ABSTRACT
If fulfillment of a decision is not bought with material or symbolic resources and not ensured through an ideology, it must be enforced. In consolidated states enforcement exercised by state agents is not usually objected to by the majority of society, while the use of violence by anybody else is not approved. According to the famous Weberian definition (Weber 1990: 651), the monopoly on legitimate violence is a constitutive feature of the State as an institution. In Russia of the 1990s, as I have already mentioned, the state/non-state distinction and boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate were blurred. The actions of state agents, supposedly legitimate, were very often far from being regarded as such, even when the former acted within the bounds of the official rules (e.g. arrest of Gussinsky). On the contrary, with a general lack of consensus on common rules, the actions of non-state agents of violence were often legitimized by “the code” – an alternative system of rules shared both by the “mafia” members and the businesses dependent on them. The mechanisms by which boundaries between the state and non-state violence became transparent in Russia are well studied (Volkov 2002). Here it will be appropriate to sketch them only to the extent that they determine media production.
