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Rethinking Postcommunist Transition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Stephen White
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Abstract

Very different views have been taken of the changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, and whether they can properly be considered a ‘revolution’. The evidence of Freedom House's annual surveys suggests that at least four distinct groups of countries may be identified, and that over time there has been no common trajectory. A majority of the former Soviet republics, indeed, have scores that were lower than those of the USSR in its final year. In the view of ordinary citizens individual liberties have improved considerably since the end of communist rule, but levels of political efficacy remain very low in comparative terms. Rather than conceive of these regimes as ‘in transition to democracy’, one may more fruitfully see them as a distinct system that has much in commun with semiauthoritarian regimes in other parts of the world.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , 2003, pp. 417 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2003.

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Footnotes

*

This is the text of the Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 6 May 2003. The printed version omits the informal opening remarks that were included in the oral presentation, but develops other points more fully. I should like to express my thanks to the journal and to Rosalind Jones in particular for their invitation and hospitality, to Christian Haerpfer for his permission to use data from the New Democracies Barometer and to Thomas Munck for his wise counsel on the French Revolution.

References

1 Gordon Wightman (ed.), Party Formation in East-Central Europe, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, p. 178.

2 For a selection of writings see Tat’iana I. Zaslavskaya, A Voice of Reform: Essays, Armonk NY, Sharpe, 1989. Zaslavskaya explained in an interview that she was ‘not a personal adviser’ to Gorbachev, but that he ‘seem[ed] to read what I write very carefully’ (Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers, New York, Norton, 1989, p. 117).

3 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? London, Faber & Faber, 1937, p. 240.

4 T. I. Zaslavskaya, ‘O sotsial’nom mekhanizme postkommunisticheskikh preobrazovanii v Rossii’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 2002, pp. 3–16 (pp. 3–4).

5 Izvestiya, 23 August 1991, p. 1, and 12 November 1991, p. 1.

6 B. N. El’tsin, Zapiski Prezidenta, Moscow, Ogonek, 1994, p. 67.

7 Egor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, Moscow, Vagrius, 1996, pp. 8–9 (there were similar references to a ‘liberal, anti-communist revolution’, p. 80).

8 I. V. Starodubrovskaya and V. A. Mau, Velikie revolyutsii ot Kromvelya do Putina, Moscow, Vagrius, 2001, pp. 364, 354, 365.

9 E. Gaidar, Dni, p. 173.

10 T. I. Zaslavskaya, ‘O sotsial’nom mekhanizme’, p. 5.

11 Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite’, Europe-Asia Studies, 48: 5 (July 1996), pp. 711–33 (p. 729).

12 T. I. Zaslavskaya, ‘O sotsial’nom mekhanizme’, p. 6.

13 B. Z. Doktorov, A. A. Oslon and E. S. Petrenko, Epokha El’tsina: mneniya rossiyan, Moscow, Institut fonda ‘Obshchestvennoe mnenie’, 2002, pp. 51 and 49; and on attitudes to the October revolution, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2, 2003, p. 34.

14 T. I. Zaslavskaya, ‘O sotsial’nom mekhanizme’, pp. 6–7.

15 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 4, 10, 14.

16 Ibid., pp. 234–5.

17 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, pp. 487, 488, 494.

18 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, p. 52.

19 Jürgen Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today?’, New Left Review, 183 (September–October 1990), pp. 3–21 (pp. 4–5).

20 Krishnan Kumar, ‘The Revolutionary Idea in the Twentieth-century World’, in Moira Donald and Tim Rees (eds), Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-century Europe, London, Macmillan, 2001, pp. 177–97 (pp. 194–5).

21 David Lane, ‘What Kind of Capitalism for Russia? A Comparative Analysis’, Communist and Post-communist Studies, 33: 4 (December 2000), pp. 485–504.

22 Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, Moscow, Goskomstat Rossii, 2001, pp. 140, 343.

23 Cited in Stephen White, Russia's New Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 141. Another suggestion was a ‘virtual economy’: Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, Russia's Virtual Economy, Washington DC, Brookings, 2002.

24 Larry Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, Journal of Democracy, 13: 2 (April 2002), pp. 21–35; Boris Kargarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy, London, Pluto, 2002; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, ‘The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy, 13: 2 (April 2002), pp. 51–65.

25 East European Constitutional Review, 11: 4 (Fall 2002/Winter 2003), pp. 43–7 (p. 47).

26 Roger Markwick, ‘What Kind of State is the Russian State – if There is One?’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 15: 4 (December 1999), pp. 111–30 (p. 127).

27 Rossiiskaya gazeta, 31 December 1999, p. 5.

28 See www.freedomhouse.org. There has been some discussion of Freedom House and its indicators; see for instance Youcef Bouandel, Human Rights and Comparative Politics, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1997, ch. 8.

29 Michael McFaul, ‘The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncompetitive Transitions in the Postcommunist World’, World Politics, 54: 2 (January 2002), pp. 212–44 (p. 242).

30 Svobodnaya mysl’, 2, 2003, p. 61.

31 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pp. 15–16, 290–4.

32 Larry Diamond, ‘Is the Third Wave Over?’, Journal of Democracy, 7: 3 (July 1996), pp. 20–37 (p. 28).

33 An analysis of the first five Barometers is available in Christian W. Haerpfer, Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe, London, Routledge, 2002.

34 Izvestiya, 15 April 2003, p. 8.

35 For the United Kingdom, see the 2001 British Election Study held at the UK Data Archive (question BQ65A); for the United States, the National Elections Studies database at www.umich.edu/~nes (table 5b.2).

36 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 69–72.

37 Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 4.

38 Stephen White, ‘Ten Years on, What Do the Russians Think?’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18: 1 (March 2002), pp. 35–50 (p. 40).

39 See Sarah Ashwin, ‘ “There's No Joy Any More”: The Experience of Reform in a Kuzbass Mining Settlement’, Europe-Asia Studies, 47: 8 (December 1995), pp. 1367–81 (pp. 1375–8).

40 Thomas Carothers, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, 13: 1 (January 2002), pp. 5–21.

41 See Marina Ottoway, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism, Washington DC, Carnegie Endowment, 2003.