The Consolidation of Dictatorship in Russia - Book Report/Review Example

As Jeremy Pope of Transparency International has said, ‘anti-corruption is like motherhood: everybody likes to talk about it, but what is anyone doing about it?’ The problem is that we have an uphill task, the most important task is to develop a solution to tackle the problem of corruption and the other is to examine the cause and effects of the same solution in order to ensure that the process of democratization takes place in the Soviet Union. The biggest and the most daunting problem is that the lack of hard facts as to what causes corruption restricts from developing a solution that can be acceptable and successfully implemented also hindering the process of democratization in the long run.

The communist era dominates the economy and it also monopolizes the politics in the country inevitably creating an alternative structure in the society. As Richard Rose (1998, 7) has written, “The role of social networks as the means to organize societies in the FSU leads to the high levels of corruption to be found in the region. Corruption is a symptom of the anti-modern post-Soviet States and acts as an important indicator of how citizens relate to and view their system of governance.

” Another pivotal concept here is social capital, its acquisition and use are arguably one of the most important things. Fukuyama has described social capital as ‘an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals’ (Fukuyama 2000). It is the distance between people who govern and the people who are governed. When taking an example of a state and society we find that this gap is increasing, this ultimately affects the level of corruption in the country and inevitably affects the process of democratization in the country.