How Russia Really WorksDuring the Soviet era, blatthe use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedureswas necessary to compensate for the inefficiencies of socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a new generation of informal practices. In How Russia Really Works, Alena V. Ledeneva explores practices in politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990sfrom the hiring of firms