In two devastating news articles last week, the Moscow Times reported stunning new proof of the total failure of dictator Vladimir Putin’s KGB regime.

First, as indicated in the chart above, the MT reports that inflation is out of control. Whereas over the past six months Europe had only 5% inflation on vegetables, in Russia the rate was ten times higher. Russia’s rate of inflation on cereal products and cooking oil was five times higher than Europe’s, and it was four times higher for sugar, three times higher for meat and fish.

In short, Russia’s overall rate of consumer price inflation on food items over the past six months was nearly 12%, while in Europe it was just over 3% even though Russia has benefited as a major oil producer from massive increases in market prices that Europe, a non-producer, simply has to pay.

Russians spend twice as much of their disposable income on their food budget compared to Europeans, and just as was the case in Soviet times Russia can’t produce enough food to satisfy demand because of inefficiency and corruption, and therefore the country imports a vastly greater share of its diet than Europe does.

Speaking of corruption, the MT reports that it, too, is spiraling out of control:

The Moscow police officers checked Viktor’s office and declared that he was in big trouble.

The Windows software installed on his computers was not licensed, and the officers said they would be forced to open a criminal case unless Viktor showed his “generosity.” Viktor slapped $6,000 into the hand of one of the officers, and the pirated software was forgotten. Across the city, Igor is proud of his brand-new Ford Focus, but he parked it several hundred meters away from the institute where he studies medicine. If his professors were to see it, he would be charged more money to pass his exams. In a small shop on Prospekt Mira, Yekaterina regularly pays tax officials to turn a blind eye to irregularities in her accounting records and fire inspectors to ignore fire safety violations. “This is the way we live. We pay, pay and pay,” Yekaterina said with a sigh.

People living in Russia pay $319 billion a year in bribes, according to Indem, a Moscow-based research center that tracks corruption. That amounts to about $2,250 for each of the country’s 142 million citizens.

The MT notes: “Corruption, however, is deeply ingrained into everyday life. Everyone pays bribes, according to a study carried out last year by Transparency International, a corruption watchdog. The study ranked Russia on par with Gambia, Togo and Indonesia in terms of corruption, ranking it in 143th place out of 180 countries surveyed.”

We musk ask: If Russia is on a par with Gambia, Togo and Indonesia with one of the most corrupt societies on the planet, how is it possible for Russia to sit on the G-8 panel, to the exclusion of countries like India? Isn’t it time for Russia to be booted out, as U.S. presidential candidate John McCain has urged?

And more important, when will the people of Russia wake up and realize that they have no future in being ruled by a proud KGB spy, a relic of a failed Soviet past who is dragging them right back down the same pathway to destruction that the USSR followed?