How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business

Abstract

How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business, Alena V. Ledeneva. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 288 pp. $22.95. How Russia Really Works covers the informal practices in politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990s. It contributes to a growing body of research in comparative politics on informal institutions. Alena Ledeneva's main thesis concerns the "paradoxical role" of informal practices in post-Soviet Russia: They are both supportive and subversive of formal rules and informal norms; "they accommodate change but also represent resistance to change" (3). Ledeneva's concept of informal practices, equally grounded in formal rules and informal norms and focusing on players, helps to explain players' dual role. She defines informal practices as "regular sets of players' strategies that infringe on, manipulate, or exploit formal rules and that make use of informal norms and personal obligations for pursuing goals outside the personal domain" (22). The actors involved are closed circles of professional elites who share a body of know-how that is largely unavailable to the general population. Rather than assuming that actors invariably follow a set of identifiable unwritten rules, Ledeneva emphasizes that their strategies involve bending both formal rules and informal norms, or following some and breaking others, and thus illuminate their creativity and mastery in navigating between the two domains. Between 1997 and 2003, the author conducted sixty-two in-depth interviews with fifty respondents representative of economic elites and various people in possession of know-how. She controlled for regional variation to the best of her ability, with her findings mainly applicable to large cities. Chapters 2-7 constitute the empirical core of Ledeneva's book. Chapter 2 examines the informal practices associated with competitive elections in post-Soviet Russia, which spawned a variety of manipulative technologies referred to as "black PR" (chernyi piar). The author examines PR practices in Russia from a comparative perspective and argues that the specifics of PR practices in Russia, such as a greater scale of manipulation, stem from certain defects of formal institutions--weakness of political parties, lack of independent media, and disrespect for the law. A comparative perspective is also employed in chapter 3 in the analysis of compromising information (kompromat) to attack political opponents and business competitors. The prominence of kompromat in Russia is contrasted with lustration campaigns (the legal process of exposing collaborators with the secret police in previous regimes) in Central and Eastern Europe, revealing the continuity of political power in Russia. …