Shadow networks: Border economies, informal markets, and organized crime in Vladivostok and the Russian Far East

The breakdown of the Soviet Union has led to fundamental changes in Russia. New cultural and economic practices emerged out of the fragments of the collapsed state. Exploring economic activities in the Russian Far East at street markets and border crossings, the thesis focuses on new informal economic practices and non-regulated commercial organizations and seeks to understand the emerging roles of entrepreneurs, organized crime, and the state in post-Soviet Russia. The informal, the non-state; the illegal, and the gray in contemporary Russia are the subject of this thesis. Questions at the center of the inquiry are: What are shadow networks, how are they structured, and how is their social reality to be described? Based on anthropological fieldwork in the Russian Far East, especially in the port city of Vladivostok, the thesis focuses on large open-air markets, on so-called shuttle traders, mostly ethnic Russians crossing the Russian-Chinese border on a regular basis to import cheap goods for local markets, and on different organized crime groups, which evolved during the transition in the Far East. The underlying theme of the dissertation is the question of what the elements of stability in times of rapid economic and social change are. Different forms of shadow economies have been established in post-Soviet Russia during the last decade and the border between legality and illegality has become increasingly blurred. Moving beyond the established legal/illegal dichotomy to distinguish different forms of parallel economies, the thesis presents an alternative way to differentiate the various forms of shadow economies. Based on the analysis of social networks and focusing on different qualities of relational ties, the thesis proposes a methodological and theoretical apparatus to understand the mechanics and dynamics of informal economic networks more thoroughly.