Modernity is usually thought as a complex society with clearly differentiated spheres of everyday life. It means, in particular, that economic rules do not interfere with the norms structuring political, social, scientific and other interactions. The complex, differentiated society sharply...

Frank Elbe, Botschafter a.D., kommentiert die Entwicklung der Beziehungen zwischen der EU, den USA und Russland und spricht sich für ein besonnenes Vorgehen der Europäer gegenüber Russland aus. Die Bereitschaft zur Kooperation sollte nicht verlorengehen.

This paper argues that corruption in Russia is systemic in nature. Low wage levels of public officials provide strong incentives to engage in corruption. As corruption is illegal, corrupt officials can be exposed any time, which enforces loyalty towards the powers that be; thus corruption is a...

The key point is about Russia, old and new, being a counterrevolutionary power: Russia's post- Napoleonic War and moreover post-1848 policy was counterrevolutionary abroad and conservative, even when reformist, at home, as is Russia's current post-Soviet, post-Cold War policy. However, while the...

We document a statistical association between the severity of the persecution and mass murder of Jews (the Holocaust) by the Nazis during World War II and long-run economic and political outcomes within Russia. Cities that experienced the Holocaust most intensely have grown less, and both cities...

In this contribution to a symposium sponsored by the Michigan State University Journal of International Law, the author argues that predominantly evolutionary Soviet transition to the Rule of Law (initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev's ‘Perestroika' at the end of the 1980s) was derailed by...

Political mobilization of business forces in the post-communist world has crucial implications for economic development and civil society. The emergence of strong cross-sectoral business associations during Putin's presidency challenges the prevailing view of Russia's political economy as an...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). Using a unique web scraped dataset containing detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders, I first show that the Russian mafia originated in the Soviet Gulag archipelago, and could be found near the...