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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Defining the contours of sistema
Sistema is an elusive term. Among its many meanings featured in the glossary (pp. 277–8), I am most intrigued by the one meant to allude to common, yet not articulated, perceptions of power and the system of government in Russia. My research is based on collecting such perceptions and exploring sistema's open secrets (Ledeneva 2011a). The term is appropriately ambivalent to embrace sistema's strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and pressures, as well as to refer to their origins as systemic, pointing everywhere but nowhere in particular. Academic outsiders tend to avoid such levels of obscurity, abstraction and immeasurability. Insiders are not ordinarily bothered with definitions of sistema – they intuitively ‘know an elephant’ when they come across one. One of my respondents explains the unarticulated nature of sistema by the lack of distance of insiders from it:
This is not a system that you can choose to join or not – you fall into it from the moment you are born. There are of course also mechanisms to recruit, to discipline and to help reproduce it. In the Soviet Union, all people were corporate (korporativnye), nuts and bolts of the same machine, but some new features emerged in the post-Soviet period. In the Soviet Union there was more or less a consolidated state, whereas now it is impossible to disentangle the state from a network of private interests. Modern clans are complex. It is not always clear who is on the top. A kompromat attack [leak of compromising information – AL] can come from within the same clan. Perhaps this complexity is not a new quality after all. Perhaps it was also complex in the past, only we don't know it well so the Soviet sistema comes across as more consistent.
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