‘One searches in vain for a book that gets the story right’, sighs a senior Kremlin official:
In 2005 I went to Moscow's biggest bookshop to browse for books in the politics and history department. I ...looked at what was written about us. As an insider, I knew how the things were and wanted to see how they were interpreted. I was shocked! Books covered every angle: kind, evil, clever, silly. I looked through piles of them, but none of them had got it even close. What I saw was that people wrote categorically about things they could not possibly know about. For example: ‘Kasianov came to Putin and said:…Putin replied:…Kasianov objected.’ Was the author there? No. How did he know? Who told him that? Putin or Kasianov? Had he said something like ‘according to a source close to Putin’…But no. Not at all. Many facts were simply wrong and actors’ motivations were misrepresented. Since I knew most of the people depicted in that book well, I was pretty sure that this particular person could not have said what was attributed to him, especially since I knew what he did say. In some instances I was in the middle of the events and I knew that what was described in the book simply didn't happen…And then I thought, ‘If there is so little resemblance to reality in the books describing a fairly recent period, when the witnesses are still alive and can remember what happened, what about history books? How much of them is likely to be true?’ It's a scary thought. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a more or less smooth narrative. Who needs to know what really happened, apart from a narrow circle of academics? Is it even important?
Informal leadershipResearch into how leaders rule and manage Russia is vast, but evidence of the informal ways of getting things done at the leadership level is fairly scarce. It is not that power ...networks, unwritten rules, double standards, multiple moralities and forms of self-deception, played out in the field of informal politics, are not applicable to the leadership level, but they are rather difficult to research. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which reliance on power networks and instruments of informal governance affects leadership style. In order to exercise leadership, the official has to become an experienced broker of sistema, to stay in control of power networks, monitor their dynamics and use the instruments of informal governance. Leadership implies a combination of methods applicable in official hierarchical contexts and those applicable to unofficial power networks, which often seamlessly transform into each other. The literature on informal governance is somewhat limited, whereas leadership theories tend to examine practices of informal management under the rubric of interpersonal skills, rather than associate them with the nature of the organisation.Similar to the daily use of networks for getting things done, the use of power networks in government jobs is taken for granted and often misrecognised. (Putin's use of power networks and reliance on informal governance is part of folklore.) The purpose of this chapter is to make informal governance an explicit part of the leadership story, to articulate and account for the instruments of informal management, so that they can be reflected upon by those who use them and those to whom they are applied. I argue that issues of informal governance deserve more systematic and in-depth analysis.
From the power of networks to networks of powerSistema is an open secret in Russia that has a powerful grip over the society. It represents common, yet not articulated, perceptions of power and the ...system of governance. My ethnography of sistema is an attempt to articulate, assemble and cross-check such perceptions with insiders of the corridors of power, as well as to explore the daily functioning and mundane practices of Russia's ‘state machine’. The perceptions of sistema are elusive, context-bound, obscured by self-deception and often resist articulation but the daily patterns commonly associated with the power of sistema can be identified.This book is a sequel to Russia's Economy of Favours (Ledeneva 1998). There I applied the bottom-up perspective to analyse blat, networking and informal exchange at the grassroots level. Here I look at the workings of power networks and methods of informal governance. I explore both enabling and constraining aspects of belonging to power networks and delve into the nuances of how they can be managed. I rely on my respondents to articulate the ‘secrets’ of sistema. Sistema rules are taken for granted by insiders, and their misrecognition of sistema is part of the story. The best sources are once-an-insider respondents, who broke sistema rules and were marginalised, or those who distanced themselves from sistema due to their career movements, personal development and global outlook.
Russia is changing dramatically. Another decade, and the phenomenon of blat – the use of informal contacts and networks for obtaining goods and services in conditions of shortage and a state system ...of privileges – may not be remembered. Nevertheless, blat was, and continues to be, the 'normal' way of getting things done in Russia. In fact, we cannot understand the nature of the ongoing economic and political changes in Russia unless we see how distinctive blat was as a feature specific of a socialist non-monetary 'economy of favours' and how definitive its influence remains in post-socialist monetary economy. To conceptualize this pervasive yet unexplored phenomenon I identify a range of features that define the boundaries of blat, discuss contrasts and similarities between blat and other informal practices in Russia such as informal economic activities, bribery, and corruption, and analyse the 'misrecognition game' in which people recognize others' involvement with blat but misrecognize their own, and which accounts for the pervasiveness of blat on the one hand and the lack of attention to it on the other.
