Description:
Ledeneva explores practices in politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990s.
Brief description: Alena V. Ledeneva is a Reader in Russian Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She is the author of Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange and the coeditor of Economic Crime in Russia and Bribery and Blat in Russia.
Review Quotes:
"Alena V. Ledeneva has not only observed Russia's transition at first hand but is also a resourceful researcher. Her first book, The Russian Economy of Favours, dealt with usages which arose in the later Soviet period, particularly blat--payments made in favours between friends and associates. Since then she has broadened her focus and developed her tools. In How Russia Really Works she manages to prise open the cover over the secret world a little more to peer at the scurrying life beneath."
--Philip Longworth, Times Literary Supplement, May 11, 2007