How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Bussiness (Culture and Society After Socialism) Review

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(More customer reviews)There are many resources to help understand official ways of doing things in Russia, this book helps the reader understand how those many things actually get done.
Alena Ledeneva's discussion of the many types of informal business, political and legal practices is eye-opening for those readers used to the Western rule of law and doing business. She effectively examines many aspects of Russian life including political campaining, bartering, and the business practice of double-accounting.
She opens her chapter on Financial scheming with a post-soviet saying "if a company has a profit, it has a bad accountant". This sums up how many Russian businesses operate and the reader should keep this in mind when establishing joint partnerships and joint ventures.
This is the best book I've read for the business person, diplomat or graduate student who plans on working with Russians in Russia.

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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.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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