Informality and the Revolutionary State in Russia

Abstract

This chapter analyses the concept of informality through the prism of the revolutionary state. It takes a historical perspective, focussing on Russia in the period 1917–1920, and is informed by original source materials recently uncovered by the author in Russian archives, as well as documents from published source collections. It considers how Bolshevik revolutionaries conceptualised a new kind of society whereby state and law would become mere tools to free people from repression before withering away as people learned to live in communist harmony. The chapter goes on to look at how the Bolsheviks attempted to implement some of their ideas after coming to power in 1917, focussing on the sphere of trade and distribution. Revolutionary policies, along with various other factors, like war and economic collapse, combined to give birth to a chaotic world of trade in which it is impossible for the scholar to separate the state from the private, or the legal from the criminal. The chapter contributes to scholarship on societies in which economic phenomena elude categorisation into the informal and formal, or the legal and illegal, rendering these concepts problematic.