ABSTRACT
Even in the most stable and well-structured societies the State never forms an ideally consolidated group smoothly directing all its actions to the same goal. Any modern state is a complex institution that embraces multiple organizations, which turns out to be both its strength and its vulnerability. As mentioned above, sometimes the people constituting institutions act against the ability of the latter to survive. When such actions prevail, an institution either dissolves completely, or becomes “hollow” – that is, while preserving its formal structure, the institution ceases to fulfill its declared functions and serves the interests of some of its individual insiders and their external partners. This phenomenon is close to Hallin and Papathanossoupulos’ notion of clientelism, defined by them as “a pattern of social organization in which access to social resources is controlled by patrons and delivered to clients in exchange for deference and various kinds of support” (Hallin and Papathanossoupulos 2002: 184). However, what I am talking about is a much broader and pervasive phenomenon. While clientelism is a more or less voluntary and equivalent exchange between the parties, private use of institutions may include exploitation of institutional resources independently of the will of others: it is especially true for representatives of enforcement bodies who learned to apply their access to open violence to the solution of their individual or team problems. Private use of institutional resources may also occur not only within public institutions, and not only at the top of the society, but at all of its levels and clusters, simultaneously subverting and supporting “host” institutions. The latter supply their internal opportunists both with resources and the legitimate façade necessary to maintain their covert practices. Therefore, such a process may be best termed the hidden privatization of Russian institutions.
