A decade ago, when I was living in Moscow, my Russian teacher explained to me her standard procedure if ever she was pulled over by traffic police. She would swiftly take off any visible jewellery and hide it. Then she’d take out whatever cash was in her wallet, leaving only a 100 rouble note. That way, when the police requested a bribe in return for letting her off a fine (as they invariably did), she could show the meagre contents of her wallet. They’d grudgingly accept the 100 roubles (the equivalent of around $30 back then) and she’d be on her way.

US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin met in Alaska in August.Credit: AP

Far from being outraged about this, my teacher was perfectly content with this system and said most Russians she knew were too. It saved the hassle of dealing with the bureaucracy involved in paying or contesting a fine. It probably worked out cheaper too. Widespread bribery and corruption, from the pettiest level up, was a mundane fact of life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and was accepted with little more than a shrug.

While the narrative in the US focuses on America’s collapse into authoritarianism under Donald Trump, less is written about its descent into a Putin-style kleptocracy. Meaning “rule of thieves”, kleptocracy is a style of governance that Putin has perfected over his five presidential terms. British financier Bill Browder, formerly the largest foreign investor in Russia, believes Putin and his cronies have stolen as much as a trillion dollars from the Russian people.

Evidence that Trump is taking cues from the Kremlin’s crooked-regime-building playbook is in plain sight. American academic Karen Dawisha’s 2014 book Putin’s........

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