Elites in the Making, and Their Organizational Behaviour: Cases in Russia and the Balkans

Postcommunist transformation has been aptly summarized as a process of ‘making capitalism without capitalists’ whereby the key players are former communist technocrats and (sometimes) dissident intellectuals, and not a propertied bourgeoisie (Eyal et al. 2000: 1). This phenomenon was conceptualized at the outset as ‘political capitalism’ (Hankiss 1990; Sztaniszkis 1991), but later on that concept turned out to be of limited heuristic value. Indeed a number of investigations on the reproduction—circulation of elites has revealed that a good deal of former nomenklatura members are among the losers in the transition for the conversion of their political capital into economic wealth was often unsuccessful (Szeleny and Szeleny 1995; Higley et al. 1998; Eyal et al. 2000). On the other hand, a high number of the former elite have been able to keep power, privilege and prestige also under the new regime, especially in Russia (Kryshtanovskaya and White 1996; Lazic 2000; Steen, and Gel’man 2003). The different degree of elite reproduction and circulation in the countries of CEE has been explained through the degree of cooptation of the intelligentsia or the formation of a counter-elite during the communist regime or the current stage of democratic consolidation (Szeleny and Szeleny 1995; Adam and Tomšič 2002); the political changes of the perestrojka years (Lane and Ross 1997); the impact of nationalist movements on elite selection, as in the former Yugoslavia (Lazic 2000).