The study is based on a methodology proposed by European Association for Education Law and Policy for their research conducted in 2009 and devoted to commercialization, competition and corruption in European education. In the article, the attempt is made to apply their methods to analyze the problems of corruption in Russian higher education system which existed before the adoption of new educational legislation which came into force in 2013. The subjects of examination in this article are: definition of corruption in Russian legislation, system of control of educational institutions in Russia from 2000 to 2009, corruption at the policy level, at the ministerial level, at the university level. The author states that the legislation and court practice in Russia in the first decade of the 21st century enabled educational institutions to do some kinds of activities in corrupted way. Besides that, the legislation and the corpus of case-law were too complicated. Some laws and decisions made by courts and authorities might contradict one another. State-operated and private educational institutions had different rights and abilities. Thus, Russia needed to gather all the norms concerning activities in educational sphere into one law. This law was adopted in 2012 and came into force in 2013.