Culture and Society after Socialism
Alena V. Ledeneva
How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet
Politics and Business. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
During the Soviet era, blat-the use of personal networks for obtaining goods
and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures-was
necessary to compensate for the inefficiencies of socialism. The collapse of
the Soviet Union produced a new generation of informal practices.
In How Russia Really Works, Alena V. Ledeneva explores practices in
politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990s-from
the hiring of firms to create negative publicity about one's competitors, to
inventing novel schemes of tax evasion and engaging in "alternative"
techniques of contract and law enforcement. She discovers ingenuity, wit,
and vigor in these activities and argues that they simultaneously support
and subvert formal institutions. They enable corporations, the media,
politicians, and businessmen to operate in the post-Soviet labyrinth of
legal and practical constraints but consistently undermine the spirit, if
not the letter, of the law. The "know-how" Ledeneva describes in this book
continues to operate today and is crucial to understanding contemporary
Russia.
Alena V. Ledeneva is a Reader in Russian Politics and Society at the School
of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She is the
author of Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal
Exchange and the coeditor of Economic Crime in Russia and Bribery and Blat
in Russia.
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Culture and Society after Socialism
The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest growing and
theoretically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. A
decade after perestroika, it is possible to begin to chart the topography of
a diverse realm of new scholarship, built on the theoretical and
methodological foundations of cross-disciplinary work.
"Culture and Society after Socialism," a series edited by Bruce Grant and
Nancy Ries, looks to present the very best of this body of writing.
Providing close-up perspectives on the lived experience of socialism and its
aftermath, this series advances innovative work that fundamentally rethinks
the cultural projects of socialist states and their outcomes. Through
detailed readings of historical and cultural contexts, these works bridge
the study of power systems and cosmologies, material practices and social
meanings, political economies and the mythic forces that sustain them.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup8_seriescsas.html
CONTESTED TONGUES
Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine
Laada Bilaniuk
PRIVATIZING POLAND
Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor
Elizabeth C. Dunn
EMPIRE OF NATIONS
Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union
Francine Hirsch
THE UNMAKING OF SOVIET LIFE
Everyday Economies after Socialism
Caroline Humphrey
HOW RUSSIA REALLY WORKS
The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business
Alena V. Ledeneva
RUSSIA GETS THE BLUES
Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times
Michael Urban; with Andrei Evdokimov
THE VANISHING HECTARE
Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania
Katherine Verdery
DEFENDING THE BORDER
Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia
Mathijs Pelkmans
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