Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

44. For analysis of President Obama’s use of new media, see Virginia Heffernan, “The YouTube Presidency: Why the Obama Administration Uploads So Much Video,” New York Times Magazine , April 12, 2009.

45. The reference to Rich’s book is Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006). The quote from Frank Rich appears in Marc Peyser, “The Truthiness Teller,” Newsweek , February, 13, 2006, http://www.newsweek.com/id/56881/page/3, accessed July 25, 2008. The New York Times reporter here cited is quoted in Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine , October 17, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 11/27/2007).

Notes to Chapter 3

1. János Kornai, Economics of Shortage (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland Press, 1980).

2. Some prewar residents of Vilnius were resettled to Szczecin in the postwar agreements; German residents of Szczecin were resettled to postwar Germany.

3. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe , John Keane, ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), p. 31.

4. The sociologist here cited is Adam Podgórecki, “Polish Society: A Sociological Analysis,” Praxis International 7, no. 1 (April 1987), pp. 57–78.

5. The term “command economy” was coined by economist Gregory Grossman. See “The Structure and Organization of the Soviet Economy,” Slavic Review 21, no. 2 (June 1962), pp. 203–222.

6. Kornai, Economics of Shortage . Informal distribution systems existed throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. See, for example, Steven Sampson, “The Informal Sector in Eastern Europe, Telos 66 (Winter 1986), pp. 44–66; Wojciech Pawlik, “Intimate Commerce,” The Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism , Janine R. Wedel, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 78–94; also in that volume, see Elżbieta Firlit and Jerzy Chlopecki, “When Theft is Not Theft” (pp. 95–109), Joanna Smigielska, “There’s the Beef” (pp. 110–121), Stefan Kawalec, “The Dictatorial Supplier” (pp. 128–143), and Piotr Gliński, “Acapulco Near Konstancin” (pp. 144–152); Gregory Grossman, “The Second Economy of the USSR,” Problems of Communism 26, no. 5 (September-October, 1977), pp. 25–40; and Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

While Grossman outlined the phenomenon of the “second economy,” other terms employed to describe the same or similar phenomena include “shadow,” “black,” and “informal” economy. The definition of blat is from Alena V. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 1.

7. Although not institutionalized, these relationships were regularized and exhibited clear patterns. For further analysis of these relationships, see Janine R. Wedel, ed., The Unplanned Society , especially pp. 11–16.

8. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours , pp. 105, 114–119.

9. The day-to-day workings of this informal economy are discussed in Janine Wedel, The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (New York: Facts on File, 1986), pp. 33–117.

10. For analysis of pride and shame, see Wedel, The Private Poland , pp. 145–152 and 163–168.

11. Cited in Ilona Morzol and Michal Ogórek, “Shadow Justice,” in The Unplanned Society , Wedel, ed., p. 62.

12. Workers distinguished among such practices as theft, lifting, bribery, “arranging,” “exchanging services,” and “doing favors.” These terms—ranging from condemnation to open justification of more or less the same activity—had dramatically different social implications. See Firlit and Chlopecki, “When Theft is not Theft,” The Unplanned Society , Wedel, ed., pp. 95–109.

13. Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 324. See also Stefan Kawalec’s “The Dictatorial Supplier,” which details how informal mechanisms among state-owned enterprises often rendered central management irrelevant and set the real terms of transactions (in The Unplanned Society , Wedel, ed., pp. 128–143). On pripiski , see Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works , p. 147; and Stephen Shenfield, “Pripiski: False Statistical Reporting in Soviet-type Economies,” Corruption: Causes, Consequences and Control , M. Clarke, ed. (London, UK: Francis Pinter, 1983), pp. 239–258. On tolkachi , see Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works , pp. 177–178; and Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours .

14. Leonid Kosals, “Essay on Clan Capitalism in Russia,” Acta Oeconomica 57, no. 1 (2007), p. 71. Also author’s interview with Leonid Kosals, November 16, 2007. These clans are grounded in longstanding association and incentives to act together, not kinship or genealogical units.

15. The political analyst of networks here cited is Gerald Easter. He elaborates that, “Beneath the formal façade of the monolithic party and the planned economy existed an informal world of cliques, factions, networks and druzhina [personal networks surrounding a patron]. Power and status within the state elite derived as much from the workings of these informal groupings as they did from the formal lines of command.” Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 46, 173–174. See also Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works , pp. 103–105, and John P. Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

16. The record of an earlier epoch, the brutal German occupation of Poland (during which one-sixth of the nation’s population perished, and city and village alike were bled and battered) may be instructive. Kazimierz Wyka, a renowned literary critic, depicted the “social fiction” of the economy at the time—one “excluded” from and functioning contrary to both the moral fabric of society and the commands of its formidable occupiers. By “fiction,” he meant the illusion of a “very tight noose” under which an elaborate informal exchange system, often in collusion with corrupted Germans, enabled many Poles to survive starvation rationing and other hardships. The “calamitous psychosocial practices” and “social distortions” of the occupation, as Wyka observed, did not disappear when the conditions that engendered them did. Instead, they persisted into the new era, burdening the new Polish state and becoming a feature of the new system. Kazimierz Wyka, “The Excluded Economy,” in The Unplanned Society , Wedel, ed., p. 58.

17. Janine R. Wedel, “The Polish Revolution Turns Economic,” The Christian Science Monitor , February 13, 1989.

18. Paszyński explained his decision to decline the cabinet-level position in an underground (illegal) newspaper.

19. On institutional nomads, see Antoni Kamiński and Joanna Kurczewka, “Main Actors of Transformation: The Nomadic Elites,” Eric Allardt and Włodzimierz Wesolowski, eds., The General Outlines of Transformation (Warszawa: IFIS PAN Publishing, 1994), pp. 132–153.

20. Quote is from author’s personal communication with Grazyna Skapska, October 14, 2002.