Property Rights In Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, And The Demand For Law

Interviewing business owners and managers in Russia in 2009, Jordan Gans-Morse would ask about the dangers of mafia rackets.“Mafia, please–that was so 1990s!” was the typical response. So much had changed since then, with businesses transitioning to state-sponsored rackets by the early 2000s (mentovskie kryshy rather than banditskie kryshy), and after that increasingly to the use of formal legal institutions. If the response to Gans-Morse’s question strikes you as unsurprising–and it might, if you have read the work of Kathryn Hendley and Vadim Volkov, among others–you might ask how this development was possible. After all, the transition to formal legal institutions has not proceeded uniformly across the postcommunist world.