Aviezer Tucker has written a wide-ranging, intelligent book that examines the impact of totalitarianism on the ability to construct liberal post-totalitarian forms of rule. He discusses the ways in which past totalitarian practices have complicated attempts to create post-transition justice, effective market economies, an educated public, and open and rational political discourse in a series of in-depth studies. He concludes with an admirable defense of liberal democracy and the role that dissidence can play in that process.

Despite these strengths, I found myself at odds with Tucker’s problematization of totalitarian legacies:

I found this troubling because historical experience cannot be labeled a legacy unless “a durable causal relationship” can be demonstrated “between past institutions and policies on subsequent practices and beliefs.” ^{Footnote 1} How can one characterize a legacy as general if countries that shared an experience have radically different economic, social, and political trajectories 25 years later?

Tucker acknowledges that there are long-term pre-communist legacies, medium-term communist legacies, and short-term extrication-from-communism legacies. Yet he claims to confine his study only to the second (p. 6). How can one disregard differences in how different countries experienced totalitarianism, the way in which they left it behind, or how subsequent social forces affected their development? If any of them prevent elements from the totalitarian past from instantiating themselves subsequently, the theory cannot distinguish legacies from other causes because of a lack of social scientific control. We are left with no way to separate whether the outcomes we observe are a product of any one of these three legacies, exogenous conditions, or a complex and contingent outcome of some combination of them.

Tucker distinguishes between a revolutionary stage of totalitarianism, when the system is being built with full coercive and doctrinaire ideological force, and a late totalitarian phase, where the system has become routinized, ideology sterile and less meaningful, and coercion less central to control. This late totalitarian phase is central to my concerns. With coercive uniformity in decline, communist elites and the societies they ruled over engaged in processes of mutual adaptation under a new system of rule. That process of adaptation was not uniform. Differences existed in the ways in which elites secured compliance with different admixtures of consumerism, nationalism, or patrimonialism, and with differing degrees of economic reform and toleration of cultural and intellectual diversity. Each society reacted in unique ways that included admixtures of the opportunistic pursuit of interest, dissimulation of obedience, and outright resistance. Such differences are central to an understanding of the degree to which features of totalitarian rule manifest themselves as post-totalitarian legacies.

Tucker’s justification for ignoring this variation is that there is a fundamental commonality across both periods: the elite’s ability to block the formation of any counterelite. While this was an essential facet of the totalitarian project, I do not find his use of it empirically defensible. There was also variation on this score across the Soviet empire in the 1980s. As a frequent visitor to both Poland and Hungary during this period, I find it hard to agree with the proposition that there were not counterelites in place or at least in formation in those countries. In Poland, sedition against the regime had a continuous underground or above-ground presence from 1976 to its demise in 1989. In Hungary, the regime had long tolerated alternative ways of thinking within the confines of the intellectual class both within the regime and in opposition to it. In contrast, in Albania or Romania, such resistance or even alternative ways of thinking was far less openly articulated. This variation is essential in understanding the ways in which these countries exited from communism, and the extent to which remnants of the system were able to persist.

Tucker acknowledges but does not take theoretical account of this diversity when he describes Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Baltics as early post-totalitarian cases; most of southeastern Europe, Georgia, and Ukraine as late totalitarian in his estimation; and Russia as experiencing a restoration under Vladimir Putin (p. 7). It is precisely the countries that he describes as post-totalitarian that were most successful in distancing themselves from the practices of the past. I think it is more useful to think of the divides he acknowledges as representing different post-communist pathways that vary in terms of the impact of totalitarian legacies. Rather than homogenizing different totalitarian experiences by ignoring them, it is essential to explore how different varieties of late communism and extraction from it help to explain different legacy patterns. Nor should we ignore the potential causal impact of important exogenous factors (like the role of the European Union, globalization, or Western influence after the Cold War).

In his substantive chapters, Tucker richly describes how communist-era elites were able to convert their political power into economic power via privatization schemes and by maintaining control in the bureaucracy. And he rightly points out that the degree of success in these efforts was a function of the extent to which there was an oppositional counterelite in place to block these efforts. Yet he does not take this important observation far enough. In this regard, the differences in the nature of late communism and of the extraction from it are critical for understanding the extent to which such legacies emerged, as well as their character. Where counterelites had already emerged prior to the end of communism or developed during the extrication process and were able to take power in founding elections, the former elite had to adapt to competitive politics and economic life regulated by real markets. This reduced (but did not fully impede) the elite’s ability to convert their positional power into new advantages. Where communist elites remained in power and claimed the mantle of democratic and market reform, the conversion of elite privilege after communism was much more extensive.

Tucker’s lack of concern for variation between cases during late totalitarianism, during regime change, and afterward weakens his theory because it omits these critical determinants of whether post-totalitarian legacies emerge and how significant they are. Such concerns also limit our ability to diagnose the current malaise. While we may well see the Putin phenomenon as a product of totalitarian legacies, it is far less clear if the problems posed by Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński are amenable to that label, or if they are better explained by a combination of the current conditions and more long-term legacies of Polish and Hungarian politics. Despite my reservations about his problematization of the issue of legacies, The Legacies of Totalitarianism is original, challenging, passionately argued, and important, and thus deserves a wide audience.