It helps to understand how Russian-style corruption works.

The system there is entirely hierarchical. Think organized Mafia as seen in movies, but but much wider both vertically and horizontally.

In that system, as an individual, you have only two path in life: poverty no matter your educational level and talent, or having a patron within the corrupt hierarchy.

If you get a patron, your life is going to be good as long as you remain in his good graces, and he remains on the good grades of his patron, and so on, all the way up to Putin. If any link in the chain above you breaks, you're back to poverty. So you now have a whole set of duties toward your entire "clan", starting with your patron and going all the way up.

There's no justice or fairness anywhere in this system, only loyalty, and the ocasional disloyalty disputes as the upper layers fight for domination.

And there's no private property either. All property is Putin's, who grants access to slices of it to his immediate underlings, who in turn grant access to theirs, and so on, until you too get yours. That grant can be revoked at any time, for any reason whatsoever.

Compared to that, corruption in normal countries is extremely simple, generally having one layer or two, not being so comprehensive that it encompasses the whole of society, and not structured in such a way that your life depends on it, to the point that in most countries you can rise and prosper in society without taking part in corruption, even if it's harder to do so.

In Russia and its satellites this simply isn't the case.