Across former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, there has been dramatic heterogeneity in the economic and political trajectories since the collapse of communism 30 years ago. At one end of the spectrum, there are places such as the Baltic states and parts of East Central Europe that have seemingly consolidated democracies and well-functioning market economies that have brought significant mass prosperity. At the other end of the spectrum, there is, for example, Russia and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which failed to follow through on market and democratic reforms and where prosperity is less widespread. Why were some former communist areas able to transition successfully to democratic capitalism, whereas others did not? One of the main scholarly debates has been around the relative importance of past and contemporary factors for determining post-communist social and political outcomes.
Two engaging new books engage this debate in radically different ways. In Present at the Transition: An Inside Look at the Role of History, Politics, and Personalities in Post-Communist Countries, the late Oleh Havrylyshyn provides a bird’s-eye view of the economic transition across the entire former communist space. Havrylyshyn’s argument is a full-throated defense of swift and extensive privatization and marketization, also known as the “Big Bang.” Countries that pursued this strategy, he argues, became more democratic and prosperous after communism than countries that engaged in gradual and partial reforms. In Big Bang countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland, domestic competition was incentivized and a new capitalist class arose. In countries that aborted the Big Bang (such as Russia) or pursued gradual reforms (such as Romania and Ukraine), old communist-era elites were able to short-circuit the reform process and translate their influence into economic riches.
What determined whether a country followed a Big Bang or gradual approach to economic reform? That is where the past comes in. Contrary to some literature on historical legacies, Havrylyshyn does not view historical inheritances as deterministically pushing countries in one direction or another. Instead, he argues that the past creates the conditions under which leaders must make their decisions. In East Central Europe and the Baltic states, where communism was imposed by the Red Army on previously existing independent states with market economies, antipathy to communism and the urge to “return to Europe” were strong, yielding a preference for rapid and extensive transition toward capitalist democracy. By contrast, in the former Yugoslavia and in parts of the former Soviet Union, where wars and civil conflicts dominated the first post-communist years, economic policy did not take center stage, and the transition was delayed.
There is much to like about Present at the Transition, and Havrylyshyn—who participated in the events—writes with passion and sprinkles with his personal reflections. For example, through deft use of data, he debunks some common misperceptions about the empirics of transition. One is that, despite the fact that rapid economic reform in Hungary did not commence until the Hungarian Socialist Party took power in 1994, Hungary more closely resembled a Big Bang country than a gradual one. Another is the oft-mentioned stagnation or decline in economic output for the former Soviet Union in the first decade of the economic transition is an artifact of inappropriately comparing Soviet and post-Soviet data. Life in the former Soviet Union was better 10 years into the transition. A third is the common belief that Eastern Europe became democratized and marketized because of pressure from the European Union. Havrylyshyn shows that most elites were committed to reform anyway.
I do have two quibbles with the argument. First, Havrylyshyn overlooks political developments that contradict his claim that all good outcomes stem from following a Big Bang approach to economic reform. For example, there is no mention of recent developments in Hungary and Poland, where initial progress brought about by rapid reform has been challenged by serially elected right-wing populist governments. Second, whereas arguments about the proper way to reform a nonmarket economy are buttressed with systematic data and detailed logic, the same cannot be said of Havrylyshyn’s claims about the role of historical legacies. Despite the existence of a substantial literature assessing the precise influence of discrete historical factors across the former communist world, Havrylyshyn often hovers at the level of generalities.
This brings us to Historical Legacies of Communism: Modern Politics, Society, and Economic Development by Alexander Libman and Anastassia V. Obydenkova. Whereas Havrylyshyn’s argument is painted in broad strokes for the entire post-communist world, Libman and Obydenkova’s carefully crafted and deeply researched study systematically zeroes in on communist party legacies in post–Soviet Russia across issue areas ranging from democracy, corruption, and inequality to mortality, attitudes toward migrants, and economic development. Each issue area gets its own chapter that specifies the relevant theory, develops hypotheses, tests a statistical model, reports threats to validity, and discusses potential causal mechanisms. Their overall conclusion is that the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) legacy casts a large shadow over post-communist Russian politics. Regions of post-communist Russia that had greater proportions of CPSU members during Soviet times tend to have lower levels of democracy, higher levels of corruption, higher mortality and intolerance toward migrants, and lower income inequality.
Historical Legacies of Communism makes two important contributions to our understanding of historical legacies. The first concerns how legacies are conceptualized and measured. A novel aspect of the argument is what Libman and Obydenkova refer to as the Janus-faced character of communist legacies. They argue that “communist legacy” can have two potentially contradictory meanings. One involves communist ideology such as mass preferences for redistribution and aversion to social inequality. The other involves any legacy of the communist regime, including the clientelistic and corrupt practices associated with actually lived communism. Generally speaking, Libman and Obydenkova’s findings correspond to the second sense of communist legacy. Although Libman and Obydenkova do not attempt to establish a causal relationship between CPSU saturation and post-communist outcomes, they are sensitive to the nuances involved in establishing an association. They examine alternative measures of CPSU saturation using different sources and at different time periods, explore other developmental legacies that might be associated with CPSU saturation, and—most significantly—consider the possibility that CPSU saturation is itself endogenous to other communist legacies. Chapters 4 and 11 will serve as excellent guides for future legacies researchers.
The second contribution concerns our understanding of the legacies of communist regimes. A weakness of legacies research is the dearth of focus on the mechanisms by which legacies are transmitted. Libman and Obydenkova are exceptionally lucid on this point. They identify three possible mechanisms of transmission for the CPSU legacy: horizontal diffusion of attitudes and behavior from CPSU members to the public at large, the degree of overlap between the old Soviet elite and the post-Soviet Russian regional elite, and the persistence of bureaucracies between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. For each outcome where they identify a correlation with CPSU saturation, they engage in additional statistical analysis to determine which mechanism is most likely at work. The data are not always sufficient to make a determination, but Libman and Obydenkova are a model of research transparency. This study should not be seen as the final word but instead as the beginning of a research program on historical legacies of communist and more generally one-party regimes.
Taken together, Present at the Transition and Historical Legacies of Communism advance our understanding not just of the extraordinary heterogeneity in economic, social, and political outcomes across the former communist world but of the role of the past in accounting for those outcomes. Highly recommended reading.
