ABSTRACT
The ambiguity in the title of this chapter is intentional. It refers to the way in which discourses of corruption in Latvia serve both to condemn and to promote images and practices of corruption. In contemporary Latvia corruption means more than just the process of bribery or use of public office for private ends. Perhaps more than actual practice, corruption in Latvia means the readiness of people to engage in corrupt activities, to use bribery as means for routine business needs and the incorporation of corruption in the imagery of everyday life. This readiness is at least partly reenforced by ongoing conversations about corruption. This does not, however, mean that people in Latvia perceive corruption in neutral terms – the majority would picture corrupt practices with some disgust.1 This chapter is an attempt to decipher the ways in which people in Latvia integrate the negative attitude towards corruption with a simultaneous readiness to engage in corrupt practices. I argue that in popular discourse attitudes towards corruption and indeed the definition of corruption are shaped by the position of such practices in relation to images of free market, family, threat, proximity and distance. I also make connections between these images and those of the Soviet period, drawing out the similarities between blat 2 and the postSoviet understanding of the free market. The mostly passive use of blat, which Soviet people rationalized as justifiable resistance against an oppressive state, becomes an actively sought-after channels for organizing corrupt deals in the current situation of ‘free market’. Friends obtained along the way now become ‘friends’ – consciously cultivated for specific purposes. While the ways in which these activities are performed have remained fundamentally those of Soviet blat, the conceptualization of these activities have changed.
