I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most corrupt, US somewhere in the bottom quartile iirc. A quick example from my industry - roughly 1/3 of the ~USD $3 billion spent on the new Russian spaceport is unaccounted for (stolen). I assure you that's many orders of magnitude worse than the contracts in play at Cape Canaveral.

A good (extremely depressing) film to watch is "Leviathan" (2014).