Political and Institutional Factors of the Russian Banking Crisis of 2004

This chapter discusses the Russian banking crisis of 2004. This event provides an interesting case study for two primary reasons. First, the development of the Russian banking system can be considered an excellent example of the impact of event perception factors on actors' behaviour and crisis management. The crisis can be considered as posing a "serious threat for basic structures or norms of the social system requiring a crucial decision under severe time constraints and uncertainty" (Porfiriev, 2004), which seems to be caused by the perception of events in the banking system as a crisis. ¹ In fact, most of the crisis management actors deliberately avoided using the word "crisis", thus trying to remove the subjective basis for behavioural patterns constituting a serious threat for the social system (in this case, the banking and financial sectors). Whether they succeeded or not is not the subject of this study.