Modern Russia under Putin is effectively an apartheid regime. Russian state effectively belongs to Putin and his clique of friends who have special privileges that common people do not. The rest of the people are treated worse than black people in Apartheid South Africa. The difference with South Africa is that in Russia it is not based on race, but rather on closeness to regime and its leader Putin.
The difference in treatment is not officially announced policy but a de facto reality. Most of the time it remains hidden by the system, but there are few glaring examples of clearly biased two tier treatment.
The most glaring example, that sometimes exposes deeper biased treatment is misuse emergency beacons by the officials. In other countries it is used only by ambulances or police during an emergency. Sometimes it also used by presidential motorcades, but rarely so and only in official capacity.
In Russia however presidential style blue emergency beacons are used by even low rank officials as they routinely drive on the opposite side of the road home from work or the other way around. Police respects these emergency lights and make normal drives give way to this official. Even when this leads to accidents on the road, an official with an emergency beacon is never treated as offender.
There is more information on this in Wikipedia article on protest against this practice: Society of Blue Buckets. Blue buckets are a way for people so satirize and protest this practice by mounting blue sandbox buckets on the roofs of their cars so that it looks like an emergency services beacon (pictures and more info here).
This however does expose government officials and elites' attitude to rules and society in general: common people must obey rules, but not us. We are special and can do whatever we want, even drive on the opposite line daily and if someone crashes into us, they will go to prison for traffic offence, not us.
It's like this in other spheres in life too. Government officials and people close to power are treated as special, while everyone else is subjected to a second-class treatment. Privileged elites are never held responsible for breaking law and even if they kill a commoner deliberately it will be treated as commoner's fault by a corrupt legal system. And if you protest against that its prison and accusation of being a foreign spy. <irony>Because why would locally oppose to this system, they must be paid by Soros or Department of State</irony>
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