This study examined socioeconomic change, social institutions, and serious property crime in transitional Russia. Durkheim's anomie theory and recent research on violence in Russia led us to expect an association between negative socioeconomic change and property crime. Based upon institutional anomie theory, we also tested the hypothesis that the association between change and crime is conditioned by the strength of non-economic social institutions. Using crime data from the Russian Ministry of the Interior and an index of socioeconomic change, we used OLS regression to estimate cross-sectional models using the Russian regions (n=78) as the unit of analysis. Results surprisingly showed no effect of socioeconomic change on two different measures of robbery, only very limited support for the hypothesis of direct effects of social institutions on crime, and obviously no support for the hypothesis that institutions moderate the effect of change on crime. We interpret these findings in the context of transitional Russia and conclude that rigorous research in other nations is important in determining the generalizability of criminological theories developed to explain crime in Western nations.This study examined the association between socioeconomic change and serious property crime in Russia and tested the hypothesis that the strength of non-economic social institutions will condition this association. Russia experienced paradigmatic political, social, and economic change in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country and its citizens are experiencing uncertainty and instability as old social norms and values are being questioned and widely replaced by a new political-economy. These rapid changes have created anomic conditions that in turn may be contributing to a wide array of social problems (Durkheim, 1897), including increased rates of crime and violence (Pridemore, 2003a).Russia is the largest nation in the world and the nature and the pace of these changes, as well as the strength of social institutions, varies tremendously throughout the country. Recent research leads us to expect crime rates to covary with these factors (Kim, 2003;Pridemore, 2002). We might further expect that the strength of social institutions such as family, education, and polity to play a moderating role in any association between social change and crime. We thus draw upon Messner and Rosenfeld's (1997a) institutional anomie theory to test the idea that even if negative socioeconomic change proves to be associated with crime, the association

Objective. This study examined institutional anomie theory in the context of transitional Russia. Methods. We employed an index of negative socioeconomic change and measures of family, education, and polity to test the hypothesis that institutional strength conditions the effects of poverty and socioeconomic change on homicide rates. Results. As expected, the results of models estimated using negative binomial regression show direct positive effects of poverty and socioeconomic change and direct negative effects of family strength and polity on regional homicide rates. There was no support, however, for the hypothesis that stronger social institutions reduce the effects of poverty and socioeconomic change on violence. Conclusions. We interpret these results in the Russia-specific setting, concluding that Russia is a rich laboratory for examining the effects of social change on crime and that empirical research in other nations is important when assessing the generalizability of theories developed to explain crime and violence in the United States.This study tested institutional anomie theory (IAT) (Messner and Rosenfeld, 1997a) in the context of widespread poverty and large-scale socioeconomic change in Russia. Although developed to explain crime in the capitalist culture of the United States, IAT has been tested cross-nationally (Messner and Rosenfeld, 1997b;Savolainen, 2000) and Bernburg (2002) recently argued that the theory should also apply to the effects of social change on crime. Russia has experienced tremendous social, political, and economic change during the last 15 years as totalitarianism and a command economy are being replaced by a free-market democracy. Since these changes began in the early 1990s, Russians have faced a wide array of social problems, including high levels of poverty and unemployment, increasing inequality, and a mortality crisis (Walberg et al., 1998). It is likely that the anomic environment accompanying the rapid social change has played a role in the increase in and wide cross-sectional variation of Russian homicide rates during the 1990s (Pridemore, 2003a).Durkheim ([1893] 1984, [1897] 1979) argued that during times of rapid social change norms become unclear and society's control over individual behavior decreases. He believed that as people's aspirations become less limited and as conventional social institutions are weakened, deviance and crime should increase. Large-scale changes have occurred since the Soviet Union collapsed, including fundamental shifts in political and economic philosophies and decreased formal social control, leading to normative uncertainty. Russians' aspirations are now less limited because of newfound individual freedoms and because a free market creates desires, whereas totalitarianism and a planned economy stifles them. Similarly, conventional Soviet

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union. KeywordsRussia; democratization; political change; crime; violence; homicide In this study, we drew upon Durkheim's (1897/1979) ideas on threats against collective sentiments to examine the association between political change and homicide rates in Russia.

The level of alcohol consumption in Russia is among the highest in the world and is often associated with a variety of problems in the country. Until recently, however, it was impossible to examine the health and social burdens associated with consumption in Russia due to Soviet secrecy surrounding vital statistics and health data related to alcohol and other topics. This study employed newly available mortality data to describe the demographic, temporal, and spatial patterns of mortality resulting directly from chronic and acute alcohol consumption in the country. The data reveal that in spite of high overall rates of alcohol-related mortality in Russia, levels of mortality vary considerably along these dimensions. Although descriptive in nature, the patterns of alcohol-related mortality in Russia presented here should provide initial observations with which to generate and test hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of these patterns.

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