ABSTRACT
It has been argued for the Post-Socialist world (Huntington 1996, Starosta 1997) that political cultures of ‘the East’ tend to involve lower levels of public trust in officials and correspondingly higher levels of corruption. A recent study compared attitudes towards bribery in a number of Central and East European countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. It concluded that, while there were significant differences between them in more or less the order given above, a simple dichotomy between a ‘clean’ Catholic West and a ‘corrupt’ Orthodox East does not explain the data. Rather, current economic circumstances and the degree of reform of bureaucracy provide better explanations (Grödeland, Koshechkina and Miller 1998, pp.673-4). We have made a study of bribery much further to ‘the East’, in Buryatia (South-East Siberia) and Mongolia, and we explore similar questions in this paper. We suggest that the characteristics of corruption in these regions can be understood as a consequence of the particular nature of the Pre-Soviet and particularly the Soviet political economy in these countries in relation to the current economic collapse. Rather than reflecting a ‘corrupt mentality’ dating from Soviet times, or an ‘Eastern’ cultural disposition, the specific forms of bribery described in this paper are, we argue, the result of predatory responses by officials to the haphazard shrinking of resources available to them, in a political ambiance where the prestige of state service is still very high, where those charged with enforcing state regulations still consider themselves an elite, where the ethical valuation of their work among those in state service remains high.
