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Alena Ledeneva, "Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns" (UCL Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Ileana Levineva
So good, so good, so good.
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Adam Quinn
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi everyone. Just a brief note before we start today's podcast. As we touch on in the interview, each chapter in Ileana's book is accompanied by a work of art and a musical composition by Benjamin Woodgates. We've included links to an open access PDF of the book and the Benjamin's album in the show notes. I'd really encourage everyone to have a look at the art in the book and listen to the accompanying music. There's also a link to a fantastic review that especially for those who might be a little less musically minded really brings to light just how Benjamin's work engages with Ilyana's insight on Russia. Hope everyone enjoys the podcast. So, hi everybody and welcome. I'm your host, Adam Quinn, and here today with me is Eleona Levineva, who is professor of Politics and Society at the University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project. Her research focuses on informal practices and she has written several books, including Russia's Economy of How Russia Really Works and Can Russia Modernize? The Global Informality Project has also published three volumes of its Global Encyclopedia of Informality. Adjana is here today to talk about her new book, Russian Pendulum, which is out in 2026 with UCL Press and has been shortlisted for the 2026 Pushkin House book Prize. Alyona, it's great to have you with us today.
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Ileana Levineva
Yes, thank you. Hello everyone.
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Adam Quinn
Thank you. And I thought I'd just start with asking. It's been 13 years since your last Russia specific book and then during that time you've been launched and been heavily involved with the Global Informality Project. What interested to know what brought you back to the Russian field now and where this book sits within your broader work on Russia and incorporating these global informal practices.
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Ileana Levineva
Thank you, Adam. It indeed has been a while since I worked on Russia and I thought the trilogy on Russia that I have completed in 2013 was enough. On my part, I've done a exploration of informal networks and the ways they work in the first book at the level of everyday practices, in the second book at the level of politics and business kind of professional networks. And the third book, can Russia Modernize in 2013 was about how informal networks were used for governance within the Kremlin, as it were. And I expected that that would be the end of era, certainly the end of Putin's system, because it was constitutionally the two terms that President Putin could have in Russia. And from 2008 to 2012 it was President Medvedev who had a modernization agenda, anti anti corruption agenda as part of his project. He was the one who started conversations about European security and openness to European partners. And that was 2012, when Putin came back quite unexpectedly and also in sort of a swap of the positions with President Medvedev, rather undemocratically, I would say. And at that point I felt very strongly that I have no longer no more to add to the study of systema that I had done. So what I've done instead I decided to look at the informality all over the globe and I launched the Global Informality Project partly driven by the fact that a lot of people perceive Russia as being unique, somewhat too big, too cold, too extreme in terms of time zones covered, and maybe also too informal. And I was really interested to see what's happening elsewhere and how does Russia compare. So in a way, my departure from the Russian studies field was still driven by interest to where Russia could be placed in a wider context vis a vis its informal practices and the ways of how Russia really worked, but also by a comparative drive. So Global Informality Project was launched in 2020, and it really started originally with just one in a tree, which was my own, on the study of blood or the use of personal contacts for getting things done in Russia. Blood being spelled as B L, a T, which is easy to remember, as bacon, lettuce and tomato. And it was a very common practice which people very often didn't even differentiate from social relationships or friendships, because if you are friends, you help your other friend. And what I was looking for is something like that in other societies. So the first person who actually contributed to the project was someone who worked on Kambi Navania in Poland, which was a very similar type of thing, the use of personal networks for getting things done. And now, so many years on, we have three volumes of the encyclopedia and the digital database and a lot of interesting research activities that are happening around global informality.
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Adam Quinn
I was going to ask this later on, but I think it's perhaps pertinent to touch on it now, having spent that time looking at these global, the wider patterns of informal practices at a global level. Why do you think it is that Russia continues to be sort of exoticized and viewed as this impenetrable, unknowable system when or if a lot of the practices are not specific to Russia itself?
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Ileana Levineva
Well, it's an excellent question. I don't really know if it was in fact exoticized. I think the problem that the world might have in Russia is that Russia objectively is very big so, and very complex. So what we have there is not just Kremlin equals Moscow and Moscow equals Russia. And everything that we could read in the media about, you know, the Kremlin and Moscow actually qualifies for Russia. It's not like that. When you look at the work of well known political scientists in Russia, what you discover that there are at least 80 plus regional regimes which do not work like the Kremlin does and certainly do not necessarily work in a similar way to each other. And once you get closer to understanding of what's happening in Russia, it just becomes too complex and too big to embrace. And having said that, I think my latest book is trying to do exactly that, do something quite challenging, which is to cover all that complexity in a very short book, which I think has been unprecedented in the sense that, you know, it took me three volumes of, you know, in Russian trilogy to cover even one aspect, which is the workings of informal networks in Russia. And that about thousands of pages. And here I am trying to cover everything there is to know about Russia in 150. But I do it, I suppose, with all the wisdom that the Global Informality Project has given me and all the possible shortcuts that I have come up with in order to make it manageable. And here, of course, I mean art and music and references to other people's research and data that already exist online and easy to chase. So I use quite a lot of shortcuts and cross references to be able to shrink the material in a form that would be easy for students to read. And I think that was, in a way, my ambition, because my students who I teach, they always complain that we allocate too much reading to them. There are too many articles, the books are too, too big. And I thought, well, then let's do something together. And I used that network expertise and team working way to try and create a manageable text, something that would be comprehensive and yet shot.
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Adam Quinn
And that's. You sort of touched on it there. One of the ways in which the book deals with this complexity is through the use of art and music. And so each, each chapter is accompanied with an artwork created by yourself and then a piece of music composed by Benjamin Woodgate. You sort of touched on there about why, why these creative methods and what do they add to one's understanding of what each chapter argues and puts forward?
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Ileana Levineva
Well, I think originally, I must say, the art collections that I made, it was not related to Russia or the book originally. So for me, it was the way to cope with the complexity of informality in the whole world. As I was working on the Global Informality Project, I've been overwhelmed by the material, the richness of it, the context, which sometimes I didn't know, but the fact that I had assembled so much material that it was problematic how to structure and organize it within the published volumes that I wanted to do. Because originally I thought, oh, I do Encyclopedia A to Z. And only then I realized I cannot do A to Z because all the entries in the project are in the language of origins, then not so many people speak. And it is exactly because I looked at those jargons, vernaculars, the local ways of referring to practices that work in the language of participants, not the categories that observers might come up with trying to describe them. I wanted to keep those names for practices which are fundamentally a local know how and the local knowledge. But then the A to Z principle makes no sense. So you have to come up with another way of organizing the encyclopedia. And what I came up with is this question, what is the case of. And then all my practices that have arrived from researchers from all over the world, I had to think about and categorized according to some inner human need that they satisfied or domain of human action. Like, for example, you know, whether it's the case of a market exchange, community exchange, power exchange or redistribution exchange. So I would put them, you know, on the floor in different corners and see how piles grow, see which practices seem to be the case of the same pattern. And that's how the structure grew. It grew bottom up, literally, you know, on the carpet by piling the material into what Wittgenstein would called, you know, family resemblance. It's not that those practices are totally identical, but they certainly have something in common. So I've organized this clustering system which is actually now captured in the first two volumes of the encyclopedia and the table of contents where you find interesting patterns emerging, you know, which I call, you know, patterns of ambivalence. Because the first part is organized, for example, around the idea of ambivalence in social relationships, how we could have a relationship and also use the relationship and that kind of blurred boundary where whether you are parents and children or relatives or friends, people are in the relationships which gets continued and reproduced through certain reciprocal exchanges of attention, of help, of mutual help, and sometimes favors. And that's where my own research into the practices of blood has become so instrumental, because I could see it easily in Russia that people felt that people felt they are friends, but they would go out of the way to help their friends, thus giving competitive advantage to them over other people who didn't have friends, for example. And of course that is a dodgy territory, right? Because, you know, for what could be friendship for one person would be a use of blood and competitive advantage for another, sometimes unfair advantage. So you have the kind of whole new informal inequalities that are emerging in a society which is very often gets unknown. And why, for example, it came so prominent, I mean, it's universally applicable, you know, every country has it. Absolutely. And in part one of the first volume of the encyclopedia, we've actually assembled a solid collection from all over the world as to what the colloquial names for similar practices are. But it's interesting that all of them have got that fundamental pattern of redistributing what you have access to. So it's basically sharing. You know, sharing is caring. And that's a very fundamental pattern, which is of course ambivalent because I think George Orwell in in his work has best captured it with a concept of double think. So what we think being friendship for us is actually a use of competitive advantage for others. And that ambivalence of the double think where, you know, we think about ourselves one thing, but about the others another thing, and somehow it coexist without any contradiction in human psyche. Plus, I would say this automatic perception and acceptance of double standards is also quite interesting because what we allow ourselves, we very often don't allow others.
- [21:17]
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Yes.
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Ileana Levineva
Good.
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Adam Quinn
It's interesting to hear you talk about how this goes like beyond just physical capital, but also like social capital in our everyday relations with others. You took you touched a lot on ambivalence there and this is one of the key sort of prism that your new book adopts here the prism of ambivalence. Could you just talk a little about what sociological ambivalence is and why this is so essential to understanding Russia as it is?
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Ileana Levineva
Well, maybe we should just quickly say that ambivalence generally comes from social psychology. And the original term ambivalence has been invented in 1918, I think, by a Belgian psychologist. His name escapes me at the moment. Whereas sociological ambivalence and what it means basically in social psychology is love, hate, relationship. So which is to say humans are capable of experiencing emotions which are contradictory to each other at the same time, like in love, hate, relationships. Sociological ambivalence was theorized by a famous American sociologist, Robert Merton, who has suggested that actually there are some social roles that put you in a position of conflicting pressures. For example, if you're a doctor, you're supposed to be sympathetic and compassionate with a patient, and yet also absolutely detached and expertly in your outlook for this particular case and diagnosis. So that kind of clash calls for an oscillating behavior. So when the patient come into the room, the doctor might be smiling and engaging in a social way, but once the actual examination takes place, the doctor turns into a cold blooded expert whose objectivity is essential for diagnosing directly and correctly. Right. So Merton has come up with different rules which actually cause for this ambivalence and oscillating behavior, saying that it's social pressure that comes from opposing directions, that squeezes an individual to try and accommodate two. So it's like being the master, being the servant of two masters. Right? So you try to serve each one, and hence your position becomes ambivalent. The way I use the term ambivalence certainly stems from the Merton's interpretation. So it's sociological, but it also is informed by what Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel laureate in literature, an emigrate from Russia, has famously said. He said ambivalence is a key characteristic of my nation. Talking about Russians, talking about Russians living under the system of omnipresent control, from above, from below, under peer pressure, sort of squeezed by the oppressive systems, not just political and ideological, but also economic and social. So that kind of oscillation, or double think, also spoken about by George Oro, comes from the necessity to pit in the public space and show that you belong and create those kind of facades of compliance, if not compliance with the system, but also preserving some degrees of freedom in your private domain. So famously, in the Russian folklore, there is a difference between the way you speak in the kitchen and the way you speak in the public. And that's just too categorically different things. And somehow they absolutely are non problematically coexist in one's head, although they are conflicting. But what one does one oscillate between those regimes. What I discovered though in my research is that it's not necessarily ambi. So it's not necessarily ambivalences or oscillating between two polarities like pendulums do. It could also be multipolar. And that certainly is true. And it's so complex, bound and sometimes very hard to pin down. But I would say maybe one example that I could give of that is, let me go back to this idea of blood that I have already explained, that it's the use of personal contacts for getting things done. And very often it is viewed as subversive of the communist regime because effectively what blood practices have done, they created, they reinserted market mechanisms and flexibility in the system that was supposed to be top down, planned, organized, with very little flexibility for its subjects. So you were supposed to be the nut and the bold of the communist system, working together for a better future. And here you've got some ideologically unsavory exchanges of favors that would bring in western goods into the Soviet Union, subvert the socialist values, you know, give access to the music and jazz, which was not really approved by the system. It would really be subversive on many levels, ideologically, politically, also economically. However, the question is what would happen if there was no alternative mechanism such as blood? Would the regime actually survive as long as 70 years of the communist regime? And the answer is no. Of course, blood has subversed the regime, but it also has supported its reproduction throughout that period because people felt it was tolerable to live due to the blood exchanges and other informal practices that existed. So in a way, that idea that the practice could be both subversive and supportive is a tricky one. And that's where the ambivalence becomes a prism. Because you need to see that duality of informality where it actually helps the post communist transitions in majority of countries where informal practices emerge in order to create competitive elections, independent media, new systems in the rule of law, but at the same time they are also subverting those very principles they try to initiate and install. So that duality obviously brings in complexities that I try to capture both in the encyclopedia, but also in my work in my latest book on Russia, and going back to your question as to how to do that, that yes, one has to look for shortcuts to communicate the complexity. And that's where art comes in. And at some point the global informality project, when I was structuring it, living with this multiple data and I couldn't sort of figure out what's the best way to organize it if A to Z doesn't work. That's what I did. I started pinning down patterns through art. I couldn't originally articulate what I was doing, but it somehow helped me to assemble the work. And if you've seen the art, you will see that it's been made in technique of an objective way. Found objects. It's something that I felt is falling out of use, no longer wanted, containing the know how that is no longer necessary and trying to bring it back to decode the pattern or function that this object had once and reinterpret it for the purposes of the future. So it was a little bit like not recycling or upcycling, but it certainly was reintegrating. The bizarre objects I found in French brocans in flea markets and assembled them in a new way which actually resonated together with all those informal practices that I learned about from all over the globe, which were also, they were not found objects, but they were found know how. And somehow creating art, it was a shortcut to see the complexity of the world and to capture it in the way which originally I just did it for me. Little did I know that I will become an artist, but it's just was my way to cope with complexity, as it were.
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Ileana Levineva
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- [35:35]
Ileana Levineva
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See full terms@mintmobile.com yeah, the complexity sort of necessitates that we use different tools and just writing a chapter, just the language I guess to convey that. And what I wanted to ask as well about one of the things the book touches on is the ambivalence of emigration. And as well it sort of confronts some of the biases that affect Russian studies. And doing this like you describe your own experience of immigration and speak about having been. You consider yourself as someone who's been pushed out by the system. How do you feel your understanding of Russia has been shaped by your personal experience, I guess, and your time within British and Western academia?
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Ileana Levineva
Well, you know, that's a very, very good question because Russia is an interesting kind of fish. You know, it's like a massive whale which if we look at it historically, every now and then it throws out a cohort of people which I don't know, I was trying to count, you know, in, in the book, in the Russian Pendulum in chapter one, I think I had self noid waves of immigration. So these are people who fundamentally not wanted by the system or viewed to be as not compliant, not fitting or they themselves deciding they are going to go. But the paradox that I discovered about the Russian immigration is that those people who actually want to leave, very often they cannot and they have no chance. But those people who find themselves outside Russia, they find themselves not due to their own will, so they are actually pushed out or expelled. So when you look at the post2022 immigration in the aftermath of Russia's invasion into Ukraine, what you see is that all those people, they didn't want to leave. They are very often, you know, well educated, successful, English speaking, mostly IT type of specialists who actually subsequently enriched, you know, IT sector in Serbia and you know, Kazakhstan and other countries. But they felt they had to go and they felt they had to escape if they were pacifists, if they felt it was wrong to fight. So that kind of pushover has been an interesting historical pattern. And I must say that in terms of my own departure, it was nothing like that. I mean, I also left as part of a cohort, but that was the very beginning of the 1990s when the Soviet Union has collapsed, and again, the door was opened. And a lot of people who felt they might belong better elsewhere, they did take opportunities to study, to work, to go abroad. And I was certainly one of those because my royal background. I studied in Siberia, in Novosibirsk State University. I studied economics. I was very successful to be come
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Adam Quinn
a
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Ileana Levineva
intern at the Institute of Economics in the department which was my dream to be in. And I was very happy. At the same time, the specific of the place I come from was that it was fairly far from the ideological center of Russia, which was Moscow. And in deep, deep, deep in Siberia, you were allowed free thoughts, free thinking, free expression. Deep, deep, deep in Siberia, we were allowed to think that science actually is not ideological, that science is science, and it would be the same everywhere. So we were educated in language. In school, for example, I trained to be a translator, and my key text was Scientific American. I kind of looked into those sort of globalized knowledge, for lack of a better word, something that has no ideological frame. And I think it helped me a lot because when I went to study, I went to Cambridge, and I must say, Cambridge, uk I didn't feel too much difference in terms of attitude, say, to social science and certainly to quantitative social science. I was good with numbers. My background is math. So it was easy to adjust. Actually, I didn't need any adjustment because socially, the two academic towns were very, very similar in terms of intellectual milieu, in terms of eccentricity and free thought floating around, in terms of creativity associated with it, innovation that emerges as part of it. So I was, I suppose, pushed out of the system because I always felt from younger age, somewhat alien. You know, I couldn't fit in very easily in various collectives, whether it was school or university. So in that way, you know, I was always motivated to study and to explore new opportunities. And that's what happened by departure to Cambridge first. And there, of course, interesting things started happening. Because my first work on Russia is probably best described as native ethnography. It's when a researcher estranges oneself from the context he or she knows best. In my case, it's my own Siberian academic town, and tried to articulate what I knew in the categories that would be understandable for outsiders. So that's basically my PhD about informal practices of blood and how I introduced the idea of Russia's economy of favors to the Western readership. But to do that, I need to do a kind of an estrangement from my own background and understanding and rewrite it in the categories that would Be familiar to everyone here. So in terms of further inquiries, and here where my perception and bias probably started changing is, my first book on blood has been criticized by the fact that, well, you know, the blood is a Soviet practice. In the post Soviet, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all practices have changed. Blood is no longer relevant. You might want to talk about ties and connections, but blood is really no longer there. And what is there is different serving the new masters of post Soviet transition. And which practices are there? That was my research question. And here I started going into the field, researching something that I didn't know, something that has already changed while I was away. And here I'm kind of crossing onto the territory of ethnographer who doesn't know the context but speaks the language, which probably make this work more kind of, you know, analytical rather than, you know, immersive. And then I looked into all those black PR and financial scheming and Krugava paruka and all informal practices that actually emerged in order to assist Russia's transition to the market. Because when the old formal institutions have collapsed, you had to find some rudimentary foundational human mechanisms which actually would carry the weight and the trauma of transition. And that's what happened. And that was actually quite sort of an emotional work also, because the 1990s were very, very different for the country which had a Soviet background. And what it meant by Soviet is long term horizon socialism was forever until it was no more. This is another great book that you might want to review by Alexei Yurchak. And it's not just the long term horizon. It's the idea of certainty, trust, understanding that things do not change very much. And then it found itself, people found themselves in it. Understanding that everything from currency, from ruble to human networks and relations, everything just goes wrong and it goes out of the window and it's very difficult to leave. A lot of people experienced starvation and deprivation and it was really traumatic. I missed that period myself, and that is probably represented in the book. So my bias is that not enough trauma is covered in that book. And in the concluding work in the trilogy, Can Russia Modernized, I again tried to fight my own bias and to see why do we think that if informal networks are culturally conditioned and work in everyday practices at the level of, you know, business, community, politics, why do we think that the presidents of the countries are not relying to informal networks to the same degree? They surely they should be, right? So they came with the same background as everyone else. And somehow the principles of governance are not viewed the same Way we kind of switch to institutions and discourse, which does not allow informal networks in the discussion of governance of the whole countries. And here what I bring in as an insight, I suppose, is that informal networks are just as instrumental at the level of governance. They are less researched because they are secretive and not really easily accessible. But we shouldn't really expect politicians to behave differently from everyone else once they take the office. It's only too logical to suggest that they will be using the same instruments of informal governance, such as captation, control, camouflage, in order to rule the country. And that basically was the bias that I try to address, you know, in my own approach. So. So that's three about Russia. What I would also say that many of my colleagues in Russia always say, well, how can you study Russia if you are, you know, if you live everywhere, elsewhere you. Let me start again. Many Russian colleagues noted the gap that exists between the study of Russia from within and the Russian studies in the West. And I had a lot of queries about that. And of course I write about it in the Russian Pendulum, that there is certainly a diasporic bias that exists in area studies, not just Russian studies, but generally, you know, in Middle Eastern studies or Oriental studies as well. So however, it's the question that I'm often asked, like, how can you study Russia if you live abroad, work abroad, teach abroad, you know, what do you know? And here my answer is that there is a value of the prism of ambivalence, if you like. You know, that kind of seeing things at a distance is equally important as experiencing things as taken for granted on daily basis. So it's combination of the two, or maybe multipolar way is really essential to capture the complexity because when you live in a society, it's almost very, very difficult to abstract. To get abstracted and get that distance, you need to see and understand too. It's like particles starting the particles. Right? That's a famous metaphor from the nuclear accelerator that kind of differentiates social sciences from fundamental sciences, that we in social sciences are particles studying the particles, which means inevitable bias, doesn't it?
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Adam Quinn
Yeah, it's inherent. It's about it, I guess. I was reading something by Grigori Yudin recently where talking about going to the US for a postdoc or. And just about it felt like the brain is being rewired. And just this, as soon as you're removed from that system, put it on a new pair of glasses, I guess.
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Ileana Levineva
Exactly, yeah. I think for me it was quite interesting in the sense that for me it was like estrangement. There is this very famous idea by Shklowski, estrangement that you have to develop that distance and work as if you never knew it before. It's almost like dramatic performance or a narrative creating a narrative so that the other person would see it as with your own eyes without leaving anything unspoken. So you recreate. But in order to do that, you need to get that estrangement. And I had that estrangement twice, actually. First, when I left Russia in 1990, I could see it with different lenses, just like you said. And then again when I left the Russian field in 2013 and started working on the Global Informality Project, it was a second estrangement that suddenly I was able to see Russia from the perspective of all those informalities that I found elsewhere. And guess what I discovered that Russia is not unique. You know, I always thought that Russia is unique, but it isn't. It is specific, but it's just as specific as any other country. But it's not unique.
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Adam Quinn
It's.
- [54:49]
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- [56:30]
Adam Quinn
maybe leads us to talk a little bit about political modernization. Then like one of the when reading this book and your previous works, it feels like a torturous process when you describe this sort of the informality trap of leaders in the Russian system relying on informal networks to get things done, but the misreliance trapping them and preventing them from modernizing and abortion democratic fashion. And in the conclusion of this book, you you lay out some predict predictions or ways of which the future might be measured. I guess you write like a Russian ruler will remain trapped in the informal governance and held hostage by the system. Is this modernization by the transformation of these networks that have to come from top down? Where might this sort of next pendulum swing come from? And here I'm particularly thinking in the fact that in the broader post Soviet space we have seen these informal networks, if you want to think of blood as a Soviet system or not, but they have been transformed in our context. So where might this come from within Russia?
- [58:03]
Ileana Levineva
Well, I think the idea that we should look at the Eastern Europe, you know, vis a vis our analysis of Russia is a very important one. You know, I try to create come up with that, you know, shortcut slogan it takes three to the tango in, in the book because Eastern Europe is central to understand the differences, but also similarities. When we talk about communist legacies, what that comparison has is in the way of political modernization that the legacy of 40 years since the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union for the majority of the Eastern Europe actually was long, but not long enough to actually undermine the trajectory. Right? So 40 years, it's a few generations. But you know, human memory is long enough to actually, you know, remember the Soviet as you know, occupation say in the Baltic countries. Whereas in Russia, where the time under the Soviet system is much longer, from 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the attitude to the Soviet legacies are very, very different and also the implications of it because with the Soviet Modernization arguably one of the most significant and most successful modernization of this space. What you have, you have an infrastructure that locks you in a non market way of operating economy. Because all the major enterprises have no logistical transportational infrastructure. A lot of them operate as monotowns where huge enterprises are created and people live there because the enterprise work in conditions which are otherwise unlivable and very poorly linked to everyone else. The space is so vast that the transport system has stopped working in an effective way since the Soviet Union has collapsed because a lot of places inside the country were connected by bilateral flights between places which once the market system and price mechanisms were involved, everyone realized it's not working like this. So now, in order very often to buy to fly to a neighboring place, you have to go to Moscow, change and fly back because there is no direct flights between two places. You also have that kind of interesting shortcut insight by T. Marshall, who calls Russia a prisoner of geography, which is to say it's not just the Soviet modernization and the Soviet economic on development that created that legacy that makes Russia difficult to govern and to develop. There are also geographical factors associated, for example with the climate because it's cold, it means that dwellings have to be permanently heated. You could not possibly create the systems like in Britain, where you could independently choose what kind of bill you pay for heating and choose your system of individual boiler services. So. So the state is viewed to be fully responsible for hitting in a centralized way for humanitarian reasons. That places a huge burden upon the state, which also means that the state effectively becomes a redistributor of funds between regions, whereas only nine, if I remember correctly, of the the Russian regions are the actual donors to the federal budget and the rest of them are the recipients. And that complex redistributory function that Moscow has create a lot of nuances as to how modernization takes place and very often those economic necessities that come up with political compliance and alliances around central authorities. That's why you could not just decide to decentralize. I mean, at the level of making sure that your pensioners are heated, well, is considered to be a responsibility of central authorities. And that's what's happening. You also have a very interesting cluster of questions about the extractive energies and extractive industries and the tax associated with it and the balance for those regions where the extraction actually takes place and how much tax they are supposed to submit to the central authorities. They are all the nitty gritty of the governance, which is a foundation for not just economic modernization, but also political modernization. With regard to leadership, being the dealer of redistributing resources within Russia, but also being the hostage of the system, I absolutely stand by this claim. Very often we talk about strong leadership versus weak leadership. I don't think that language is actually, you know, is appropriate in the sense that it places too much on the personality. And I think personalization is not right way to actually address the issues at hand. But the fact that leaders are hostages of the situation, which is historical, geographical, economic, political, the specifics of the electorate in Russia, that's absolutely true. And whether one could bring out of this, and that's. Now we come to the whole key idea of this book. As I saw it, every time I see the programs of the opposition, I see the personalized critique of President Putin and suggesting that a different person would do things differently in one selected. I strongly doubt that proposition. Obviously different personalities matter and we see that very clearly with the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. However, in my view, what I've pinned down in this book as patterns of Russian pendulum, they are the sources of change. And these patterns need to be addressed, reversed, governed, reconfigured for Russia to be able to engage on a successful path of political modernization. And in a way this book is like manifesto for the non systemic opposition, you know, for sort of key foundational patterns that would need to be reformed and re modeled.
- [67:18]
Adam Quinn
If enough people opt out of systema, is that enough to produce change at a, at a system level?
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Ileana Levineva
That's a good question. If you mean internal immigration, it would not change a lot because what it means effectively that people disengage, people do not stick promotions, People stay within their niche range of activities and functions. People withdraw from public activity, from any activity that could be detrimental to the authority, because if they display something like a protest, they would be punished. So in a way internal immigration does not, even if it is exercised by the majority in the country, which was the case of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, just before Gorbachev came to power, majority of people understood that the system is not viable and cannot go on as is. But there was very little individual or group protest against it. So everyone was living in one's own apolitical bubble. And what we see now, for example, since Russia's invasion to Ukraine, we see that a lot of people, due to the extremely punitive legislation for a post on Internet, you could get from 15 to 25 years in prison, people have withdrawn. So we don't know whether it's a majority because obviously we have like with every war There is a rise of nationalism and patriotism and there is a lot of that that is taking place too. But my point is internal immigration is not changing the system. It just allows it to go on until it comes to the point point when it collapses. For facilitation of that collapse you need active engagement. Disengagement is not enough. That's it. I think that's the formula. So I slowly come. But you could cut out the kind of slow bits. But the idea is the internal immigration as disengagement. Living in apolitical bubble does not resolve the issue of political modernization in Russia. It rather connive the reproduction of the system. But there are factors which would actually be much more effective. And I think in the book I have summed it up in relation to the Russian folklore where Ivan the Fool or the prince has to solve a con, some unsolvable puzzle, perform a task which is impossible to perform and master a dragon or some kind of, you know, unknown species. And here just very similar, we have to find the ways to actually find the species which is AI now. Which means to see if Russia would be able to develop the likes of the Great Five in the globe in its own self isolating context to sort out the issues of extractive industries and dependence of the economy on natural resources. Would it be possible to develop an economy that no longer depends on the extraction of whatever that might be? It used to be fur in the past and maybe it will be water in the future and it is
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Commercial Announcer
energy,
- [72:29]
Ileana Levineva
fuel energy at the moment. But to develop an economy that would not be about extracting and living at the expense of the nature, that's another big issue. And in terms of solving the koan or unsolvable puzzle, I would say that the social patterns that are included in this book are those unsolvable puzzles that the leadership has to be thinking about. Because you could not really modernize without addressing those fundamental patterns that dominate Russian society.
- [73:16]
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- [73:46]
Adam Quinn
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- [74:03]
Adam Quinn
Thank you so much for that. And as we, as we wrap up here, ljoana, I wanted just to ask you about what you're working on at the minute, what might be coming next from you. And here on the New Books Network, we like to have guests recommend a book or two. So if you had any recommendations for us for reading.
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Ileana Levineva
Well, I have already mentioned the book by Alexei Yurchak. It was Socialism Forever until it was no more. I don't know if you covered it in your series. You have.
- [74:40]
Adam Quinn
Well, I certainly know of the book, right?
- [74:44]
Ileana Levineva
So I also have been impressed by Aunt Voucher book, the Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall that I also have managed to mention in the text. I would certainly invite everyone to browse the Global Informality Project online or through the encyclopedia, if only because, you know, I'm very proud to say that all my latest work is published in open access by the UCL Press, which is a university press, but they run this, one would say, revolutionary format, so they don't charge for access to the PDF. It's only if you want a hard copy that you could purchase one if you like. But the idea of open access is amazing because that way you reintegrate all parts of the world in accessing the material that they otherwise are absolutely blocked off by the prices, high prices of books. And in terms of the future project, I'm working on art collection about Exit and also in collaboration with my husband who is Stanislav Szechnya, professor of Insead Business School, who works on Exit from top corporate positions and succession of CEOs. And it's really his latest book, 21 Questions About CEO Succession that Made me think about bigger question of succession. Also for political leaders as to why would political leaders dwell, cling to power and dwell on their positions for 20 plus years? Is that because exiting is so scary? Because exiting to where once you are on top of the world, right, what possible better job you are likely to have? And that bigger cluster of questions made me think about answers in an artistic way, but also taking interest in the topic academically as well. Recently I came up, I came recently I came across a very interesting book which is not academic, but it's called Should We Stay or Should We Go? Which is a book by Lionel Shriver, which is a humorous fiction work about a couple who had decided to have a suicide pact in order to avoid the difficulties of the old age. And the whole book, the development of that scenario, which I found a fascinating read also because I'm thinking about the issues of exit in a much wider direction than just politics.
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Adam Quinn
Brilliant. Thank you so much for being with us today and well, I look forward to seeing an assortment of Russian leaders and other leaders at your exhibition. That would be something to look forward to. But thank you so much for being with us on the New Books Network today.
- [79:02]
Ileana Levineva
Thank you. Adam thank you.
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Thank you for listening to this episode
- [79:06]
Ileana Levineva
of the New Books Network.
- [79:07]
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- [79:17]
Ileana Levineva
You can browse all of our episodes
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