BLAT LESSONS

Posted on 2026/02/06 by secret santa

The Jeff Epstein saga isn’t a scandal about pedophilia, it’s about a Russian word called ‘blat,’ a Soviet-era word meaning ‘the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.’ It’s about a kind of government.… pic.twitter.com/nTlPGwG6pv

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 2, 2026

the UNWRITTEN RULES BASED ORDER : ECONOMY of FAVORS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)
https://in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blat_(Russia)
https://researchgate.net/Blat_Lessons_Networks_Institutions_Unwritten_Rules
Blat Lessons: Networks, Institutions, Unwritten Rules
by Alena Ledeneva / January 2004

“In their conclusion to a volume of early post-1991 reflections on the collapse of world communism Frederic Fleron and Erik Hoffman admit: “We have been unable to understand scarcity and bargaining. We have found it difficult to comprehend the politics of survival in economies that are dominated by nonmarket forces and that reward blat, stability, conformity, and material equality rather than work, risk, creativity, and personal achievements. Because we live in consumer-oriented societies where virtually all goods and services are available to those who have the money to pay for them (i.e. societies with no nomenclatura elites), we have brought too many Western economic, social, and psychological assumptions to our analyses of Communist systems.”…

Blat is the use of personal networks and informal contacts to obtain goods and services in short supply and to circumvent formal procedures. The word is virtually impossible to translate directly into English. As Joseph Berliner, one of the earliest observers of blat, has remarked, ‘the term blat […] is one of those many flavoured words which are so intimate a part of a particular culture that they can be only awkwardly rendered in the language of another’.* The ubiquity of blat was obvious to every citizen of the ex-Soviet Union and was also reported by Western researchers, who first described the phenomenon in the 1950s. Edward Crankshaw referred to it as ‘an extremely elaborate and all-pervading “old-boy” network. Everyone, including the most ardent Party members, deals in it. Yet although blat has long been recognized, there have been no attempts to assess its role and to conceptualize its function for the workings of the Soviet system.

As Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests: “Very little attention has so far been paid to sociability in the Stalin era, or for that matter in the Soviet period as a whole. Perhaps thinking about blat as a form of sociability, as well as a form of economic exchange, will provide an entrée into this wider field of enquiry. The importance of friendship and small-group loyalties in Soviet (especially late Soviet) life was something well-known, at an impressionistic and personal level, to several generations of western Soviet scholars; yet for some reason this impressionistic knowledge was usually compartmentalized as ‘field lore’, not applicable to our theoretical understanding of how Soviet society worked.”

The 1990s have provided a window of opportunity for research on blat. People were no longer inhibited from discussing sensitive issues, yet their memory of the Soviet past was still fresh. Before perestroika people were unwilling to talk for fear of the consequences or because they were fundamentally unused to speaking openly. The political and economic reforms of the 1990s resulted in dramatic social changes which made Soviet realities a thing of the past. With these changes, people lost their inhibitions and even began to talk about the old ways with nostalgia. Although they still remembered how Soviet society functioned, people had already had some time to reflect on how this had changed in post-Soviet conditions. This has made it possible to collect data on Soviet blat that would otherwise have been inaccessible to researchers.

The research that I conducted in 1994-95 resulted in the following definition of blat.”
• Blat is the use of personal networks (kin, friends and acquaintances) to obtain goods and services in the economy of shortage [form of sociability];
• Blat is also the informal exchange of ‘favours of access’ given at the expense of institutional resources (parallel currency;
• Blat is instrumental both to people (to satisfy the needs of personal consumption) and to the state (to cope with the extreme centralisation of the Soviet system), and it illustrates one of the unwritten rules necessary to operate a system which cannot work according to its own proclaimed principles.

The theoretical account of blat offered in my Russia’s Economy of Favours is concerned with the institutional characteristics of Soviet society which necessitated a gradual expansion of blat networks; with the ways in which these networks were interwoven with other forms of power (despite the fact that not much has been written on political power or vertical patron-client relationships); and with the ways in which actors have used these networks to pursue their own aims and interests. A central argument of the book is that blat should be considered as the ‘reverse side’ of an overcontrolling centre, a reaction by ordinary people to the structural constraints of the socialist system of distribution – an indispensable set of practices which enabled the Soviet system to function, made it tolerable, but also subverted it.

The research into blat has prompted three further areas of investigation. First, blat is a network phenomenon, which raised my interest in the nature of networks used for getting things done in Russia. Second, blat is both functional and subversive, which required a conceptualization of the relationship between formal institutions and informal networks. Third, blat was a form of ‘know-how’ in the Soviet system. Understanding blat was the key to understanding how the Soviet system really worked and posed questions about the whole system of unwritten rules and their role in non-transparent economies. These three themes are much wider than blat and, I think, much more interesting, particularly when explored in a post-Soviet context. Revealing the nature of networks, explaining the relationship between the formal and the informal, and providing insight into the unwritten rules are all essential to understanding the informal order in Russia.

The nature of networks that serve the economy of favours
Blat is an important part of the Soviet legacy and blat networks are still instrumental in getting things done in post-Soviet Russia. The relevance of the Soviet term blat, which is associated mainly with the economy of shortage and access to items of everyday consumption, however, becomes questionable in the post-Soviet context. The term ‘economy of favours’ is better suited as a generic term for blat, both in post-Soviet studies and for comparative research.

The fact that the economy of favours makes use both of personal/ informal networks (the terms are used interchangeably) and institutional resources has considerable bearing on the nature of personal networks and institutions. Not only do personal relationships become ‘colonized and used for matters going far beyond sociability, but formal contacts also tend to become ‘informalized’, which results in ‘privatising’ the state, as Vladimir Shlapentokh puts it. Thus formal institutions can also be seen as ‘colonized by personal networks and involved with the economy of favours. Richard Rose associates this impact with the ‘anti-modern’ nature of formal institutions in Russia. The literature on the sociology of organizations has examined the impact of personal networks on organizations. But what kind of impact does the economy of favours have on personal networks themselves? We know that not all personal relationships and not all formal institutions become ‘colonized’, as not all rules can be broken and those which do tend to get broken are still considered to be rules. Is it possible then to distinguish those personal/informal networks that serve the economy of favours from a wider class of social networks?

Analytically, the networks that serve the economy of favours are, quite literally, ‘in-formal’; that is, they penetrate the formal institutions and reside in them (say, when a friend becomes a colleague at work). In framing the phenomenon, I follow the logic of Endre Sik and Istvan Janos Toth‘s concept of the ‘hidden economy’ and Eurostat classifications, which do not take account of housework, do-it-yourself activities, social work, the exchange of produce between households, crime and activities which count as productive but which are not legal (for example, the production of and trade in drugs). Under this category, Endre Sik and Toth do list the unreported activities of registered enterprises and the activities of enterprises which, although not registered, conduct otherwise legal activities. Following this logic, networks that serve the economy of favours include not all informal contacts but only those used to access or penetrate formal structures.

Favours exchanged within those networks informally are given not at one’s own expense (do-it-yourself activities or exchange of produce between households), but rather at the expense of institutions. They are so-called ‘favours of access’ that serve to channel institutional resources into private pockets, thus constituting a parallel currency exchanged within circles of ‘svoi’ people (people belonging to the circle)…”

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