Power, Personalism, and Provisioning in Russian History

No wonder the Soviets liked politekonomiia so much: in Russia, as these two books remind us, the constituent elements of this discipline have been impossibly hard to disentangle. Tamara Kondratieva and Alena Ledeneva both explore the interpenetration in Russia of politics and economics, and both attach particular importance to social practices rather than policy formation or macroeconomic trends. Beyond this common ground, however, their two books could hardly be more different. Kondratieva's book is a work on the grand chronological scale: it argues for broad connections in Russian politico-economic culture between the Muscovite court of the 16th and 17th centuries and the various courts of the "red tsars" of the 20th century. Ledeneva's study, although it, too, has recourse to historical arguments in a few places, is an ethnography of post-Soviet politics and business that draws its main body of primary material from interviews conducted in 1998–99.

Both authors lived long enough in the Soviet Union that they possess abundant local knowledge, but they also departed Russia long enough ago to have accumulated a substantial theoretical toolkit in their new intellectual homes. Kondratieva left the Soviet Union for France in 1974, while Ledeneva moved to Britain in the early 1990s. In one case, the primary sources of inspiration are Paul Ricoeur and Marc Bloch; in the other, Pierre Bourdieu and Ludwig Wittgenstein are to the fore. Both authors fully understand the value of "going native," but they also resist any tendency to pigeonhole Russia as irrational or otherwise inaccessible to methods of investigation that have worked on other places.

In both works, however, Russia remains noteworthy—"exceptional," if anyone still dares use that word—for its heavy reliance on informal practices for establishing and maintaining authority, transacting business, and getting all manner of other things done. Ranging from the boardroom to the tsar's banquet table, these books consistently show unwritten norms trumping or circumventing formal rules, face-to-face interaction counting more than performance indicators, and opacity triumphing over transparency.

Even if all this is accurate, it leaves us with an intellectual conundrum: how does one historicize—or otherwise make interesting—the quintessential? Is there any way of talking about informal practices in Russia, and about the cross-contamination of economics and politics, that does not amount to hand-wringing or reiterating truisms? Can we ultimately say anything more than that Russia is still ambling along those Muscovite folkways?

To her great credit, Tamara Kondratieva has found a way of breathing historiographical life into these questions. The theme of her short and elegant book is stated clearly by the Foucauldian paired infinitives of her title: she is interested in the ways in which, over the last five centuries or so, the function of exercising power in Russia has been bound up with that of securing and bestowing food. For researchers focused on the Soviet 1930s, perhaps, Foucault's original Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) might seem a better choice, but Gouverner et nourrir makes a great deal of sense in Kondratieva's exposition.

In the introduction to the Russian edition of her book, Kondratieva recalls that she originally wanted to reverse the order of her infinitives and call the book Nourrir et gouverner. She was persuaded not to by her publisher and her colleagues, who argued that French readers would not understand the title: brought up in the republican tradition of the social contract, they would expect this to be a study of the ways in which government organized the provisioning of society. The role of government, according to this view...