I'm not glorifying them or anything. But bribes are part of an authoritarian system, those people have an almost feudal right to the power, and hence to extract

I'm not glorifying them or anything. But bribes are part of an authoritarian system, those people have an almost feudal right to the power, and hence to extract value from it. However at the higher echelons where the government was ran from, failing to do the job you were given for bribes was a problem. I suspect that effective members of government took bribes in such a way to incentivize the behavior they needed.