Corruption and Bribe

Relying on recently opened Soviet justice and party archives, this article explores contested notions of the bribe and official corruption in the Late Stalinist USSR (1945–1953). The article highlights the efforts of the rationalizing and modernizing Soviet state to impose its vision of a perfectly professional civil service onto traditional structures that often valued personal relationships between petitioners and officials.While tracing the interaction of gifts, the law, and social practices along "bribe trails,”
the research examines the important role of what I call
“cultural brokers.” Acting as intermediaries between cultures, or between institutional and traditional arrangements, these cultural brokers moved between one set of norms and practices that dominated on the Soviet periphery, and a very different set in the Imperial center of Moscow. The article examines intermediaries who represented non-Russian clients in the courts of Moscow, focusing on the case of the Soviet republic of Georgia. Cultural brokers bridged the chasm between legal cultures. Because of the multinational character of the empire, there was a great deal of demand for culturalbrokers in many spheres of social and economic life. In highlighting participants' initiative the research challenges stereotypes of a paralyzed Soviet society during Stalinism, just as it questions popular caricatures of the prototypically corrupt Soviet bureaucrat.

Since at least 2011, Azerbaijan has used artists and art institutions for propaganda purposes to a degree that is unequaled in the contemporary era. In the last decade, scores of artists and institutions have taken money from the brutal dictatorship of Azerbaijan to artwash its reputation. This is especially important to call attention to now, since Azerbaijan is actively engaged in ethnically cleansing and destroying millennia-old monuments, permanently robbing the world of a rich cultural record. To preserve endangered and invaluable artifacts, the art world needs to stop normalizing Azerbaijan’s monstrous behavior and start accepting responsibility for platforming despots. Any artist or cultural group that receives patronage or money from Azerbaijan is complicit with war crimes, oppression, and ethnic cleansing.

From service learning to implementation, this paper begins observational in nature and then transforms the researcher into an active participant/ artist.

"Peru can open your eyes and also make you want to shut them, but people need to see what is going on down here". Elena Valenzuela

One might think that bribery is always unethical. Studies by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development discourage the practice and a number of other studies have viewed bribery in negative terms. However, a closer examination of the issue reveals that the question of whether bribery is ethical or unethical is not so clear-cut in some cases. For example, bribing a prison guard to release a political prisoner who is being held by a corrupt or evil regime might constitute an ethical act. From a utilitarian ethical perspective, bribery would be acceptable in cases where there are more winners than losers. Another approach for determining ethical versus unethical bribery focuses on whether the recipient is a helping hand or greedy hand. Where the bribe goes to someone who facilitates commerce by cutting red tape or by performing a service for the bribe payer, some scholars have concluded that the bribe may be ethical. Those who merely take advantage of someone by abusing their authority have been viewed as acting unethically by soliciting a bribe.

"Based on fifteen in-depth interviews conducted in Riga between July and December 2000, this article is an attempt to decipher the ways in which people in contemporary Latvia integrate a negative attitude towards corruption with a simultaneous readiness to engage in corrupt activities.
The metaphor of ‘rotten talk’ describes the discourse of corruption though which the images and attitude towards corruption are communicated through members of the society. Since corrupt deals are almost exclusively closed by two persons, the actual practice of corruption is not available for observation to the anthropologist or to other members of society. Therefore ‘rotten talk’ is the only way in which one can obtain information about the practice of corruption.
In the core of ‘rotten talk’ are the images of blat system that were employed by people in Latvia during the Soviet period. People perceived the state as an active force that has created the situation of shortage and a set of obstacles to normal life. In such a situation blat was perceived as justified means to obtain the scarce resources. In most situations the network of blat a was obtained passively – those were relatives and friends one already had beforehand.
In contemporary discourse corruption in Latvia is often described by the same terms that were characteristic of blat networks. The agency, however, has changed and people now actively seek for ‘friends’ among state officials which they can use for their business needs. The process of obtaining ‘friends’ draws strongly on corruption. The success of this process, however, depends significantly on the capability of the bribe giver (or the originator of the corrupt relationship) to mask the relationship under the image of friendship.
At the same time, the image of an antagonistic state is also employed to strengthen the idea that one has to engage in corrupt activities. Just like in the case of blat, the state is pictured as the one that has created the situation in which the only possibility is to engage in corruption.
‘Rotten talk’, however, not only communicates images and attitudes but also reinforces the sense among contemporary Latvians that corruption ‘is everywhere’. Through these on-going conversations members of the society learn how to understand when a bribe is needed and how the bribe can be offered (or a more elaborated process of corruption managed). Simultaneously this ‘rotten talk’ leads to a situation when corruption is seen where there is none. This in turn results in growing distrust in the state system and readiness to engage in corruption. I argue also that the current activities of mass media, NGO’s and international organisations which increase awareness in the wide presence of corruption in Latvia, add-on to the ‘rotten talk’. This allows me to question the widely accepted assumption that free press always is an important factor in the fight against corruption."

http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300175257/art-bribe

Despite abundant interest in corruption and black markets during “late socialism” in the Soviet Union, scholars have neglected the archival study of the phenomenon of bribery in the Late Stalinist period. This study takes advantage of newly declassified archives of the Soviet State and Communist Party as the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union from World War II to the death of Stalin. Within the larger framework of official corruption, a study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, using social-historical approaches to examine it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. Thus, the Soviet case is evocative of societies around the world, even as it developed its own specificities.

Within this framework, The Art of the Bribe delves into the unrelenting tensions among official ideologies, popular attitudes, and customary practices that exposed by such “everyday corruption.” Everyday bribery is explored as a vehicle for investigating how individuals entered into “unofficial” relationships with officialdom, often to elude the arbitrary power of the Soviet state. The Art of the Bribe argues that bribery in the USSR was simultaneously enabling and disabling; it served as a source of stability in the near term, comprising a series of informal relationships facilitating the distribution of scarce goods and services via a huge “shadow economy.” Yet in the long term, bribery was a destabilizing factor, as widespread graft contributed to popular cynicism, eroding faith in the party’s ideological foundations and exacerbating inefficiencies in the economy.

Reviews:

“Corruption could be the most important of all the understudied topics in Soviet history, but James Heinzen has found a way to illuminate this dark terrain with brilliant research. His cogent analysis built upon startling archival finds enlarges the pioneering work of the great Gregory Grossman, and provokes a rethinking of Soviet legal machinery, the state, and the society.”

—Stephen Kotkin, Princeton University and author of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power


“A magnificently researched, archivally based study of bribery and corruption under high Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The analysis is carefully drawn, fully persuasive, and makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union and the comparative study of corruption and bribery.”

—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University


“In a stunning study that exposes the intricacies and intimacies of late Stalinism, James Heinzen demonstrates how bribery, embezzlement, and other forms of corruption were deployed in an economy of scarcity and a culture of gift-giving.  Bribery was not peripheral or alien to the Stalinist command economy but an essential consequence of the fatal combination of opportunities to steal, the necessity to make it, and cultural values that allowed for extra-legal behavior.  …Heinzen's study is bigger than its ostensible subject, for it gives a deeply textured view into how Soviet society actually worked.”

—Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan


“In Stalin’s Russia, where the party ruled every aspect of life, to give or take a bribe was to be human. Heinzen’s fascinating study shows how and why it was done.”

—Mark Harrison, University of Warwick

Abstract: This paper examines the effectiveness of using asymmetric liability to combat harassment bribes. Basu (2011) advocates legal immunity for bribe-givers, while retaining culpability for bribe-takers. Results from our experiment indicate that while this policy has the potential to significantly reduce corrupt practices, weak economic incentives for the bribe-giver, or retaliation by bribe-takers can mitigate the positive disciplining effect of such an implementation. As a result, asymmetric liability on its own may face challenges in the field.