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Europe-Asia Studies
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Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience.

Markets, Moral Economies, and Cultural
Contradictions of Post-Socialist Russia
a
Imogen Wade
a
University College London
Published online: 13 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Imogen Wade (2014) Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience. Markets, Moral
Economies, and Cultural Contradictions of Post-Socialist Russia, Europe-Asia Studies, 66:1, 169-170,
DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2013.864112

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.864112

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 REVIEWS 169

interaction, and attempts to explain the role of criminal groups in political developments. The last two
chapters summarise the argument and highlight lessons and recommendations for stakeholders.
The book provides interesting insight into post-Soviet informal politics, and should be of interest
both to scholars and policy makers.

University of Leeds AIJAN SHARSHENOVA q 2013

Jeffrey Hass, Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience. Markets, Moral Economies, and Cultural
Contradictions of Post-Socialist Russia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xviii þ 277pp.,
£67.50 h/b.

MUCH OF THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE LITERATURE ON ECONOMIC change since the fall of
the Soviet Union interprets that experience through the lens of rational choice, assuming a logic of
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instrumental rationality. In such a perspective, people have clear goals and act as individuals to achieve
them in a relatively straightforward manner. Societal outcomes, including economic change, are the
aggregate result of these individual choices. This perspective inclines analysts to take the existence of
institutions and organisations as given, without examining what they are made up of, and how they are
reproduced or change, in ‘everyday practices of “little people”’ (p. 10).
Jeffrey Hass argues in the book under review that political scientists and economists have typically
misunderstood the process of change, specifically in the former Soviet Union, by neglecting the
important role of ‘culture’, or the norms, assumptions and meanings which guide collectivities in their
patterns of behaviour—economic, political and social.
His aim, in a phrase, is to ‘bring culture back in’ to the analyses of economic transformations from
statist-communist systems towards less statist and more private-property based systems. He seeks to
explore the ‘social roots and nature of the politics of the post-Soviet, post-socialist change’ (p. 3).
‘Social’ here roughly equates to culture. The book lacks an explicitly stated research question, but we
can infer that it could be stated as ‘how did peoples’ beliefs about “appropriate” behaviour—and their
larger moral frameworks—influence patterns of exchange in markets and in politics, and how were
those beliefs themselves changed by material conditions in the post-Soviet space?’.
Throughout, Hass draws on political sociology as well as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s
work on power, culture and material conditions and the links between them. The empirical material is
based on his own interviews and observations from St Petersburg in the early 1990s, his own
experiences of Russia more generally over the following 20 years, on enterprise newspapers from the
late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, as well as on secondary data where available.
The argument pivots on the distinction between ‘market economy’ and ‘moral economy’. By market
economy the author means a set of meanings and narratives on how normal exchange is meant to
operate, in contrast to the standard definition in economics as institutions of exchange. These narratives
presume instrumental rationality, individual autonomy, optimisation and material interests (p. 45). In
contrast, a moral economy consists of a normative rationality, in which norms of collective identities,
reciprocity and community have relatively more influence than the logic of instrumental rationality
(p. 45).
Hass argues that market and moral economies can contradict or complement each other depending
on the specific context in post-transition Soviet Russia. For example, in the case of enterprise
restructuring and reform (Chapter 2), Hass argues that restructuring was socially acceptable up to 1990
because of the persistence of Soviet enterprise norms which moderated the force of market
competition. The enterprise was a unitary collective which gave its employees services, protection and
empowerment in exchange for loyalty (moral economy). Thus the narratives of enterprise
restructuring, which began with the 1987 law ‘On the enterprise’, were initially acceptable to
 170 REVIEWS

workers and managers because of these narratives’ promises of unbundling the central planning system
and of handing more control to individual enterprises—promises which complemented rather than
challenged the enterprises’ moral economy of worker empowerment and autonomy. Thus the moral
and market economies were complementary in the initial reforms of the late 1980s. However, by
1991 –1992, when it became clear (Hass does not say to whom) that the newly introduced market
economy also brought with it capitalism and private property, then moral and market economies
clashed because enterprise workers felt they would not necessarily get greater control, empowerment
and autonomy and would be fully exposed to market discipline.
Hass argues that moral and market economies interrelate differently over time. He gives empirical
evidence of this argument through detailed case studies of different aspects of the transition
experience. He argues, in the case of restructuring and privatisation of organisations and firms, that
moral and market economies were complementary in the late 1980s but then became contradictory
from 1991 (Chapter 2). In terms of exchange and contract, moral and market economies are
complementary as the moral economy helps the defence of contract (Chapter 3). In the case of state,
property and power (Chapter 5), moral and market economies contradicted themselves in Russia under
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President Yel’tsin and then complemented each other in Putin’s Russia. In terms of money and value
(examined in Chapter 4), Hass argues that market and moral economies have an ambivalent
coexistence due to a fragmented embodiment of value.
The book makes a useful and convincing contribution to the now considerable stock of knowledge
about the dynamics of transition in post-Soviet countries. It is certainly to be recommended for
curricula on economic, social and political aspects of post-Soviet transitions at the postgraduate level.
On the other hand its value to a wider readership is qualified by too frequent overdoses of sociological
jargon, as in: ‘a moral economy . . . is not just norms and practices of redistribution and reciprocity for
survival; it is categories (community, collective property, etc.) embedded in narratives (redistribution
as necessary for survival, threats of individuals acting on their own, etc.)’ (p. 19). An appendix listing
all the interviews carried out and their dates would help to increase the research project’s transparency
and replicability.

University College London IMOGEN WADE q 2013

Matt Killingsworth, Civil Society in Communist Eastern Europe. Opposition and Dissent in
Totalitarian Regimes. Colchester: ECPR Press, ix þ 173pp., £27.00 p/b.

THE CIVIL SOCIETY PARADIGM IS CLOSELY LINKED TO ITS HISTORICAL Enlightenment background, and
the use of such a concept to analyse non-democratic politics is the by-product of the zeitgeist which
assumes that the establishment of a liberal democracy is somewhat unavoidable in any country and in
any case. Matt Killingsworth’s book is a good example of how we should deal with cases that challenge
our analytical tools both spatially and temporally. As the author points out, the ‘dominant liberal
interpretation of dissenting opposition in Soviet-type regimes is both politically and morally flawed’;
the totalitarian nature of these regimes did not allow a ‘genuine civil society to exist’ (p. 3).
The book is organised in two parts: the introduction and Chapters One – Three and Seven deal with
the discussion of the theoretical framework. Chapters Four – Six analyse dissent and opposition
dynamics in Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic and Poland.
The main theoretical contribution of Killingsworth’s work is the elaboration of the concept of a
‘totalitarian public sphere’, a term able to describe the space in which the variety of dissenting
oppositions organised themselves, as well as to explain the activities of these groups vis-à-vis the
totalitarian party-state (p. 48). Obviously such a ‘public sphere’ differs greatly from Habermas’s idea
because, firstly, in Soviet-type regimes opposition groups were rarely granted basic freedoms;