Abstract
This chapter explores how institutional shocks in the last years of Soviet socialism opened up the environment of institutional fields to reconstruction. This opened the door for confusion and contention over what the operative logics of organizational strategies and structures, the nature of property, and the basis of authority should be. Key actors’ Soviet experiences and knowledge (embedded in habitus) shaped how different actors perceived risks and a normal economy; this provided some path dependency. However, the Soviet experience was not uniform and from that past came three competing “new classes”: Soviet-era managers (Red Directors), financial entrepreneurs (paradoxically), and state cadres, especially form the massive security apparatus. As these classes set about organizing and defending field rules and boundaries, they came into conflict over whose conceptions of normality would predominate. That conflict was at the heart of the drama of the 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin.
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Notes
- 1.
The existence of clans suggests shared interests and structured positions and relations in the broader economy and in competition with other groups. That is, the clan battles of the 1990s were not simply about gain but also about positioning vis-à-vis others: implicitly constructing a “Them” to define “Us.”
- 2.
Additionally, there was a Moscow clan defending the interests of business and other elites in the capital, and this was headed by Moscow Mayor Iurii Luzhkov. An “agrarian clan” existed but was not as strong as other clans and by the mid-1990s was mostly impotent, as the Agrarian Party could not gain traction in electoral politics and the Duma. One could also include a “Family clan” consisting of Boris Yeltsin and his gatekeepers, daughter Tatiana Diachenko and presidential administrator Aleksandr Voloshin—but as they were at the center of Kremlin power, I am no longer sure they should have been considered a “clan” in the same sense as the others.
- 3.
To repeat, this does not negate the possibility that these actors were also playing political games for personal gain, as Dawisha (2013) hints in her work on the early years of Putin and his Petersburg allies.
- 4.
“Vysshii arbitrazhnyi sud RF otkloniaet isk AO ‘Rybinskie motory’ k pravitel’stvu,” Segodnia, January 19, 1996; “Vosvrat: ‘Rybinskim motoram’ ne udalos’ vykupit’ 5% svoikh aktsii,” Kommersant, March 23, 1996; “Podopleka: ‘Rybinskie motory’ ostalis’ na shee u gosudarstva,” Segodnia, October 25, 1996.
- 5.
The top siloviki include Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov, Igor Sechin, Viktor Ivanov, Nikolai Patrushev, Sergei Naryshkin, Vladimir Yakunin, Sergei Chemezov, and Viktor Cherkesov. Some fell out of favor in recent years. “Chekists in the Corridors of Power,” Novaia gazeta, July 2003; translated and reprinted in Johnson’s Russia List, #7255, July 18, 2003. See also “Twelve who have Putin’s Ear,” RFERL Oct 15, 2007; Kryshtanovskaya 2005: 256–279.
- 6.
“‘Nel’zia dopustit’, chtoby voivy prevratilis’ v torgovtsev,’” Kommersant Daily, October 9, 2007.
- 7.
Lilia Shevtsova, “Implications of the Yukos Scandal for Russian Domestic Politics,” September 16, 2003 (https://carnegieendowment.org/2003/09/16/implications-of-yukos-scandal-for-russian-domestic-politics-event-643).
- 8.
This is something entirely absent from mainstream economic and most of the rest of the social sciences: the idea that underlying relations and practices is something more than interests or ideologies, namely, a logic of wholistic perception and evaluation, with non-utilitarian judgments and more than instrumental rationality at work as actors deliberate and respond . As Martin (2011) notes, a field framework, having a wholistic logic to it, can encompass this aesthetics and make humans human again in social science, rather than being the equivalent of a walking, talking Excel spreadsheet.
- 9.
In this sense, post-socialist recombination of property in Russia shows remarkable continuity from the past, which Stark and Bruszt (1998) downplayed in their assessment of privatization and recombination in East Europe.
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Hass, J.K. (2018). Fields in Flux: Post-socialist Reorganization of Property and Power. In: Hass, J. (eds) Re-Examining the History of the Russian Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75414-7_13
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