Софи Ламброскини. "Capitalist bankers “made in the USSR”: managing cultural dichotomy (the story of Vyacheslav Ryzhkov)

21 октября 2013 г. на открытом заседании семинара НУГ социальных исследований экономического знания выступила Софи Ламброскини, докторантка Университета Париж-Уэст Нантер Ля дефанс. Тема доклада:  "Capitalist bankers “made in the USSR”: managing cultural dichotomy (the story of Vyacheslav Ryzhkov)" . Подробнее...

21 октября 2013 г. на открытом заседании семинара НУГ социальных исследований экономического знания выступила Софи Ламброскини, докторантка Университета Париж-Уэст Нантер Ля дефанс. Тема доклада: "Capitalist bankers “made in the USSR”: managing cultural dichotomy (the story of Vyacheslav Ryzhkov)".

Summary 

The USSR Foreign Trade Bank was in charge of “defending the monetary interests” of the Soviet Union on the financial front of the cold war. Its combatants constituted a small and exclusive group of Soviet financial professionals — Soviet bankers working either abroad in Soviet-owned British or French banks, or at home in Moscow at bank headquarters. These sovzagranbankiri were trained to master the skills necessary to fulfill Soviet financial strategies — earning foreign currency, moving money around to discretely finance a popular front movement or buy embargoed technology in the West, or collecting economic intelligence abroad. Seen from a sociological perspective, these activities involved both “Western” and socialist culture “processes” simultaneously. The story of one banker, Vyacheslav Ryzhkov, a wordly young Soviet professional who rubbed shoulders with the London City’s bankers, serves to illustrate this point. In 1977, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union sentenced him to death, though he was accused of no criminal intent, following the quasi-bankruptcy of the bank that he had set up and managed. The paper argues that Ryzhkov’s fate illustrates the divide between the bankers’ economic knowledge and the principles professed by the social and cultural institutions they were part of. The tuning between praxis and background is sharpened in light of the changes in official discourse in the second half of the 1980s and how they reflect in international Soviet banking praxis.

 

Организаторы семинара:

В.С. Автономов (научный руководитель факультета экономики НИУ ВШЭ)

О.И. Кирчик (в.н.с. ИГИТИ НИУ ВШЭ)

Г.Б. Юдин (с.н.с. ЛЭСИ НИУ ВШЭ)