Open secrets and knowing smiles

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 720-736

  Ledeneva, Alena ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Everyday life; Informal agreements; Knowing smiles; Open secrets; Tacit knowledge; Unwritten rules

Indexed keywords

EID: 82955193316     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325410388558     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Alena Ledeneva, "Informal Institutions and Informal Networks: The Study of Blat" (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, UK, 1996)
2. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 1).
4. Oxbridge unwritten rules are spelt out in F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica (New York, 1964. Reprinted by MainSail Press, 1993).
5. Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works (London: Centre for European Reform, 2001), 4-5.
6. Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
7. Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways, " Russian Review 45 (1986): 115-81.
8. Some Moscow observers note that under President Putin the law enforcement is just as selective, and law enforcement agencies appear to be pursuing corruption allegations almost exclusively when they involve known opponents of the Kremlin. A variety of "official" legal, administrative, and economic sanctions can be levied against "selected" victims. To start with, the fire brigade, tax police, and sanitation department can be called upon to issue citations for tax irregularities or violations of fire, safety, and public health codes on request. If necessary, this can be followed by further economic sanctions, informal arm-twisting, negative publicity in the press, etc.-a whole menu with legal changes for desert.
9. Yuko Adachi, Building Big Business in Russia: The Impact of Informal Corporate Governance Practices (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010).
10. According to Interfax, Vladimir Makarov, the deputy head of the Interior Ministry's economics crime department, said that up to 45 percent of the country's goods and services are part of the shadow economy. He also said that more than forty Moscow banks are involved in what he called "serious" shady deals. These comments were echoed by Duma Security Committee chairman Alexander Kulikov, who told RIA-Novosti the same day that the treasury receives only 5 percent of taxes owed because of operations in shadow economy (quoted from RFE/RL, vol. 5, no. 28, pt. 1, 9 Feb. 2001).
11. See Paul Seabright, The Vanishing Rouble (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
12. Personalities and relationships are just as essential to the understanding of knowing smiles. See Charles Tilly, Why? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19-20.
13. Torstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: The Challenging Analysis of Social Conduct That Ironically Probes Misused Wealth and Conspicuous Consumption (New York, NY: Vanguard, 1962)
14. and Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
15. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), on practical knowledge
16. and Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), on tacit knowledge.
17. Georg Simmel, "The Sociology of Secrets and of Secret Societies, " American Journal Society 11:4(1906). Sharing a secret is often compulsive: when one cannot bear keeping a secret to oneself, one reloads the burden on another person to keep it.
18. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 7-14.
19. See the discussion of sociology of secrecy in Kim Lane Scheppele, Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3-23.
20. Lesley Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem, 2004), Introduction. From the perspective of informal practices, I would not separate humor into official culture and unofficial culture that is co-opted in the building socialism and the alternative anekdot. Both helped to reproduce the façade of socialism.
21. Note the censorship of Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
22. See Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)
23. Timothy M. Frye, Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Market Institutions in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)
24. and Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
25. The Soviet system also failed to change individual needs, despite all its repressive potential and "experimental grounds of the concentration camps" Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1968).
26. These boundaries are shifting as the implications of "smiling" in the 1930s are different from, say, the 1950s and 1980s, as well as the implications of not smiling at the right times.
27. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours, 79.
28. Alena Ledeneva, "From Russia with Blat: Can Informal Practices Help Modernize Russia?" Social Research 76:1(2009)
29. and Alena Ledeneva, "Telephone Justice in Russia, " Post-Soviet Affairs 24:4(2008): 324-50.
30. Gogol, Griboedov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin quoted in Milne, Reflective Laughter.
31. According to modern communications research, understanding of emotions is instinctive and mostly wrong. As Paul Ekman says in his classic work, Telling Lies, nonverbal communication reliably signals the presence of emotion, but not the specific emotion. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage (New York, NY: Norton, 1993).
32. See also Daniel McNeill, The Face: A Natural History (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1998).
33. Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), xiv.
34. Mikhail Zhvanetskii, "Nepevodimaia igra, " in Izbrannoe (Moskva: Eksmo, 2009), 131-33 (originally recorded at the 1986 New Year eve performance).
35. Lev Gudkov, Negativnaya Identichnost': Stat'i 1997-2002 godov (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2004).
36. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason.
37. In contemporary Russia, for example, a simple reaction to success is to associate it with connections, corruption, or siloviki when it is really is not just about that. "You can blame it all on blat when in fact it's not blat. "
38. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1989).
39. Goffman, The Presentation of Self.
40. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours, 59-72.
41. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours, 60.
42. As one gender studies specialist pointed out, "It's a gender thing"-people smile because you are a woman and would be different in case a male researcher approached them on a similar subject.
43. The AASS panel on history of emotions in 2004 in Boston provided an inspiration, especially contributions by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Ronald Grigor Suny on hatred. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war Soviet Russia, " Australian Journal of Politics and History 50:3(2004): 357-71.
44. See also Carolina Humphrey, "Inequality and exclusion: A Russian case study of emotion in politics, " Anthropological Theory 1:3(2001): 331-53
45. Golfo Alexopoulos, "Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging, " Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7:3(2006): 487-528
46. and Serhy Yekelchyk, "The Civic Duty to Hate: Stalinist Citizenship as Political Practice and Civic Emotion (Kiev, 1943-53), " Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7:3(2006): 529-56.
47. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Blat in Stalin's Time, " in Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000)
48. and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).
49. Simmel, "The Sociology of Secrecy, " 442.
50. See Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in Spring 2011).
51. Mayfair M. Yang, Gifts, Favours and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
52. Quoted in Iurii Levada, "Homo Post-Sovieticus, " Sociological Research 40:6(2001): 17.
53. Quoted in Seth Graham, "Varieties of Reflexivity in the Russo-Soviet Anekdot, " in Milne, Reflective Laughter, 176.
54. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 458.
55. Levada, "Homo Post-Sovieticus, " 6-7.
56. Levada, "Homo Post-Sovieticus, " 9.
57. See also James Millar, "The Little Deal: Brezhnev's Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism, " Slavic Review 44:4(1985).
58. Alexei Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretence, and the Anekdot, " Public Culture 9 (1997): 162.
59. For example, when a survey shows that among Russians today only 11 percent can say that they have "never lied to anyone, " and only 32 percent can say that they "have never taken something that belonged to someone else without permission, " it attests to one of the simplest and most widespread types of human deception. This type is based on the diversity of normative fields themselves (social, group, role, and other fields), which determine the orientations and frameworks of each individual's activity. What interests us, however, are the more specific types and structures of "deceptive" behavior that are linked to the specific functioning of social norms in particular historical and nation-state conditions-for example, the evasion of civic obligations and disobedience to the traffic rules (Levada, "Homo Post-Sovieticus").
60. Levada, "Homo Post-Sovieticus"
61. The proposed analysis of open secrets and knowing smiles poses an empirical question of their universality/specificity. It is also worth pondering what forms of research might deepen our understanding of societies. Finally, one could pursue the line of analysis of the emotional content of corruption.
62. See Anthony Giddens, "On Rereading the Presentation of Self: Some Reflections, " Social Psychology Quarterly 72:4(2009): 290-95
63. and Goffman, The Presentation of Self.
64. Now with a rear-view image of the Soviet system, with all these things coming to the fore, we can start seeing without worrying if it is going to upset those who were complicit in their own repression.
65. Peter Larmour, Understanding Corruption in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming).
66. Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).
67. See the materials of the British Council Conference, "The Inner Life of Cultures, " Brussels, 25-26 Feb. 2010, at http://www.counterpoint-online.org/the-inner-lives-of-cultures-papers.
68. "Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness, " chap. 1 in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 3-4.