STATE-RUN television is not usually the place to find news of corruption scandals involving officials close to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Murky business dealings have never been a bar to government service. When high-level bureaucrats fall, they usually go quietly. But viewers have recently been treated to quite a spectacle on Channel One: evening broadcasts full of current and former ministers, their lovers, their expensive homes and millions in misappropriated funds.

This nascent anti-corruption campaign began in October with the dismissal of Anatoly Serdyukov as defence minister. He was fired after investigators linked a company spun off from the ministry to a $100m fraud. That a high-level official with ties to Mr Putin could be so publicly dumped was unprecedented. But since then, a $200m embezzlement case over a satellite-guidance system has threatened Mr Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov. And on November 27th Rossiya-1 channel aired a documentary linking a former agriculture minister, Yelena Skrynnik, to a reported $1.2 billion fraud.

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