ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on 18 months fieldwork (1995-1996) in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to study corruption in the post-Soviet situation. It offers a descriptive analysis of the most significant local notions and practices of corruption. I argue that post-Soviet corruption is different from corruption which was rampant in the late Soviet era: While corruption in the Soviet era was embedded in the contradictions of an overcentralized bureaucracy and economy the post-Soviet corruption, occurring on much larger scale, is a characteristic of the interface between a new form of the post-Soviet polity, which I have called elsewhere ‘the chaotic mode of domination’ (Nazpary 2001), and the emerging mechanisms of the market.
