Simon Gdalyevich Kordonsky

Who he is and his times

Simon Gdalyevich Kordonsky was born on 7 September 1944 in Oirot-Tura (now Gorno-Altaisk). According to his page at the HSE University, in 1977 he graduated from Tomsk State University with a degree in biology, and in 1988 he defended a dissertation for the degree of candidate of philosophical sciences at Novosibirsk State University. According to his biography on the website of the Khamovniki Foundation, in the 1970s he worked as a sociologist studying construction and social problems, and in the 1980s he took part in informal academic seminars on economics.

During his Novosibirsk period Kordonsky joined a circle of researchers who studied how resources were actually distributed and decisions actually made in the Soviet economy. As A. Shuman describes it (2011), administrative markets in the USSR were first studied by two groups: a Moscow group that studied Gosplan (Vitaly Naishul was among its leaders) and a Novosibirsk group that studied a rural district of the Altai Krai (Kordonsky was among its leaders). This account is based on a secondary source. In 1989 Kordonsky's article Social Structure and the Braking Mechanism (Sotsial'naya struktura i mekhanizm tormozheniya) appeared in the collection Understanding (Postizhenie), the same collection in which Naishul's reform proposal was published.

In the 1990s, according to Khamovniki, Kordonsky worked as an expert for various international and commercial organizations; according to Wikipedia, from 1993 he headed the Centre for Civil Society Problems. In 2000–2004 he headed the Expert Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation, and in 2004–2005 he was a senior adviser (starshy referent) to the President — these facts agree in Wikipedia and on the Khamovniki Foundation website. Thus the author of the theory of the administrative market himself worked for several years inside the state apparatus. The Expert Directorate prepared analytical materials for the head of state, but the content of Kordonsky's memoranda from that time has not been published in open sources, and they cannot be used to judge his influence on specific decisions.

Since 2006 Kordonsky has worked at the Higher School of Economics, and since 2008 he has been a tenured professor; he headed the Department of Local Self-Government, and according to the HSE page he leads the Project and Training Laboratory of Municipal Administration and is a research professor at the School of Politics and Governance. He chairs the expert council of the Khamovniki Foundation for Social Research, which funds field studies of the Russian provinces.

Main ideas

The first big idea is the administrative market. In the book Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (Administrativnye rynki SSSR i Rossii; the text was compiled from works of 1987–1995 and edited in 1995–1996; book editions under the title Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia appeared in 2000 and 2006), Kordonsky rejects both widespread pictures of the Soviet system. In his view, the totalitarian system with a planned economy does not withstand economic and political criticism, while the theory of the administrative-command system projects myths about an ideal bureaucracy onto Soviet reality. Instead, he describes a rigidly but multidimensionally hierarchical system in which the economic and the political cannot be separated even analytically, and social statuses and consumer goods are converted into one another according to partly unwritten rules.

To describe this market formally rather than in slogans, Kordonsky introduced the concept of administrative weight — a measure of an official's potential influence, which depends not on the person but on their position in the system of power. Each level and form of activity is assigned a rank from 10 to 7, and the weight of a post equals their product: for the General Secretary of the Central Committee it is 100, for the head of a Central Committee department it is 49. For such constructions he used a formal apparatus of his own devising, named, at S. Chebanov's suggestion, fan matrices (veernye matritsy). The purpose of the apparatus is to connect the impersonal concepts of economics and sociology with the fact that decisions are actually made by specific people in specific positions.

The second idea is the resource state, set out in the collection of articles The Resource State (Resursnoe gosudarstvo; REGNUM, 2007, 108 pp.). Kordonsky calls a resource something that the state collects and distributes for the sake of a common goal, as opposed to a commodity, which is produced for exchange. He writes that no commodity arises when resources are “assimilated” (spent): the very fact of spending serves as evidence of use, and the resources spent are written off and cease to exist as a unit of account. The state, as he describes it, resembles a honeycomb of demarcated cells — regions, sectors, social groups — between which resource flows pass, turning into commodities and money at the borders.

The third idea is the estate structure, set out in the monograph The Estate Structure of Post-Soviet Russia (Soslovnaya struktura postsovetskoy Rossii; Institute of the Public Opinion Foundation, 2008, 216 pp.). According to the author's abstract, Russia's social structure has two components — estate and class — and history appears as the cyclical predominance of one of them. He distinguishes titular estates, which exist by law, from non-titular, serving ones, and describes inter-estate relations connected with the distribution of resources. In The Resource State the same idea is put this way: citizens' access to resources is possible only in accordance with their state status and the normative needs assigned to it, and the groups themselves are described in terms of accounting and control.

What became of the ideas in practice

For the history of Gosplan, what matters most in Kordonsky is his interpretation of Soviet planning as a system for accounting for resource flows. In The Resource State, the national goal is broken down into the particular goals of fragments — administrative-territorial units, sectors, and the social accounting groups of workers, peasants and white-collar employees — and five-year plans link these fragments together. Relations between them were planned as flows of resources, but in practice took the form of socialist commodity-money relations, and every conversion of a resource into a commodity or money was tracked by statistical and accounting bodies.

Hence his main thesis about the fate of the planning system: the administrative market outlived the planning bodies. Kordonsky defines the administrative market as an implicit system of relations between the producing and distributing actors of a formerly planned economy, which continues to exist after the disappearance of the CPSU and Gosplan. The Russian state, he writes, like the Soviet one, divides the population into social accounting groups inherited from the USSR — miners, teachers, doctors, military personnel — and extracts and distributes resources to pay public-sector salaries and pensions.

Kordonsky also describes the absence of Gosplan as a problem of the resource system itself. As he observes in The Resource State, in the absence of a great state idea and of Gosplan, resources are distributed irrationally, and raising the salaries of particular categories of workers causes tension because it violates habitual notions of fairness. He even suggested that, in order to carry out the priority national projects, a functional analogue of the Soviet bodies regulating resource flows — Gosplan, Gossnab and Goskomtsen — would eventually be created. This is a forecast, not a recommendation: Kordonsky describes the logic of the system rather than calling for its restoration.

He writes separately about the role of repression. In The Resource State it is treated as an instrument for managing the resource organization of the state — by his comparison, roughly the same as discount rate policy under capitalism: arrests are mass or local depending on the tasks at hand. This analytical formula is worth knowing because it explains why, in his model, informal exchange always coexists with the threat of criminal prosecution of those involved.

What worked and what did not

The strength of Kordonsky's concepts is their explanatory power on field material. The terms “administrative market”, “estate” and “rent” have become common currency in sociology and economic sociology: they are used by both supporters and critics. S. Yu. Barsukova, reviewing the 2008 monograph (Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost', 2012, no. 3), summarizes the concept as follows: the specific feature of the Russian economy lies in the dominance of the estate principle; it is above all a resource economy in which the main goal of actors is the struggle for estate rent, and this construction is characteristic of both the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods.

The model of the resource state explains the recurring Russian cycle without reference to “market” categories. According to the abstract of the 2007 book, periods of weakening, degradation and ruin — perestroikas, thaws, revolutions, civil war, up to and including collapse — alternate with periods of strengthening statehood and “restoration of the national economy”, which, in the author's opinion, is not quite adequately described as economic growth. This view helps to understand why rising incomes are often absorbed by the system of social accounting rather than turned into capital.

The weaknesses stem from the same things that make the concept strong. Kordonsky deliberately raises the question of the limits to which the concepts of law, democracy, civil society and economy apply to the resource state. This offers a fresh perspective but makes verification difficult: if familiar categories do not apply, it is hard to formulate which observations would refute the model. Formalizing administrative weight as a product of ranks is illustrative, but the ranks themselves are set axiomatically, and we have found no independent quantitative tests of this apparatus.

Kordonsky's practical influence as a civil servant in 2000–2005 cannot be assessed from open sources: his posts are known, but not the content of his expert memoranda. Linking specific decisions of that time to his theory would therefore be a stretch. It is more reliable to assess his other legacy — the research one: field expeditions, the municipal research agenda of the HSE laboratory, and the fact that the concepts of the administrative market and estate rent have entered the vocabulary of Russian sociologists. For the history of planning this means that Kordonsky influenced above all how the distribution of resources is described, not how it is organized.

Debate and criticism

The main debate around Kordonsky concerns whether he describes reality or justifies it. V. S. Martyanov, in the article The Rent-and-Estate Transformation of Russian Society (Neprikosnovenny Zapas, 2016, no. 5), accepts the estate metaphor as more accurate than class schemes but criticizes the fatalism of the approach: recognizing reality should not mean accepting and legitimizing it. As he presents it, citizens in this model are assigned to estates specialized in surrendering resources, distributing them or overseeing fairness, and this construction generates irremovable contradictions between political control and the appropriation of rent.

The second debate is with economists who describe post-Soviet Russia as capitalism, albeit with a strong state and corruption. Kordonsky denies that this framework applies at all: according to the abstract of The Resource State, he revises the notion that capitalism emerged and is developing in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. What is usually called corruption looks, in estate logic and as reviewers present it, like normal estate rent. Critics reply that such renaming strips the phenomenon of normative evaluation.

The third line of debate is methodological. Kordonsky insists that there was no bureaucracy as a social stratum in the USSR, just as there is none in Russia, and builds his description through statuses and administrative weight. This diverges from the classical theory of bureaucracy and from the works of Sovietologists, for whom the planned economy and the nomenklatura were the basic categories. Kordonsky agrees with Naishul in the diagnosis — the Soviet economy was bargaining rather than the execution of orders — but differs in the conclusions: Naishul saw the way out in completely replacing the administrative market with a monetary one, while Kordonsky describes monetization as a change of form without a change of substance.

A separate question is verifiability. The model of the resource state rests largely on field observations and the author's own axiomatics rather than on sample surveys with open data, so it is difficult for proponents of quantitative methods to confirm or refute it. Kordonsky himself does not conceal that his approach is closer to working with ideal objects, as is customary in mathematics and theoretical physics, than to standard sociology. Some of Kordonsky's public statements outside his academic work have also drawn criticism, but these disputes have no direct bearing on his concepts of the administrative market, the resource state and estates, and we do not examine them on this page.

Legacy today

Kordonsky's concepts remain one of the main frameworks for analysing Russian power, municipal administration and the provinces. The Khamovniki Foundation, whose expert council he chairs, supports field research, and the collection How Russia Works: Articles and Interviews from Various Years (Kak ustroena Rossiya. Stat'i i interv'yu raznykh let; Common Place, 2021) presents his ideas to a wide readership. In 2024, according to the HSE page, he received the Alexander Piatigorsky Literary Prize for his sociological studies of post-Soviet Russian institutions.

Kordonsky shares a common subject with Open Planning — the distribution of resources — but the models are in many respects opposite. For Kordonsky, access to resources is determined by the status of a group and the normative needs assigned to it, and accounting serves to control flows between cells. In our model, a resource should go to a verified result recorded in an open registry, and measurement is separated from those who allocate. Kordonsky, however, warns that an “assimilated” resource is written off and ceases to exist as a unit of account, which means that the spending report itself becomes proof of use. Our rule “no payment without a measurement report” is directed precisely against this logic.

The second contrast concerns how goals are set. In the resource state, the common goal is set from above and broken down into the goals of fragments, and the absence of a great idea, as Kordonsky observes, makes distribution irrational. We propose setting goals publicly, through voting and citizens' assemblies. We must honestly admit that Kordonsky's model poses a difficult question for us: estate logic may penetrate the democratic circuit too, if voting groups demand resources by status rather than by result. An open registry and the two-column rule reduce this risk but do not eliminate it.

Finally, Kordonsky's forecast about the revival of a functional analogue of Gosplan for national projects is useful as a warning. Any new planning circuit risks becoming yet another cell of the resource state — with its own statuses, quotas and rent. The difference of Open Planning must be verifiable: public registries, reproducible calculation and an honest registry of data gaps, not just declarations.

Links between ideas

Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. Graph of ideas

• Vitaly Naishul

  Parallel path ←

  Naishul’s Moscow group studied Gosplan, Kordonsky’s Novosibirsk group a rural district; both arrived at the theory of the administrative market.

• Vitaly Naishul

  Debate and criticism →

  Same diagnosis, different conclusions: Naishul expected a money market to replace the administrative one, Kordonsky sees monetisation as a change of form.

Timeline

1. 1944

   Born in Oirot-Tura (now Gorno-Altaisk)

2. 1977

   Graduates from Tomsk State University

3. 1988

   Candidate of philosophical sciences, Novosibirsk State University

4. 1989

   Article Social Structure and the Braking Mechanism (Sotsial'naya struktura i mekhanizm tormozheniya) in the collection Understanding (Postizhenie)

5. 2000

   Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (Rynki vlasti: administrativnye rynki SSSR i Rossii); becomes head of the Expert Directorate of the President (until 2004)

6. 2006

   Reissue of Markets of Power; begins work at the HSE University

7. 2007

   Collection of articles The Resource State (Resursnoe gosudarstvo)

8. 2008

   Monograph The Estate Structure of Post-Soviet Russia (Soslovnaya struktura postsovetskoy Rossii); tenured professor at the HSE

9. 2021

   Collection How Russia Works: Articles and Interviews from Various Years (Kak ustroena Rossiya. Stat'i i interv'yu raznykh let)

10. 2024

    Alexander Piatigorsky Literary Prize

Key works

• 1989Social Structure and the Braking Mechanism (Sotsial'naya struktura i mekhanizm tormozheniya) // Understanding (Postizhenie). Moscow
• 2000Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (Rynki vlasti: administrativnye rynki SSSR i Rossii); reissued Moscow: OGI, 2006
• 2001Cycles of Activity and Ideal Objects (Tsikly deyatel'nosti i ideal'nye ob'ekty)
• 2007The Resource State: A Collection of Articles (Resursnoe gosudarstvo: sbornik statey). Moscow: REGNUM
• 2008The Estate Structure of Post-Soviet Russia (Soslovnaya struktura postsovetskoy Rossii). Moscow: Institute of the Public Opinion Foundation
• 2021How Russia Works: Articles and Interviews from Various Years (Kak ustroena Rossiya. Stat'i i interv'yu raznykh let). Moscow: Common Place

Sources

1. С. Г. Кордонский. Административные рынки СССР и России. 2006
2. С. Г. Кордонский. Административные рынки СССР и России (карточка издания). 2006
3. С. Г. Кордонский. Ресурсное государство. 2007
4. С. Г. Кордонский. Ресурсное государство (страница книги). 2011
5. С. Г. Кордонский. Сословная структура постсоветской России (страница книги). 2011
6. С. Ю. Барсукова. Ресурсная экономика и сословная рента (о книге С. Кордонского). 2012
7. В. С. Мартьянов. Рентно-сословная трансформация российского общества. 2016
8. НИУ ВШЭ. Кордонский Симон Гдальевич (страница сотрудника). 2026
9. Фонд «Хамовники». Кордонский Симон Гдальевич. 2026
10. Википедия. Кордонский, Симон Гдальевич. 2026
11. А. Шуман. Административные рынки в Беларуси. 2011
12. НИУ ВШЭ. Вышла книга Симона Кордонского «Как устроена Россия». 2021
13. В. М. Широнин. Бюрократы, большевики и реформаторы: нетривиальная история экономического знания в России. 2020

Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.