Carmen Firan is a poet, essayist, journalist and fiction writer, whose subjects range from literature, politics and women’s studies to emerging democracies and civil society. Originally from Romania, she has been living and publishing work in New York since 2000.
10
Unwritten Rules, Open Secrets, Knowing Smiles
Alena Ledeneva
Myths, signals and ënon-translatablesí
There is a certain mythology that Russia is a land of irregularities and paradoxes, to a large extent impenetrable for outsiders. At the level of clichés, the ‘Russian soul’ and ‘Russian chaos’ are often given some taken-for-granted explanatory power. Among other usual suspects, clues such as a ‘traumatic past’, ‘kleptomania’, or ‘size matters’ point to important dimensions of the analysis. A common assumption behind all these ideas is that there is some kind of disorder in Russia, which makes it different and distinct from more orderly economies. A certain non-transparency of the ‘rules of the game’ in Russia has become an accepted commonplace. A similar conclusion could be drawn from the analysis of emerging post-Soviet discourses referring to the ubiquitous workings of the informal economy. Many of these are incomprehensible without cross-cultural translation and even then their meanings deviate in translation. Yet these ‘non-translatables’ and ‘linguistic innovations’ are the best indicators of fundamental changes in society – they signal and point to the existing unwritten rules, known only to insiders (see the glossary for examples).
I argue that in order to make the rules of the game transparent, one should start by altering the approach. Rather than looking only at what does not work in Russia and why, one should concentrate on what does work and how. This essay is based on the assumption that there is order in Russia and that it is possible, however hard it might be, to grasp the logic and articulate the rules of that order which counteracts the change. Let me give some examples. Corruption and the ineffectiveness of the rule of law in Russia is one of the main obstacles to Russian economic and political development.1 Not only does the weak rule of law deter foreign investment in the Russian economy, it also undermines efforts to rein in acute problems such as property rights, capital flight, tax evasion and abuses of corporate governance. Many reforms were designed to remedy the inefficiency of the rule of law but failed at the stage of implementation.2 Why? Following our alternative perspective, one should ask, ‘If the rule of law does not work in Russia, then what does?’ Indeed, if legislative reforms and law enforcement in Russia do not operate in the expected way, it is logical to suggest that something is working against them and working really efficiently. What is it?
A tentative answer can be found in popular wisdom: ‘Russia is a country of unread laws and unwritten rules.’ Or, as they say, ‘the imperfection of our laws is compensated for by their non-observance’ (nesovershenstvo nashikh zakonov kompensiruetsya ikh nevypolneniem). It is not that the requisite components of the rule of law are absent in Russia; rather, the ability of the rule of law to function coherently has been diverted by a powerful set of practices that has evolved organically in the post-Soviet milieu. Taking such an outlook as a point of departure, I will argue that the ‘rules of the game’ in Russia can actually be understood if so-called ‘unwritten rules’ are taken into account. Adopting a perspective of unwritten rules and understanding how they work can help to make the rules of the game in Russia more transparent and therefore subject to positive change and reform.
Given the scale of the informal economy in Russia,3 there is no shortage of examples that illustrate how unwritten rules operate. Tax evasion practices alone provide an excellent ground for studying the informal order of things. On the one hand, there are commonly used ways of reducing the tax liability and of evading taxes, which are considered dysfunctional for the economy. On the other hand, ‘saved’ taxes are often used for investment, as there are few other sources for investment in the economy. What looks like capital flight can in fact make its comeback in the form of foreign investment. The fact that, in the 1990s, Cyprus was both the most popular offshore zone for Russian business and one of the country’s top five foreign investors, matching the level of France and the UK, is indicative of this. In other words, the informal order balances off the formal one. This accounts for why things are never so bad or so good as they seem in Russia and draws attention to unwritten rules prescribing the ways in which the informal order of things intervenes with, compensates for or diverts the formal one.
Another striking set of examples derives from the role of the state as a major shareholder in many large corporations. Insider deals have prevailed (particularly since 1995) as a method of state asset disposal, and other opaque corporate governance arrangements have proliferated. Since the 2000s, similar methods have been used for the state to reassert its control over the strategic sectors and key industries. These deals are impossible to decode without understanding the logic of unwritten rules, just as it is impossible to decipher fully the ‘information wars’ and ‘kompromat (compromising material) wars’ omnipresent in Russia of the 1990s. Unwritten rules have also played a part in regulating non-monetary exchanges. Barter chains redistributing income among the ‘inner circle’, as well as among firms and their multiple subsidiaries, have revolutionised practices of ‘give-and-take’ and have provided them with a legally amenable form.
All of these phenomena of the new Russian economy share an important feature: agents at all levels employ practices that have come to be known as extralegal or informal. These practices are to a large extent responsible for the non-transparency of the ‘rules of the game’ in the Russian economy, mainly because they are regulated by what is referred to as informal arrangements, unwritten codes or unspecified rules. All these are elusive in nature and need further clarification.
Unwritten rules
Nobel laureate, economist Douglass North has defined institutions as the ‘rules of the game in a society or, more formally, humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’.4 ‘They [institutions] are perfectly analogous to the rules of the game in a competitive team sport. That is, they consist of formal written rules as well as typically unwritten codes of conduct that underlie and supplement formal rules, such as not deliberately injuring a key player on the opposing team. And as this analogy would imply, the rules and informal codes are sometimes violated and punishment is enacted. Taken together, the formal and informal rules and the type and effectiveness of enforcement shape the whole character of the game.’ His distinction between formal and informal types of constraints has become revolutionary for the neo-institutional analysis.
Unwritten rules should not be confused with informal constraints. The unwritten rules are not about knowing the rules, they are about following the rules. Knowing a rule does not imply an ability to follow it, or mastery of it, just as knowing a recipe does not assure practical skill in its implementation, and knowing the literal meaning of a word does not automatically mean that one will use it correctly in context. In Wittgenstein’s terminology there are practices of ‘rule-following’ (i.e. being able to continue the sequence of numbers 2, 4, 6, 8…) that are distinct from rules that are interpreted, explicated and understood (i.e. an ability to figure out the formulae of this sequence). In a classic example of chess playing, Wittgenstein shows that certain mastery and expertise can be achieved only by dealing with constraints in practice.
A distinction between a rule and mastery of the rule can be illustrated by the metaphor of driving in Russia. To drive ‘properly’, one has to mix both formal (traffic rules) and informal rules (conventions); to apply them as needed in appropriate contexts and to switch fluidly between them; and, crucially, to negotiate oneself out of trouble if caught. This is apart from struggling to avoid the holes in the roads by radical manoeuvres and watching others doing the same. In other words, unwritten rules are not only about how to follow the rules of the game but also about how to break them. They imply that the rules of the game are mastered with particular experti
se.
Unwritten rules are the know-how needed to ‘navigate’ between formal and informal sets of rules and between the rules and their enforcement. Without being articulated, they ‘prescribe’ which rules to follow in which context and ‘set’ the best approach for getting things done. Applying one formal rule rather than another, using restrictions (quotas, filters, etc.) and small print, and enforcing some decisions but not the others are examples of how constraints can be mediated. The focus of unwritten rules is not on constraints per se, as in the case of formal and informal codes, but on the enabling aspects of those constraints. To put it more bluntly, unwritten rules define the ways of circumventing constraints, both formal and informal, of manipulating their enforcement to one’s own advantage and of avoiding penalties by combining the three elements of the rules of the game creatively.
Unwritten rules exist in all societies,5 but predominate (and even become indispensable) in those where enforcement, formal and informal rules are not synchronised and do not constitute coherent rules of the game. North shows that when people perceive the structure of the rules of the system to be fair and just, transaction costs are low and enforcement costs are negligible, which helps the efficiency of the economy. When people perceive the system to be unjust, the costs of transacting go up. In other words, if one cannot follow both formal and informal sets of rules coherently, this will be reflected in their merger and certain patterns of rule-following or unwritten rules. It might be tempting to think that unwritten rules are generally disadvantageous for the system. This is only true, however, if the rules of the game – formal and informal constraints and their enforcement – were tied to the public interest and were beneficial to economic performance. As this has not always been the case in Russia, the impact of unwritten rules is rather ambivalent.
Cultural traditions in Russia separate the concept of justice from that of formal law, which is grasped in a discrepancy in connotations between the terms spravedlivost’ (justice) and zakonnost’ (lawfulness). In his study ‘Muscovite political folkways’,6 Edward Keenan explains such a gap between the informal and the formal in terms of political culture. He argues that Russian political culture has been strongly influenced over time by both the psychological attitudes and the practical, adaptive techniques that were developed by the earliest Slavic settlers. The conditions of economic and social life that faced them – isolation, poor land, a severe climate, unpredictable harvests and a generally hostile environment – gave rise to a vigorous culture characterised by a specific set of traits: caution, calculation, resoluteness, stoicism, endurance and, above all, an orientation around survival. Over the centuries, Keenan claims, these traits manifested themselves in the three distinct but compatible cultural settings of medieval Muscovy: the peasant village, the court and the bureaucracy. These share certain common features which constitute the enduring elements of Russian political culture:
The operational basis of each setting is informal and traditional (lacking a necessary connection between real power and formal status)
Decision-making is corporate and conspiratorial
Stability and risk-avoidance are favoured over innovation and progress
There is a reluctance to promulgate systematic codified law (those who need to know the rules know them)
Keenan suggests that the peasant, court and bureaucratic cultures fused during the Soviet period – especially since Stalin – in a way that strengthened and purified the ‘deep structures’ of Russian society in a modern regime: a strong leader and corporate rule (‘grand prince and boyars’ became ‘general secretary of Communist Party and Politburo’), conspiratorial politics and pervasive informality (‘it is more reliable to depend upon informal and personal relations than it is to rely upon the impersonal legal procedures and institutions that are favoured in other societies’).
Keenan’s conclusions about the nature of the Soviet system (his analysis predated the end of the USSR) have relevance for our examination of the post-Soviet era as well. Distant and sceptical attitudes to the law produce a fundamental problem of public governance and limit the constituency for the effective functioning of the rule of law. The disregard of the law is coupled with disregard of the state. The state is partly responsible.
Over the course of the 1990s, the public felt betrayed by the outcomes of privatisation and placed all the blame on state institutions and bureaucrats who found ways to prosper while abandoning the general population to its own devices. A widespread sense of injustice fuelled the use of informal practices. For instance, before recent tax reforms, the nominal rates of all taxes often resulted in cumulative rates of more than 100 per cent of revenues. Economic agents who feel compelled to evade taxes blame the state for forcing them into such a position. The state is scapegoated as corrupt and incompetent, further diminishing its legitimacy and deepening attitudes of civic passivity. When taken together with deep-rooted historical legacies, these tendencies present serious obstacles to the development of the rule of law, a full-fledged democracy and a market economy and sustain an arena for unwritten rules.
Thus, there is little prospect of transparency in the Russian economy so long as the conditions are in place that make the rules of the game in Russia dependent upon unwritten rules. Let me summarise the nature of such dependency:
The ‘rules of the game’ in the economy are non-transparent and frequently change, because the existing legal framework does not function coherently
Anybody can be framed and found guilty of some violation of the formal rules, as the economy operates in such a way that there is always something to be caught for
Due to the pervasiveness of the offence punishment is bound to occur selectively on the basis of criteria developed outside the legal domain
While everybody is under the threat of punishment, the actual punishment is ‘suspended’, but can be enforced at any time but in a select number of cases. Punishment thus becomes a resource in short supply that is distributed according to extralegal criteria
Unwritten rules come into being to compensate for the defects in the rules of the game and to form the basis for selective punishment
Violation of unwritten rules can result in enforcement of written ones, which paradoxically makes it more important to observe the unwritten rules than the written
The latter in turn feeds back into the non-transparency of the ‘rules of the game’ in the Russian economy.
I believe that these attributes of the system have not changed much during Russia’s transition to a market economy. In the same way that the planned economy was not really a planned economy and was actually run with help of tolkachi (‘pushers’ for the completion of plans in industry), blat (use of personal networks for getting things done) and other informal arrangements, the market economy today is not really a market economy. This is due primarily to the key role that unwritten rules still play in the system,7 and their Soviet roots.
Open secrets
The common knowledge about the gap between the official discourse (planned economy) and the ways in which things are done in practice (like tolkachi and blat) constitutes a grey area worthy of research. Commonplaces and other trivial aspects of day-to-day life can sometimes reveal profound features of societies and political regimes that are hidden when tackling them directly.8 Open secrets of socialism express tensions in the relationship between the individual and the political regime. The tacit knowledge of open secrets of the Soviet regime translates into ‘doublethink’, and the social competence of handling them with a knowing smile.
In the famous folklore definition of the six paradoxes of socialism every paradox points to an open secret – an informal practice, widespread but hidden from outsiders: absenteeism in ‘no unemployment but nobody works’; false reporting in ‘nobody works but productivity increases’; shortages in ‘productivity increases but shops are empty’; blat in ‘shops are empty but fridges are full’; unfair privileges in ‘fridges are full but nobody is satisfied’; cy
nicism in ‘nobody is satisfied but all vote unanimously’. These practices were not really unknown but ‘shameful’ for socialism and therefore hidden from the official discourse – thus making them its open secrets of socialism.
Belonging and complicity expressed in knowing smiles reflect on the key paradox of the totalitarian power that generated a ‘Homo Sovieticus’ who has brought it to its end. So goes the seventh, post-socialist paradox: ‘all voted unanimously but the system has collapsed anyway’.
As a phrase, ‘open secret’ is similar to Torstein Veblen’s paradoxical concepts of ‘trained incapacity’, ‘conspicuous consumption’, ‘trained incapacity’, ‘business sabotage’ and ‘sagacious restriction of output’, in which mutually exclusive parts clash in order to create a new meaning. People’s reactions to paradoxes of socialism – knowing smiles – are the acknowledgement of understanding of such meaning, the meaning of the failed purpose.
One might think that an open secret is not a secret at all, since it concerns things that ‘everyone knows’, whether within a particular group or more widely in a society. This view would be a mistake, however, because open secrets are only partly open. Open secrets are secrets in the sense that they are excluded from formal or official discourse. But they are open in the sense that they are familiar and referred to in idioms and language games, though these often require explanation for outsiders. The ambiguity involved is a real and significant one. There is a tacit acceptance that what is known remains in shadows. Open secrets occupy areas of tension, where a public affirmation of knowledge would threaten other values or goods that those involved want to protect. This point is noted in Georg Simmel’s celebrated discussion of secrecy, which reveals its complexity and subtlety. Simmel defines secrecy as ‘consciously willed concealment’ – open secrets are clearly still secrets according to this definition. Simmel makes the point that secrecy is a relative phenomenon, at least as soon as it is shared: ‘a secret that two know is never a secret’.9
Goffman takes the idea further by opposing diplomatic, official and strategic secrets to secrets that are, to various degrees, ‘open secrets’ because of everyday familiarity with one another’s doings.10 The degree of openness is likely to correspond to the reaction when the secret is broken or spoken about. If the knowing smile is the likely reaction to bringing up the subject of blat, the type of reaction of breaking ‘closed secrets’ or ‘dark secrets’ – the opposite of open secrets – might be rather different.11
Dark secrets are usually confined to very small groups bound by strong emotions that effectively block what may be ‘known’ yet never admitted to. A telling example is provided by the movie, Capturing the Friedmans, which deservedly sparked much debate when it first appeared. The film has a curious history. The filmmaker originally set out to interview one of the brothers in the family, who was a very well-known clown in New York City. During the course of the interviews, it became apparent that more powerful emotional dynamics were at work in his family milieu. Subsequent long interviews with his brothers, mother and father brought to light a history of sexual abuse by the father involving young boys in his care (whether he abused his own sons never became fully clear). All the family members seemed aware of what was going on, but the issue was never discussed in the domestic context itself, only revealed obliquely in the interviews – and in videos which the family routinely made of one another.
In contrast, depictions of open secrets in late Soviet movies, such as Danelia’s Afonia (1975), Mimino (1977), Osennii maraphon (Autumn Marathon, 1979), Riavanov’s Ironiia sud’by (The Irony of Fate, 1975), Sluzhebnyi roman (An Office Romance, 1977), Garazh (The Garage, 1979) and Bortko’s Blondonka za uglom (The Blond Around the Corner, 1984), convey attitudes to informal practices that are light and playful, even if meant to be corrective.12 They are ‘satiricised’ rather than genuinely satirical and target particular groups that engage in these practices themselves. Similarly to the Krokodil images, satirical films claim to co-opt Soviet audiences into a stigmatising laughter, but at the same time they introduce techniques of handling open secrets and define the boundaries of what is possible. By the 1980s, understanding of the formal (and enabling) nature of constraints and acknowledging the possibility of circumventing them became almost universal – a variety of know-how was shared by insiders of a circle, a group or society as a whole. Depending on the reference group, open secrets varied in degree of openness. Blat is an example of a widely acknowledged open secret (even 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, only seven per cent in an all-Russia national survey found it difficult to define blat, in contrast to 27 per cent having difficulty in defining telefonnoe pravo (political pressure on the judiciary), for example.13
Commonly recognised but rarely registered in written sources, apart from their ‘satirised’ or ‘critical in a controlled way’ images, inevitably linked with the defects of particular individuals rather than attributed with a systemic character, these practices testified to various ways in which socialism failed to satisfy individual needs. ‘Satirised’ images of the Krokodil were acceptable because they never targeted the intrinsic failures of the Soviet system. Just about every part of everyday life was satirised, if not in the controlled discourse of the Krokodil, then in anekdot. The failures of the system were out in the open but not acknowledged as systemic. They did not appear in the proceedings of the Central Committee. That is what censorship did – it did not allow the formal admission of a failure on the part of the system; one could never come to the conclusion that the system that had emerged in the Soviet system was intrinsically doomed to failure.14 The regime could not exist without people circumventing its own declared principles. The regime needed people to take care of its systemic defects and to lubricate the rigidities of its constraints. But the regime was unwilling to admit it. The failures of the Soviet system,15 which all the insiders were complicit in reproducing, were its main open secrets, satirised, smiled at and… kept!
Thus, on the one hand, blat was a commonplace and its instances could make the front page of the Krokodil in 1980s (without using the word blat). On the other, the political regime keeps its reliance on informal practices hidden and shifts the responsibility for engaging in informal practices on individuals. The Krokodil helped to promote the narrative of the ‘grand misrecognition game’: everybody does it (engages in informal practices, unofficial discourse, doublethink) but it has nothing to do with socialism. Although designed to create humour, the Krokodil could not help being part of the political repressive machinery designed to introduce and reinforce moral/political standards. Uncovering a form of politics that pretends to be humour reveals new dimensions of symbolic violence.
As a form of controlled critique, the Krokodil exercised the power of tension management in a number of ways. Being the main official publication that refers to informal practices, the Krokodil – itself perhaps being a form of false reporting – claimed to perform the functions of producing Soviet satire, of eradicating social ills and of giving a platform for revealing critique and self-critique (samokritika) for the system, but could not deliver. Officially published and therefore working within the boundaries established by the regime, the Krokodil was not about satire – it was about the adequate ‘framing’ of social ills and their ‘satirisation’ (with an appropriate sound association with ‘sanitisation’). By introducing themes and boundaries – where, how and what to smile at – the Krokodil socialised and educated the Soviet public on the matters of everyday life.16 On its pages one can see some realities of the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s, but not others, and therefore conclude what can be discussed, criticised and satirised and what cannot (this function of the Krokodil would be similar to satirical publications in other societies). While claiming the task of eradication of social ills, the Krokodil was engaged in educating the public on how to react to certain themes and concerns – what could or should be smiled at, and how – it was a pedagogical device, like all Soviet mass culture, assisting the ?
??misrecognition game’ of the regime.17 The ways of revealing social ills to the public were also the ways of concealment. Most importantly, the Krokodil inverted the role that satire has in other societies – to criticise – into one that it does not have in other societies – to de-moralise people and to make them complicit in the failures of the regime. One of the things we still do not know about the Soviet system (despite all the academic literature about the one party state, the redistributive economy, nomenklatura and its pathologies) is the way in which people were made to accede to power within the system. It was not just force, oppression, or rewards for co-optation or inclusion that brought people into that system. There was more to it than that – the social psychology of the Soviet power and its emotional content has never been unpacked or smiled at knowingly by researchers.
Knowing smiles
The very question, ‘Why do people smile about commonplaces that are strictly speaking neither funny nor enjoyable in any obvious way’ may already suggest an answer. Just as it is different from the reactions to the disclosure of ‘closed secrets’, a knowing smile is different from a smile of joy or laughter. Even if reminiscent of the Russian literary tradition of ‘laughter through tears’,18 the knowing smile is relieved of intense emotions because of the mundane nature of blat – the familiarity that brings contempt rather than laughter or tears.
I identify a knowing smile as acknowledgement and competent mastery of ‘open secrets’. When reciprocated, it is a sign of sharing awareness and ability ‘to read between the lines’, ‘to see behind the façade’, with some complicity in ‘beating the system’ but without shouting about the ‘emperor has no clothes’ secret. To put it in Simmel’s terms, ‘although at first sight an empty form, [a knowing smile] is an excellent symbol of that reciprocal apprehension, which is the presumption of every social relationship’.19 The ‘emptiness’ of the knowing smile may signify the inability to articulate tacit knowledge (the actual workings of paradoxes are complicated)20 but it enables the reproduction of daily interactions without pressure of recognition of one’s own compromised behaviour or the failures of the regime. It allows people to go on with their everyday lives and helps the system to reproduce itself. The ‘emptiness’ of the knowing smile is also relevant in the sense that knowing smiles in the stagnation period would not be the same as a knowing smile under Stalinism – its content is contextual and defined by whatever social competence may be involved in a particular period.
The meaning of the knowing smile about blat is elusive, inevitably defined by period, place and context. But personalities and relationships are just as essential to interpretations of knowing smiles.21 Now that it is possible to ask people to articulate their views on informal practices without constraint (just as in the 1950s, those who left the Soviet Union were able to describe their blat experience in the Harvard Interviewing Project,22 the collapse of the Soviet Union has made blat a matter of the past and thus enabled people to articulate it), I have conducted a number of interviews about knowing smiles and ad hoc experiments, testing for the emotions behind them, to determine that ‘empty’ signs of competence could be emotionally charged in articulation and hide a varying degree of personal involvement, or an implicit relationship with informal practices. Some emotions were associated with knowing smiles about blat much more often than others and could be divided into three nominal groups – ‘positive,’ ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’ – accordingly.
At a very basic level, chats about blat produce a smile of linguistic recognition. As was brilliantly grasped by Zhvanetskii, ‘only those who belong would understand…’ (tol’ko svoi ponimaet kak prinosit’ pol’zu obschestvu vopreki ego zhe zakonam). The pleasure of sharing untranslatable ‘games of words’, behind which, in Zhvanetskii’s satirical piece, hide the untranslatable ‘games of deeds’ – what I call informal practices – provides a sense of belonging to a circle of people who ‘know how’.23 Just as it is a pleasure to recognise a foreign idiom or understand a joke, it is enjoyable to recognise a native ‘language game’ that points to an open secret that might be tricky for a foreigner to understand. A knowing smile of belonging (‘we are all complicit in our own oppression and in our own corruption’) is most common but it also has an implication of dividing us and them, ‘subconsciously indicating secret pleasure from co-operation’ between us against them. ‘Us’ implies complicity of people in the circle who care about each other. ‘Them’ refers to the state, strangers, or outsiders, who take care of themselves. Such division is representative of what Gudkov has referred to as ‘negative identity’.24
Other knowing smiles associated with guilty pleasures include the one of the ‘pleasure of doing something wrong’, the ‘pleasure of perversion’, the ‘pleasure of crossing boundaries in the society which is overregulated’. Empowering an individual through crossing some boundaries, conscious or unconscious, feeds into one of the central themes in my study of informal practices – the enabling power of constraints. Knowing smiles (audacious, mischievous or naughty) can imply active use of constraints; ‘positive opportunism’, the experience of turning the weaknesses of the system (prokoly sistemy) to one’s advantage, known as ‘cheating the state’ or ‘beating the system’, all point to satisfaction from a covert system of rewards and abuse of state institutions in totalitarian regimes.
Reactions associated with indifference and a weak emotional charge – the knowing smiles of ignorance, apathy or acceptance – are no less important. Dismissive smiles ‘undermine the significance of the issue or indicate lack of interest or concern’ while accepting smiles ‘can display anything from admission of the necessity of blat involved, directly or indirectly’, the individual helplessness vis-à-vis the regime, as well as the overall acceptance of the ways things are, failure or not. Often, the knowing smile is a way of disguising ignorance and erroneous associations.25 In such cases, the knowing smile is a cover for not understanding the processes at work – ‘of course I understand what’s going on’ – when in fact this is a form of laziness. Neutral smiles emphasise the openness of open secrets and the widespread scale of blat practices but also provide an escape route from taking them seriously by turning them into a smiling matter. They tackle uncertainty and display a passive habit of acceptance, the habitus26 of Homo Sovieticus that ensures that one does not articulate or even question what the open secret really is about while smiling knowingly. Neutral knowing smiles are similar to what Goffman identifies as ‘civil inattention’, and are thus most functional in signalling and testifying normality (‘the unserious nature of practices as opposed to the big corruption scandals’) and enable people to ‘go on’.27
Negative knowing smiles are generated by emotions associated with embarrassment, shame and guilt. These smiles (shifty, awkward, uncomfortable, nervous smiles) show involvement and present a way of ‘easing out of the situation’ or represent a defence mechanism. Defence mechanisms are essential to protect one’s positive and altruistic self-image.
All types of knowing smiles have a common denominator – social competence of handling open secrets and dealing with situations of moral squeeze, regardless of expressed attitude or emotional load. Social competence embraces tacit knowledge about what is normal, the ability ‘to go on’, a skill to turn formal constraints to one’s advantage and a capacity to play the ‘doublethink’ game in self-defence and in the defence of the system people live under. It implies ambivalence about the idea of being honest, upright and dedicated to official goals. ‘Someone who readily believes whatever official discourse says has no independent thought.’28 ‘Independence’, ‘individualism’ and ‘civic rights’ in totalitarian societies are channelled through ‘distance’, ‘doublethink’ and ‘double-deed’. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell defines doublethink as ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously’.
The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing
tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated… [T]he essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them… all this is indispensably necessary.29
Taken out of humorous contexts and into the everyday workings of society, the knowing smile – whether as a sign of recognition, misrecognition or both – serves to point out open secrets, tensions or situations of moral or logical squeeze, that individuals are forced to resolve themselves whether they deny or accept, fight or benefit from the existing gap between the official story and reality. The inadequacies of the system shifted onto the individuals to handle is well illustrated in an anekdot. A politburo member is giving a speech about industrialisation and 20-storey skyscrapers recently built on Karl Marx Street in Kharkov. Suddenly one of the listeners interrupts him:
‘Comrade Kalinin, I am from Khar’kov. I walk down that street every day, but I have not seen any skyscrapers!’
‘Comrade,’ replies Kalinin, ‘instead of loitering on the streets you should read newspapers and find out what’s going on in your city’.30
In tune with this folk wisdom, Hannah Arendt theorises totalitarian ideologies as those aiming not at the transformation of the outside world but at the transformation of human nature.31 Yuri Levada’s empirically backed analysis results in the idea of
Homo Sovieticus:
The Soviet experiment produced not so much a new human type as an individual who was wholly adapted to Soviet reality, one willing to accept it as a given, with no alternative. A society that was closed on all sides, even from its own historical reality, raised generations who could not imagine any way of life except the one they were given. The lack of alternatives turned the universal practice of adaptation into a habit, a mass behavioral structure that was neither dissected nor subject to analysis.32
The near ubiquitous exchange of ‘knowing smiles’ in everyday contexts is exactly that behavioural structure that, up to now, has escaped dissection and analysis. Yet it is the basis of normality and routine interaction that is so fundamental for the modus operandi in societies according to Goffman.33 The function of knowing smiles is that, by dismissing their importance and by accepting commonplaces that rule out reflection upon them, they reproduce unwritten rules and open secrets and thus the system of power based on everybody’s complicity in it. In other words, smiling at open secrets is allowing them to go unchallenged. Knowing smiles are an integral part of maintaining the yawning gap between the official discourse of the political regime and the unwritten rules it relies on. One is forced to keep open secrets a secret while also following the unwritten rules and engaging in informal practices that bridge the gaps between formal constraints of the regime and its informal impositions. Such an engagement makes one the insider of the system but also makes one complicit and fundamentally dependent on the regime. One is forced to put oneself in a compromised position and to apply self-control under the ‘system of suspended punishment’, only applied ‘where necessary’.34 The system makes people complicit in their own demoralisation and their own corruption.35 Knowing smiles actually serve to de-moralise people and not to allow one to moralise. Individual dependence is replicated at societal level, where the political and the economic system are dependent on informal practices in their inner workings.36 In his 2001 analysis, Levada phrases it sharply and suggests little change for the Homo Post-Sovieticus.
At the individual level, the whole system of deals made with the state, which was intrinsic to the Soviet arrangement, inevitably led to moral corruption, the acceptance of sham, the padding of figures, string pulling, bribery, and doublethink. These conditions were necessary if society and the economy were to function. The collapse of the Soviet system did not introduce anything fundamentally new; it only eliminated the social and institutional (punitive) regulators that had limited the effect of the corrupting mechanisms.37
Following Goffman’s methodology, one should suggest that the system will change when people stop smiling knowingly at references such as blat and other unwritten rules still propping up the existing regime. Levada’s survey data are revealing in this respect.38
In conclusion, I must emphasise that smiling at open secrets is a universal practice, not restricted to the Soviet doublethink or even to its post-Soviet reincarnation. Due to the inherent duality of informal practices and their paradoxical role in subverting the formal systems which they penetrate and exploit but also support,39 they find their uses in post-Soviet contexts and in other societies that feature a gap between the official and the unofficial. People do not have to live under the Soviet system to smile at the anekdot of its six paradoxes above. The context of telling an anekdot prepares one for smiling and provokes a smile of recognition of a different kind, not necessarily of familiarity with the reality of socialism but of an elegant unfolding of paradoxes or by proxy of one’s own experiences. The manipulative use of the formal rules and using them to one’s own personal advantage may be particularly strong in repressive systems but is not limited to them. This is illustrated by the studies of corruption and rent-seeking behaviour in the Middle East, Latin American and African resource-rich economies, as well as in the recent analyses of the 2008 sub-prime crisis elsewhere.
It is not the wrong-doing but the reaction to it that often determines the difference between societies. Although there might be some cross-cultural recognition and smiling at the subject matters of blat and corruption, there is a great deal of serious public awareness, academic interest and policy concern in the UK and the US, Finland and Norway.
Given the importance of personal background and experience in producing knowing smiles, one might imagine that changes in bringing up and educating younger generations will lead to the evaporation of Soviet-style practices. To date, the legitimacy of informal practices among the younger generations in Russia suggests otherwise. Levada’s data suggest that the legacy of the ‘doublethink’ is still relevant. Thus, groups under 40 find evasion of military service justified: the youngest respondents, directly subject to conscription, are more than twice as likely to justify draft evasion as to condemn it.40 Future knowing smiles, competence in unwritten rules and the doublethink on civic duty are thus set in motion. Unless such open secrets are articulated, explained or integrated into policies and cultural exchange, the fundamental non-transparency of societies is not going to diminish.41