Russia’s gangster capitalism : portent for contemporary states?

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Russia's turbulent transition from communism to state capitalism, a phase popularly referred to as "gangster" or "wild" capitalism. The terminology describes the period of lawlessness (bespredel) that had gripped the country in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when the economic and political levers of power were said to be vulnerable to, or in the hands of, organized crime. Indeed, the then president himself, Boris Yeltsin, in addressing the publication of Russia's first open commission on crime in 1993, declared that the country had become "a mafia state on a world scale.'' In our understanding of the impact of "organized crime" and "corruption" in the development of the Russian state, we need to acknowledge the constructionist nature of these terms, the narratives they weave, and the agendas behind such narratives. In the same way that the language of "risk" has been described as "a rhetorical device deployed in arguments about what harms should be given priority, how they should be dealt with, and who is blameworthy," the discourse around organized crime and corruption similarly defines and proscribes harmful acts according to agenda-driven selectivity.' In the turbulent and often violent process of transition, Russia has been beset by competing and often contradictory agendas in which the application of these terms to particular acts and actors at specific times has served to detract from or obfuscate some of the more deep-seated and complex issues of the transition process, the tools that served it, and the aspirations of those who led or opposed it. By unraveling the narratives around corruption and organized crime in Russia and the impact these discourses have had on the emergence of the Russian state as a market economy, we can more easily interrogate the conventional historical memory of this turbulent era.