One thing that comes to mind is that for any former USSR country geopolitical considerations come into play. Unless you're willing to spend more money on this t

One thing that comes to mind is that for any former USSR country geopolitical considerations come into play. Unless you're willing to spend more money on this than Russia is willing to and able to procure other resources that Russia has readily available (military, etc), you're done. More generally speaking, even as a thought experiment, the main obstacle is that the actual corruption is the tip of the iceberg -- or the flower that blooms from the plant and the roots of a civil society that operates in such a way. I don't know whether anybody ever succeeded in changing civic culture from the top down. I'd be surprised and I'd expect that this would require the use of violence unacceptable to anyone that minds corruption. My guess is that the only way towards a healthier social culture is evolutionary. I think that the only way strong civil societies ever developed historically is in the conditions of gradually increasing prosperity or at least the standard of living above subsistence that gives the luxury of a bit of toil-free time and that little extra buffer of security that you're not constantly under the immediate risk of being hungry and homeless tomorrow if something goes wrong. In a man eat man environment, you do what you have to do to survive. There's significant evidence with multiple meta-analyses at this point that anxiety has strong effects on attention and cognitive performance (e.g http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08917779108248762 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08917779108248762). There's a good reason why, as per de Tocqueville's astute observation, revolutions occur not when bad conditions get worse, but when gradually improving conditions suddenly become worse. The slightly better-off and the rich face different issues. Multiple studies suggest that the rich in societies with high inequality are a lot more anxious and less satisfied with their life. It's easy to imagine why that might be -- the costs of falling down the food chain in a highly unequal society are very serious, and the perceived threat from the have-nots is substantial. (Now, inequality in a society where the lowest incomes are far above the living wage is probably far less of a problem.) Ancient Greece & Mediterranean, pre-industrial Britain and other European countries after the population-culling blessing of the Black Plague (I'm not kidding), the US, fertile North & South of China before and after 0 AD all had conditions of some sort that made starting down this road of growth a bit easier. It's of course a catch-22. We don't really know how to engineer strong civil societies and prosperity, for all our chest-beating. The evidence is abundant. Because of that, I think that we ought to be a lot less dismissive about "increased standard of living without freedom" that China is often accused of. I think we know of many more examples of prosperity producing strong civil societies than the inverse.