When Bo Rothstein (2000, 479) was invited to Moscow to lecture about the Swedish civil service, a Russian bureaucrat asked him: “‘How do you go from a situation such as Russia's to the situation which exists in Sweden?’ That is, how do you move a society (or an organization) from a low trust situation with massive tax fraud and corruption to a high trust situation where these problems, while still in existence, are much less severe?”

Is there a way out of this misrule, this lawlessness, and low trust? The inequality trap suggests not. Yet Russia and other countries that made the transition from Communism to democracy – in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union – are the major exceptions to my argument linking high inequality through low generalized trust to much corruption. Yes, they have high levels of corruption – the former and the handful of still Communist countries on average are more corrupt than either the West (by far) or the developing nations.