581099

research-article2015

TCR0010.1177/1362480615581099Theoretical CriminologyKosals and Maksimova

Review article

Informality, crime and

corruption in Russia: A
review of recent literature

Theoretical Criminology
2015, Vol. 19(2) 278288
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480615581099
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Leonid Kosals

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

Anastasia Maksimova

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

A Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance,
Cambridge University Press: New York, 2013; 327 pp.: 9780521125635
G Favarel-Garrigues, Policing Economic Crime in Russia: From Soviet Planned Economy to
Privatization, Oxford University Press: New York, 2011; 288 pp.: 9780199327317
SN Inshakov (ed.), Theoretical Fundamentals of the Analysis of Latent Crime, UNITI-DANA:
Moscow, 2011; 839 pp.: 9785238021256 (.. (.),
, -: , 2011;
839 c.: 9785238021256)
GA Satarov (ed.), Russian Corruption: Level, Structure and Dynamics. Evidence from the Sociological
Surveys. Liberal Mission Foundation: Moscow, 2013; 752 pp.: 9785903135417 (
: , , : /
. .. , : , 2013; 752 .: 9785903135417)

Informality appears to be a systemic trait of Russian society: it intrudes into all major
social institutions and shapes the economy, politics, legal system and peoples daily life.
As a result a peculiar mismatch emerges between formal norms and laws and the actual
operation of institutions. To understand what is going on in Russia and other states in the
former Soviet Union knowledge of this dual reality is necessary; it is not enough to
know just the visible institutions but also their informal functioning.

Corresponding author:
Leonid Kosals, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Sociology, Department of Economic Sociology, National
Research University Higher School of Economics, Myasnitskaya ul., Moscow, Russia.
Email: lkosals@hse.ru

Kosals and Maksimova

279

Of course, informal relations and practices are fundamental features of any functioning
society. However, the Russian case is notable, because as much research shows informality
largely overtakes the formal institutional setting and shapes behavior within formal roles.
In this capacity, informality subverts and shifts the initially declared goals of institutions
and policies, and these then instead serve the ends of certain powerful actors and policymakers. Informality can in this way act as a catalyst and a breeding ground for corruption
and deviant behavior thus hampering political and economic development and institutional dynamism.1
We examine four recent books which analyze various aspects of informality in Russia.
The first book (Ledeneva, 2013), offers a systemic view of informality in Russia which
can help to understand how informality works and its role in decision making. The second
publication by Favarel-Garrigues (2011) lifts the veil on how a system of informality
emerged from the Soviet period through an analysis of the policing of economic crime in
Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The next book (Inshakov, 2011) provides some of the
strongest evidence of the distortion of institutional goals due to informal practices in
Russia. The authors describe latent crime figures and show that Russian law enforcement
agencies turn a blind eye to most crimes. Finally, in considering the issue of corruption
the authors in Satarov (2013) show how this broadly but paradoxically functions in classic
Russian-style as a fully informal yet also highly institutionalized phenomenon. This
peculiar manifestation of corruption helps the reader to understand the systemic character
of informality in Russia and its role as one of the major factors acting as a brake on
development.
The book Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance
by Ledeneva (2013) is one of a number of publications devoted to the analysis of the
model of the post-soviet capitalist system in Russia which try to explain the hidden
mechanisms of governance in the country (Darden, 2008; Kosals, 2007). It provides a
comprehensive picture of the role of informality in Russian society: from the provision
of public goods to the distribution of wealth. Ledenevas research is based on a wide
range of empirical data, which include interviews with insiders of this sistema, court
cases and observations. The author uncovers double standards within these data and
reveals the inner structure of the sistema, explaining patterns of its informal power.
But what is the sistema according to Ledeneva? A system of what? Clearly, the book
is about how governance operates, in particular during the reign of Vladimir Putin, at the
head of Russian government for 15 years now. But Ledeneva intentionally omits any
specification in regard to the term sistema as this enables a nice ambiguity and invites
us to think of what the meaning of this term is for different parties, both outsiders and
insiders. Yet, descriptively the sistema emerges into view through a range of informal
networks that shape and maintain it. The author points out that an exact analysis of the
networks sheds light on how private relationships influence governance. Regarding proximity to political and economic leaders, Ledeneva distinguishes an inner circle, core
contacts, useful friends and mediated contacts, which perform different functions in
supporting the sistema. Thus, the inner circle sets the agenda and backs up the informal
activities of its participants, while core contacts ensure policy implementation through
creating a safety net of loyal and interested people. Less proximate groupsuseful friends
and mediated contactshelp to control resources and support the stability of the sistema.

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These networks simultaneously serve the system and the private interests of its participants. Such a result emerges from the specific patterns that give power to the system.
First of all, loyalty and even obedience to the leader plays far more an important role than
professionalism within the system, as it provides safety and impunity for most actions.
But social ties that can serve here as a highly effective means for social mobility, at the
same time compromise those people who utilize them for such a goal. Such people obtain
levers of power, but in return they are forced to serve their patrons and forfeit freedom in
decision making. Those who get resources (for example for business) through social ties
also stay dependent and vulnerable, as it is impossible to completely legalize them. Such
complementarity between informal deals and interests complicates the provision of
public goods, but supports the stability of the system and enhances the systems control
over the private corporate sector. Therefore it prevents any possible modernization of
Russian governance.
A fascinating conclusion to the book concerns the functionality of the sistema. To
put it bluntly, it works, says Ledeneva. It motivates people providing incentives that they
truly want. In contrast to the Soviet system, where people served an ideology, in Putins
Russia the system provides privileges and opportunities for wealth accumulation. But
this effectiveness is illusory, as primarily it orients governance toward a short-term
perspective at the expense of long-term goals. The system falls into a modernization
trap of informality, in other words informal ties lead to negative consequences for
institutional development, such as undermining the rule of law and decreasing the security
of property rights. There are important characteristics of the sistema then that prevent
the modernization of Russia and foment conflict in the globalized international
economy.
Over and above this original argument, the book does a fine job of combining previous
studies of Russian informality. Its unique selling point is explaining the detailed mechanism, the incentives and opportunities embedded in the network structures, behind the
sistema, and thus the difficulties Russia faces to modernize as well as contributing to
our understanding of how Russia really works.
One element that Ledeneva chooses not to focus on is the question of the historical
roots of modern Russian informality. They might largely be found in the Soviet past and
the nature of the economic reforms during the collapse of the Soviet system. This conclusion
follows from the book Policing Economic Crime in Russia: From Soviet Planned
Economy to Privatization by Gilles Favarel-Garrigues (2011).
This book is devoted to advancing understanding of how the nature of economic
crime and forms of combating it were changing from Soviet times through the reform
period of the 1980s known as perestroika and finally to the new period of Russian capitalism. The term economic crime in the book is used as an umbrella term for an entire
group of offenses that, in some regard, were economic in nature or against property. Such
offenses, found across all chapters of the Soviet Criminal Code were frequently used for
political purposes. The actual goal of going after certain forms of economic crime was
never declared openly and formally but instead was governed by opaque incentives and
informal mechanisms that favored particular groups in the Soviet and Russian elite.
By paying attention to the policing of economic crime in the Soviet period, FavarelGarrigues explores the roots of the informal economy in post-Soviet Russia through a

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281

historical lens. This gives the book its essential value; there is a lack of rigorous,
academic empirical research which includes both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
There are a few studies about informal relations, corruption and the informal economy in
the USSR (Feldbrugge, 1984; Grossman, 1977; Katsenelinboigen, 1977; Simis, 1982)
and a lot of research about such topics in the post-Soviet period (see Clarke, 1995;
Galligan and Kurkchiyan, 2003; Grdeland, 2007; Ledeneva, 2006; Lehmann and
Muravyev, 2012; McCann, 2000; McMylor et al., 2000; Oleinik, 2004; Round et al.,
2008; Wedel, 2005). Favarel-Garrigues analysis of the Soviet period, perestroika and the
beginning of radical economic reforms, the massive privatization of the early and
mid-1990s and its consequences, provided an appropriate methodological lens for a deep
understanding of many current Russian complexities in the policing of the economy. The
book clearly shows that the situation in Russian society in the beginning of the 1990s had
consistent continuities with Soviet times. Yet, this left us with a certain questionwere
some of these continuities by design? As the author writes:
one of the aims of the book is to explain why changes in this domain (i.e. police and other law
enforcement agencies) were restricted to partial institutional measures, and why penal policy
generally adhered to the Soviet model long after the collapse of the USSR.
(p. 5)

It feels at times that the book describes the situation in Russia as somehow planned out
by political elites. In contrast the literature on the transition period usually underlines
the chaos in the political sphere that impacted heavily on most events (Shleifer and
Treisman, 2001).
Leaving this question to one side, the narrative is based on a wide range of empirical
data from 1965 to the mid-1990s. It includes analyses of speeches of leaders, field
research in the Sverdlovskaya region in the Ural Mountains, media materials, regional
archives of reports on economic crime, analytical articles and more. It also provides a
large number of real cases of informal practices that were ingrained in society during the
whole period, providing much needed historical perspective on the type of sistema that
the work of Ledeneva is concerned about in the present day.
The book starts with an overview of a whole range of illegal activities that took place,
as Gregory Grossman (1977: 26) outlined in a classic early study, in every sector of the
Soviet economy. Among these are speculation, corruption, moonlighting and accounting
frauds. The Prosecutors Office, the Interior Ministry and the KGB struggled with one or
another economic crime depending on its nature and gravity. Additional special forces
policed these illegal activities. These included social and economic surveillance bodies
such as the druzhiny (peoples volunteer detachments), Peoples Control Committees,
Party Control Committees and the Finance Ministrys Control and Revision Department.
The interviews conducted by the author, as well as previous research, indicate that these
additional policing forms enhanced the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies
providing civilian support for the professional law enforcement agencies. However,
these non-professional crime-fighters often were inexperienced in law and legal issues
and professionals could easily manipulate their activities and use them for the sake of
alternative goals.

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In later chapters the author describes change in the political sphere, law enforcement
structure, penal policy and the types of economic criminal activities many of which
became public knowledge due to Gorbachevs policy of openness or glasnost in the late
1980s. New media freedom heightened fear of crime and increased the already high
distrust in the police within Russian society. The government responded to this with the
creation of new law enforcement institutionsanti-organized-crime departments and the
tax police.
The book frequently turns to the question of the effectiveness of the police during the
whole period under examination. An interesting question here is whether Russian law
enforcement agencies ever had a clear mission to fight economic crime? Another question
is whether they actually have been able to ever fulfill such kinds of duties. The author
shows that police officers, as street-level bureaucrats who work within certain formal
frameworks, have had to satisfy not only citizens but also orders from above, and meet
new legislation and performance criteria. Frequently these goals could contradict each
other. Due to the bureaucratic form of the police organization, officers were involved in
a wide spectrum of informal activities including the faking of performance indicators
and the extortion of confessions. They also only dealt with the easiest and most accessible
offences.
The book argues that especially after perestroika, when new illegal and legal economic
activities arose such as cooperatives, individual entrepreneurship and new organized
criminal groups, police officers faced serious difficulties. New legislation, including a
revised Criminal Code, was imperfect and contained a lot of loopholes. Policemen faced
enormous difficulties in interpreting laws during the second half of the 1980s. That old
boy selling the handmade basketsdo we congratulate him for his individual labor or
punish him for unearned income? (per satirical magazine Krokodil in August 1987).
Moreover, everything a police officer knew about new economic crimes was learned
from laws or other legal documents, they had no specialized training:
One police officer in six has no idea how he is supposed to deal with the greater independence
in accounting and financial matters granted to cooperatives and individual labor activity; 56%
are unsure of their duties in these circumstances. Only one third of the officers questioned said
they were capable of working effectively in the present context. Police officers skills had been
a source of concern long before the development of the cooperative sector, but the problem was
considerably exacerbated by the emergence of the private economy.
(pp. 234235)

This situation of ambiguity eroded the polices sense of professionalism and granted
police officers higher discretionary power simultaneously. As a result, the Soviet police
found themselves in conditions favorable for taking part in the informal economy.
Finally, the book contains a chapter concerning police responses to privatization of
business in Russia. This is particularly well done and of special interest. The author
provides a comprehensive picture of the polices response to new challenges. The police
was not ready to deal with new forms of private economic activity such as the cooperatives
in the late 1980s. Yet, this was just a prelude of things to come. The chapter analyzes the
many ways in which the privatization of state assets occurred in Russia after the collapse

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of the Soviet Union. This included spontaneous privatization, the so-called komsomol
economy (new small enterprises established by the officials of the youth communist
organization), and auctions and tenders. In all this, police officers largely played the
role of spectator in the emergence of Russian capitalism. This generated a feeling of
frustration and alienation which further served as a background to worsening police
corruption.
In summary then, in contrast to Ledeneva, Favarel-Garrigues broadens the focus of
the question of informality away from Russian political and economic elites. He gives us
a thorough grounding for understanding both the informal practices, including widespread corruption, of the average Russian police officer in the present day as well as a
genealogy of the informal practices engaged in by economic actors from the old boy
selling the basket to the directors of large enterprises.
Many of the practices engaged in by the officers and economic actors of FavarelGarrigues study might be termed corruption. Russia, and other former Soviet states, has
an infamous reputation for this problem. A recently published study by Georgii Satarov
and his colleagues from the INDEM Foundation (Information Science for Democracy),
Russian Corruption: Level, Structure and Dynamics. Evidence from the Sociological
Surveys (2013), provides us with a comprehensive picture of Russian corruption in the
2000s. The study, the result of a productive collaboration of Russian scholars, uses an
impressive empirical base. This includes four representative sociological surveys, two of
the general population and two of business people, conducted twice, once in 2001 and
once in 2005. The study also includes data from a general population poll in 2010. Thus
this is a longitudinal study that provides us with a dynamic view of corruption and its
changing nature in Russia.
Corruption in Russia has been a hot topic for international academic research for the
last couple of decades. There is a huge body of academic literature about corruption
which covers both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Tsarist to Soviet and
post-Soviet Russia (see, inter alia, Chwalba, 2001; Heinzen, 2009; Holmes, 2012; Satter,
2004; Wedel, 2005). This literature argues that though a high level of corruption is far
from an exclusively Russian phenomenon, Russias peculiarity in this question is the
social embeddedness and culture of corruption and how this impacts on the state machine
and undermines the function of government (Shlapentokh, 2003).
What distinguishes the work of Satarov and his colleagues from the hundreds
and even thousands of publications about corruption in Russia? First of all, it utilizes a
rigorous methodology and high-quality sociological datasets. The data were specially
collected to study corruption in Russia over several waves of this longitudinal project
and included more than 8000 respondents selected randomly in all federal districts
excluding the North Caucasus.
To analyze and interpret the data on corruption the authors construct a special term:
the market of corruption. They divided corruption into two main parts, daily corruption
among the general population, and business corruption among business people. They
then analyzed these two various markets of corruption. They studied demand and supply
for corrupt dealings, variations in the two different markets, as well as conflicting trends.
The authors mention the institutionalization of corruption several times (see, for example, pp. 468, 470, 474), however they leave a theoretical analysis of the implications of

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this for future research (p. 742). Therefore, what appears a promising theoretical
constructthe market of corruptionis not fully thrashed out in the book. We believe
it would be possible to develop a more appropriate understanding and investigation of
this term in the context of the studies of illegal markets (Beckert and Wehinger, 2013;
Bouchard and Wilkins, 2010; Bruinsma and Bernasco, 2004). In particular, the book
leaves open the question of exactly what the institutionalization of corruption actually
means for these markets of corruption in terms of its regulation and governance.
Such a research agenda opens up thanks to the many valuable empirical findings in
this book. For example, the book tells us that the percentage of people paying bribes is
actually unchanged in the period 20012010 and includes around half of the surveyed
respondents (p. 284). The risk of engaging in daily corruption has grown slightly, but the
demand for corruption (willingness to pay a bribe) has dramatically decreased. This
stood at 74.7 percent of respondents in 2001 and fell to 47.3 percent in 2010 alongside
the intensity of corruption (average number of bribes paid by bribe-givers per year),
which has declined from 1.19 in 2001 to 0.76 in 2010. Simultaneously, the average size
of a bribe measured in rubles increased three-fold, from 1,800 to 5,300 rubles; but when
measured as percentage of the cost of living, the average bribe decreased, from 121
percent to 93 percent. The percentage of the market of daily corruption in GDP decreased
from 0.95 percent to 0.42 percent (p. 285).
Analyzing business corruption the authors found different trends. Though the percentage
of bribe-givers remained unchanged among the surveyed business people for the period
20012005 (8182 percent) and the intensity of bribe-giving has shrunk from 2.2 to 1.8
times per year, the average size of a bribe has grown by 12 times and reached 3.9 million
rubles in 2005. As a result the market of business corruption in Russia according to the
authors estimates rocketed from one trillion to nine trillion rubles (p. 314) or 11 percent
of total Russian GDP in 2001 to 54 percent in 2005. Accordingly, they estimate the
market of corruption to have grown from 34 to 318 billion dollars in current US dollars.
These tremendous figures of the true market of business corruption and its unbelievably
high percentage of GDP mean that the authors treat business corruption as a sector of the
Russian economy (p. 321).
It should be noted though that the authors present some alternative estimations of the
size of business corruption: based on firms output they calculated the size of the market
as 70 billion dollars in 2005. This is 4.5 times lower than the alternative figure of 318
billion dollars. Further still, we took Saratovs figures and calculated the size of business
corruption using purchasing power parity (the commonly accepted method for crosscountry comparisons of GDP). We arrived at a figure of 138 billon dollars. Though these
alternative figures are very high too, these estimations suggest debate is needed as to the
most accurate measures of the market for corruption.
The authors consider why there has been such fast growth in the market for business
corruption. Analyzing their data they make two interesting conclusions. First, according
to the opinion of surveyed business people the economic cost of lawful behavior is much
higher than that for corrupt behavior. This is because of rapid bureaucratization and
extra-regulation emerging during the 20012005 period as a product of Putins strong
state policy and the return of the state to the economy. This trend especially strengthened
after the arrest of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. Second, heads of

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firms treat the high costs of corruption as unimportant because they accept it as a strategy
for problem-solving. Only 7 percent of business people saw the costs of corruption as an
issue for their business against 16 percent who saw the costs of legality as an obstacle in
2001. These figures stood at 15 percent and 25 percent respectively in 2005 (p. 530). In
other words, it is perceived as costlier for ordinary businessmen to follow legal norms
than to move into the market of corruption.
The authors argue that the roots of this situation lie in the political change during Putins
presidency, resulting in a sharp decline of control over bureaucracy, the elimination of
political opposition and the suppression of independent media and NGOs. Of course, the
general population and business people take on certain moral costs when engaging in
corruption and the authors provided a detailed description. However, they argue that while
those who pay bribes may suffer some moral damage, this damage is not substantial.
In conclusion, this book provides strong evidence for the systemic, widespread nature
of corruption in Russia through all strata of society and business. Going beyond
Ledenevas and Favarel-Garrigues accounts of informality in Russian social and
economic life, this book also asks how Russians see a way out of corruption and the
sistema. Analyzing respondents opinions of the causes of corruption, the authors find
that more than half the general population and more than 60 percent of business people
see the causes as systemic. Russians, according to these data, believe that anti-corruption
policies must impact the socioeconomic conditions which generate corruption rather
than simply punishing people involved in corruption.
Yet, even prosecuting crime and punishing criminal behavior is a fraught process in
todays Russia as our last book shows. This study, Theoretical Fundamentals of the
Analysis of Latent Crime (2011) was produced by a group of scholars affiliated with the
research unit of the General Prosecutors Office. This unit has conducted research for
more than a decade since 2001 and the book contains empirical data for the period
20022009.
Research on latent crime in post-Soviet Russia initially started in the Ministry of
Interior in cooperation with international scholars at the very beginning of the 1990s.
The first study presented figures that showed that the majority of crime was hidden and
uninvestigated (Alvazzi del Frate and Goryainov, 1994). Such studies were conducted on
the basis of a well-grounded research methodology developed by international scholars,
utilizing victimization surveys, expert polls and analyses of official statistics. However,
in the 2000s the Russian Ministry of Interior became inactive in conducting such studies
of latent crime.
The authors of this new book use similar methodology as in the early 1990s. This is a
huge volume which is full of data, tables and figures about the level of crime. Its main
value is a concrete estimation of latent crime of all kinds: violent crime; theft; hate crime;
crimes against the state and so on. Moreover, the authors systematically estimate
dynamics of latent crime of all kinds during the 2000s comparing it with registered crime.
These data occupied a major part of the monograph, almost 400 pages of 840 in total.
The authors reveal that an overwhelming number of crimes are latent and only 12
percent of total crimes are registered by the police and included in the official statistics
presented by the Russian Ministry of Interior. They reported that near three million
crimes were registered and 23 million were latent according to their research in 2009.

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Theoretical Criminology 19(2)

Even in the case of crimes such as homicide, which should be easy to detect, there is still
a very high level of latency (see Lysova and Shchitov, this issue). Moreover, one of the
most significant latent crimes is corruption. According to the authors estimation only 1.3
percent of the total number of bribes was registered in Russia at the end of the 2000s. As
we discussed in reviewing Saratovs (2013) book above, widespread corruption undermines government, distorts markets and demoralizes people: in Russia there has been no
improvement in tackling this phenomenon.
Explaining this abnormally high level of crime the authors test many factors such
as the low living standards of the population, the high level of inequality, the rise of
unemployment, negative trends in migration, alcoholism and anomie. However, they do
not focus on the distortion of the political system or the low level of democratic pressure
on the criminal justice system to investigate the size of unregistered crime itself. Such
political factors can potentially improve the quality of criminal justice agencies, promote
the necessary reforms to protect social order and at least decrease the level of latency of
crime. In other words, in contrast to our other publications, the authors underestimate the
systemic elements that produce such a high latent crime level.
We argue that two concepts might have high explanatory power to improve understanding of this phenomenon: competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way, 2010)
and the notion of the predatory state (Duvanova, 2013; Moselle and Polak, 2001), and in
particular the sub-category within this of predatory police (see Light et al., this issue;
Gerber and Mendelson, 2008). Competitive authoritarian regimes, ones that maintain a
faade of democracy, care about their image and push agents to generate a picture of
constantly decreasing crime. Meanwhile a system of predatory policing creates material
incentives for police officers to refuse to register crimes and to fake performance
(Paneyakh, 2014) in return for rents (bribes). The informal activities of police officers
actually replace the overriding organizational goal of the police. The criminal justice
system serves the interests of an image-obsessed state, which in turn buys compliance
from the police through allowing bribe-taking. In this systemic informal arrangement,
public security suffers. Informality itself then is a big part of understanding why so few
crimes go unregistered.
In conclusion, then, these publications provide a deep and wide understanding of
the issue of informality in Russia. Informality impacts everything from the level of
unreported and unregistered crime, to everyday business transactions or dealings with
the police, to the very workings of the political system at an elite level. In some cases,
this informality blurs with corruption and straightforward criminal behavior. The recent
studies reviewed here show just how big this problem remains in Russia.
The four publications reviewed here all show how informality is embedded in current
Russian society. This widespread phenomenon is not just some simple divergence from an
ideal type western model. It is a sistema widely accepted by the Russian public and
perceived as normal practice. This brings us to normative questions about modern Russian
society. This society is not transitional any more. It has developed an equilibrium that includes
a range of informal practices, understandings and norms (see Kupatadze, this issue).
However, at the same time this equilibrium is not sustainable and is susceptible to manipulation by well-organized, powerful groups. We feel that where scholars now lack knowledge
is precisely about such groups. We need to disaggregate Russian society and understand the

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287

various social and economic groups that exist and the variation in their values, attitudes and
relations with law enforcement agencies and government. It is a challenging task to fill this
gap but it would help us understand where the sources of change might emerge.
Funding
This article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program
at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

Note
The authors thank Gavin Slade and Matthew Light for valuable comments and suggestions for
improving an earlier draft of this article.
1. Of course, informality can play a positive role in the development of entrepreneurship
and enable peoples daily survival (Demirgc-Kunt et al., 2011) as well as creating new
professional roles (Gluch, 2009). However, in this review we would like to focus on the
specific role of informality as an enhancer of the deviations in Russia.

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Author biographies
Leonid Kosals, is a Professor in the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia and Sessional
Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto,
Canada. The focus of his current research is on informality and corruption, in particular in the law
enforcement agencies in comparative perspective. He widely published on topics in economic
sociology and criminology in Russian, English and other languages.
Anastasia Maksimova, Assistant Professor in the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia,
where she received her PhD and studied police culture and corruption in the post-socialist countries.