In our book, Jewish Luck, Vera describes a morose chauffeur, Ivan, whose spirits cannot be lifted by any favor, big or small. After giving Ivan money for his children’s education, finding him an apartment, and increasing his wages, this benevolent boss asks what more he can do for Ivan.
“I want to be driven,” Ivan answers.
Vera used this story to illustrate the lack of initiative in Russian culture- Russians want the perks without the responsibility. The story may reveal something deeper and more disturbing in the Russian psyche.
On a lovely Saturday afternoon in West Rogers Park visiting my second and fourth cousin, Joanie[1] and her wonderful family after a few decades of not being in touch, a guest rapped on the door. In strolled Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern[2] with great energy and pomp and took his place at the Shabbat table. Both of us were passionate about the books laid...
Alena Ledeneva is an intrepid Russian-born professor now teaching in Great Britain, who conducted in-depth interviews with 50 respondents between 1997 and 2003 to understand the “rulebook” of the post-Soviet Russian economy as it is actually played out. How Russia Really Works is a fascinating account of the problems of modernization from a failed centralized “planned economy” in which no one, except the power elite, was invested, to a market economy for many who would find the terms “business ethics” or “business law” oxymoronic. However, the problems predated the Soviet state.
Ledeneva cites Sergei Witte, the progressive prime minister who served at the end of the nineteenth century, “’I am not in the least afraid of foreign capital, since I consider it is in the interests of our country…What I am afraid of is just the opposite, that our way of doing things has such specific characteristics, so different from the... 
