Big Business and the State in Russia

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Notes

Elizabeth Teague writes in a personal capacity and the views expressed here should not be taken as representing the views of the British Government.

An early version of this article was delivered at the conference on ‘What type of capitalism in the post-socialist economies?’ organised by Professor David Lane and hosted by the Jean Monnet Centre and the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 12 March 2004. For helpful comments on earlier drafts the authors are indebted to participants in that conference to Duncan Allan, and to referees for this journal.

State capture denotes a situation where a set of narrow interests, such as a firm, uses corruption to shape the political and legal environment to its own advantage (Hellman et al., 2000).

The term ‘oligarch’ is widely used to refer to Russia's richest businessmen. In the sense of ‘rule by a few’, the term was perhaps briefly applicable in the mid-1990s. Today, however, that meaning is no longer appropriate. We have therefore preferred, when dealing with the recent period, to speak of ‘tycoons’ or ‘big businessmen’.

This section draws on Johnson (1995), Jones (2003), McCargo (2000), Sassoon (1997) and Stockwin (1999).

There is probably no corrupt practice that does not occur everywhere, even in Finland, but the evidence is that these practices really are less widespread in the countries that score well for Transparency International and for ‘corruption control’ in Kaufmann's governance measures. Mény & Rhodes (1997) point out that circumstances conducive to corruption can increase over time in any country. They cite, for example, the rising real cost of winning elections and, in Europe, the secretiveness and growing complexity of EU arrangements.

This is not meant to imply that such links have since vanished.

Not, for example, mobile telephone businesses.

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Notes on contributors

Philip Hanson

Elizabeth Teague writes in a personal capacity and the views expressed here should not be taken as representing the views of the British Government.