaggerated the scandal in order to attack Bastrykin, Putin’s ally.

This is not the first time that Bastrykin has been mired in a media scandal.

In 2008, United Russia Deputy Khinshtein accused Bastrykin, then a deputy prosecutor, of possessing undeclared property abroad.

It turned out that the property had been registered before Bastrykin became a law enforcement official.

According to Solidarity member Sergei Davidis, the organizational committee of the March of Millions concluded that the march would go on as planned, regardless of the actions of security officials.

Since Ilya Yashin was scheduled to be one of leaders of the march but may now be unable to attend because of a subpoena, the committee named State Duma Deputy Dmitri Gudkov from A Just Russia as his replacement.

According to Interfax, Russia’s Investigative Committee issued subpoenas to march organizers Aleksei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov, and Ksenia Sobchak in addition to Yashin, ordering them to appear on at 11 am on Tuesday to “undergo investigation” in regards to riots in Moscow during an mass opposition protest on May 6 that ended with about 650 arrests and 47 injured activists.

The subpoenas were issued after investigative units raided (or attempted to raid, as some residents weren’t home) 10 Moscow apartments, purportedly in connection with the riots. In addition to the aforementioned activists, the apartment of Voina art activist Pyotr Verzilov was also raided. A number of computers, iPads, cellphones, and other materials were confiscated from Navalny and Udaltsov, as was Navalny’s t-shirt that read “United Russia is the Party of Swindlers and Thieves” and an item from Udaltsov with the Left Front logo on it.

Police also took 1.5 million euros from Sobchak’s apartment, on the vague basis that “the source that the funds were acquired from has not been established.” Sobchak was not one of the organizers of the May 6 protests.

The office of the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption, created by Navalny, was also raided, as was the apartment of the parents of his fiancé.

A trio of Duma deputies from A Just Russia compared the raids to Soviet tactics of repression. “We feel that this might provoke an irreversible rise in tension in society and close the path to the constructive evolution of the political system in Russia,” said the statement released by Gennady Gudkov, Dmitri Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev.

Politkovskaya’s death catapulted Russia into the spotlight as one of the world’s deadliest countries for reporters. Over the past five years, blame has been cast at Chechen militants, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, Russian then-President Vladimir Putin, and Russian police officers, among others. But today, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that ex-Lieutenant Colonel Dmitri Pavlyuchenkov had been arrested as the suspected organizer of the journalist’s murder.

Investigators say that Pavlyuchenkov, who was at one point a main witness in the Politkovskaya case, was paid to organize the hit and even provided the criminal group in question with the murder weapon.

An answer to the larger question of who paid Pavlyuchenkov also may be close at hand, as the Investigative Committee additionally announced that it had information regarding the murder’s “client.” According to RIA Novosti, the name of the suspect is under wraps for now in order to prevent complications with the investigation.

Editors at Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, said the news matched up with the results of their own independent investigation.

“In regards to the client, I do know of a few versions that federal investigators have developed at various levels of detail. They partially overlap with our own,” Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Sergei Sokolov told Gazeta.ru. “But to name any specific names right now would be irresponsible.”

At the very least, Novaya Gazeta’s investigation found that Pavlyuchenkov definitely played a key role in organizing the murder, said Sokolov. “I can’t say if he was the only organizer; there could have been two. But that this man was one of the main organizers and used his position [to ensure the murder was carried out] can already be confirmed,” he explained.

According to Gazeta.ru, the journalist’s children came to the conclusion that Pavlyuchenkov was involved in the murder “long ago.”

“We and Novaya Gazeta, as victims, carried out our own research, collected evidence in the case and more and more came to the conclusion that he was involved in the crime and should not take the stand as a witness,” said Anna Stavitskaya, lawyer for Ilya and Vera Politkovskaya.

For more information about the developments and background in the Politkovskaya case, see Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

According to preliminary information, the explosion occurred at 4:32 pm local time after a man carrying a bag entered Domodedovo’s international arrivals area, where a large crowd was waiting at the baggage claim. The bomb that then exploded was at least as powerful as 5 kilograms of dynamite and was filled with metal screws and bolts to heighten its impact.

Eyewitness accounts and videos began streaming in from social media soon after the explosion. “A bomb exploded in Domodedovo. People are covered in blood, there’s smoke everywhere…” said Twitter user ann_mint, who says she works in the airport. “Everyone’s running somewhere. It’s awful.”

Another airport worker said that many foreigners were among the victims: “There were many Africans, people who didn’t speak Russian in general.”

Other witnesses said the baggage claim was filled with smoke and the smell of ash. A series of videos on YouTube and Twitter filmed during the immediate aftermath of the explosion showed thick smoke and piles of charred bodies, as well as medical personnel wheeling victims out of the airport. According to RIA Novosti, airport workers dismantled part of a wall to widen the exit for the victims.

Early reports of the number of victims varied. According to the Ministry for Emergency Situations, 168 people were injured, 74 of whom have been hospitalized. Moscow regional governor Boris Gromov told journalists that 34 people had died, two of them in the hospital.

Meanwhile, Domodedovo’s press service reports 35 dead and 46 injured. Sofia Malyavina of the Ministry of Health and Social Development reported 35 dead and 130 injured.

A statement on Domodedovo’s website confirmed that the explosion had occurred in the international arrivals area, “where people who aren’t passengers have free access.” It also said that the airport was operating normally, and that aircraft were still being allowed to land and take off as usual.

State authorities are calling the attack an act of terrorism. Operatives from the Federal Investigative Committee have been dispatched to the airport.

Authorities have reportedly found the head of a man who appears to have been the bomber. “The head of a man of Arab appearance has been found; he was approximately 30-35 years of age; he presumably set off the explosive device,” a source told Interfax.

The three men who have been identified as suspects were apparently already wanted by Russia’s federal security services before Monday’s attack. According to RIA Novosti, a recent operation had been carried out to detain the suspects in Moscow’s Zelenograd district, but was unsuccessful.

Investigators were careful to say that the bomber was not necessarily a “suicide bomber.”

“Until relevant expert analysis has been carried out, you need to be very careful when dealing with different types of terminology, including the word ‘suicide bomber,'” said one official, explaining that the bomb could have been detonated remotely, unbeknownst to the man carrying it.

In response to the attack, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev postponed a trip to Switzerland, where he planned to arrive on Tuesday to participate in the World Economic Forum. According to Gazeta.ru, the president ordered Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Governor Gromov to go to Domodedovo personally to ascertain the situation. “Everything needs to be done… to obtain quick information and conduct an investigation without delay,” Medvedev said at a press conference.

Chief of the Ministry of Health and Social Development Tatyana Golikova was sent to the airport by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in order to determine what kind of aid would be necessary for the victims. “A project for a government ordinance on providing material aid to the families of the victims needs to be prepared,” the prime minister said in a meeting with Golikova.

Moscow city officials said that the families of victims would be compensated with funds from the city budget.

“Aside from federal payouts, families of the victims will be compensated with 2 million rubles, critically-injured victims by 1.5 million rubles, those with moderate or mild injuries – 1 million rubles,” said Mayor Sobyanin. In addition, funerals for deceased victims would be free. “All of these services should be free,” said the mayor.

Olga Egorova, a representative of the Moscow City Court, told the agency that more than a dozen city judges have requested federal protection so far in 2010 – an unprecedented number for recent decades.

“I’ve worked in the judicial system for practically 40 years,” Egorova said. “In that time, this has simply never happened: this year, 13 judges officially appealed for protection, one was murdered, and that’s in Moscow.”

Egorova added that this was the first year that she has been personally threatened, including by judges who were fired for taking bribes. “I didn’t think that the profession of a judge could be such a dangerous one,” she said.

This past April, Moscow City Court Judge Eduard Chuvashov was shot dead in his Moscow apartment building. He had presided over the cases of several ultranationalist groups and other high-profile defendants.

According to Egorova, Chuvashov’s murder investigation is currently in the hands of the federal Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General, which has not yet come out with any information about the course of the investigation.

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.

Vladimir Markin, official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said that investigator Sergei Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty. If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.

Trifonova, who suffered from diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility last Friday. The businesswoman had been detained since December 2009, when she was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Her lawyer alleges that Trifonova was intentionally denied medical care so that she would die, immediately giving rise to comparisons in the Russian press to the case of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer died last November, also in Matrosskaya Tishina, and also allegedly due to intentionally denied medical care. Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officials admitted partial responsibility in that case.

After Magnitsky’s death, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered massive layoffs from FSIN. Among those, says FSIN head Aleksandr Reymer, was supposed to have been Matrosskaya Tishina manager Fikret Tagiev. The newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday, however, that Tagiev remains in charge of the facility to this day. FSIN officials in Moscow did not confirm whether or not this was the case.

President Medvedev ordered a federal investigation into Trifonova’s death on Saturday. In the meantime, at least two people have been fired in connection with the incident – Deputy Manager Aleksandr Filippov at Moscow’s regional investigative agency (and one of Pysin’s supervisors) and Valery Ivarlak, who also worked at the agency.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the newspaper Gazeta that charging Pysin with negligence would sidestep his actual crime.

“I’m going to insist that it wasn’t negligence; there was clearly a direct intent here,” said the lawyer. In an earlier statement to the advocacy group Justice, Zherebenkov detailed how Pysin removed Trifonova from a Moscow hospital against doctors’ orders and sent her to a hospital 75 kilometers outside of Moscow that lacked the equipment she needed to survive. “I’m going to demand that he be charged with abuse; he knew perfectly well where he was sending her, and he should answer to the fullest extent,” he told Gazeta.

Zherebenkov said that he plans to have the proper documentation prepared by next Tuesday to request that Pysin be charged with abuse of his official authority – an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Also on Tuesday, a group of prominent human rights advocates from the Russian Association of Independent Observers addressed a letter to President Medvedev demanding that those responsible for Trifonova’s death be brought to justice. The signatories included Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Andrei Babushkin, Valery Borshchev, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksandr Goncharenko.

Speaking to the online news site Kasparov.ru, Borshchev lamented that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death. This allowed the situation to happen again.” He added that there was more blame to go around than just on Investigator Pysin. Odintsovsky City Court Judge Olga Makarova, for one, had stated publically that she wouldn’t grant Trifonova’s bail request unless she plead guilty.

The letter also includes a list of illnesses and asks the president to authorize a ban on allowing anyone suffering from them to be held in a pretrial detention facility. Right now, the list only applies to convicted criminals.

In a statement on Thursday to the Russian news agencies Interfax and RIA Novosti, law enforcement sources said that the murder had been solved and a killer had been identified. The killer has not, however, been detained, and a search is currently underway. Investigators, the sources said, are also still working to establish the identity of the person who ordered the murder.

Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights center, where Estemirova had worked, has already refuted the announcement. Speaking to Gazeta.ru, Orlov said that his colleagues at Memorial have spoken with representatives of the groups investigating Estemirova’s murder, and that these representatives denied that the announcement was true. “They said that they haven’t established the name of the murderer,” said Orlov.

While Gazeta.ru was able to obtain an unofficial confirmation from sources in the Chechen Investigative Committee that the culprit has been identified, all official sources proved to be unreachable on Thursday. The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia refrained from commenting, and the official representative of the Chechen Investigative Committee was out of the office and did not answer her cell phone throughout the course of the day. The newspaper was also unable to reach the press secretary of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who had promised to monitor the course of the murder investigation.

The 50-year-old Estemirova had been the lead member of Memorial’s office in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and had worked to investigate kidnappings and murders of people in Chechnya. She was kidnapped herself not far from her home in the capital on June 15 of last year, and was later found shot dead in the Nazranovsky district of Ingushetia.

Memorial, which soon after announced that it was shutting down operations in Chechnya, blamed Estemirova’s murder on President Kadyrov, claiming that the volatile situation in the republic was the president’s responsibility. Kadyrov successfully sued Orlov for slander, and a Moscow city court fined Orlov 70 thousand rubles (about $2300). In the beginning of February, after experiencing pressure from public officials and a particularly public dressing-down from his mother for failing to respect his elders, Kadyrov dropped all further suits against other human rights activists, including the prominent 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva.

The news of Estemirova’s murder had a powerful resonation throughout the world. In particular, United States President Barack Obama issued a statement calling on the Russian authorities to investigate the murder and punish those responsible. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that he did not believe that Kadyrov had participated in the tragedy, and considered the murder to be an act of provocation against the government.

Kadyrov, however, gave several interviews after the murder in which he spoke out harshly against the slain activist. Defending himself on Radio Liberty and saying that he took no part in the killing, the Chechen president said that he “had no reason to kill a woman who nobody needed.” Referring to her place on a public council under the Grozny city administration, he added that “she has never had any honor, dignity, or a conscience, and all the same I named her as a council representative.” He also did admit that he had later dissolved the council.

When asked if he thought the murder would ever be solved, Orlov stated that the politics tied up in the Estemirova’s case made it hard to say. “In naming this or that person as having participated in the murder, or in naming the person who possibly ordered the murder, the investigators and prosecutors are invariably stepping into a type of political realm,” he told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper.

Memorial member Aleksandr Cherkasov noted the 2002 murder investigation of an outspoken Chechen village leader, Malika Umazheva, as a cautionary tale. An official investigation blamed the killing on militants who it turned out had long been dead, and also on people who had only issued confessions under torture. Memorial’s own investigation established that Umazheva had been murdered by federal security forces, likely in retaliation for the leader’s fervent criticism of the ongoing Russian federal raids in her village.