East European Politics and
Societies and Cultures
Volume 29 Number 2
May 2015  391­–408
© 2014 Sage Publications
10.1177/0888325414555761
http://eeps.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Pre-Communist and Communist
Developmental Legacies
Grigore Pop-Eleches
Princeton University
This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies
in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken
Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies,
while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the
significant and resilient pre-communist, communist, and post-communist diversity of
the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The empirical evidence reviewed in this paper
suggests that both types of legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of postcommunist
transitions. Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform
communist imprint in areas such as primary education and the importance of the
state sector in the economy, in other areas of socioeconomic development, either communism
was unable to reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect
to GDP/capita or the size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental
imprint has been fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as
in the case of the massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist
countries). In political terms, there is an interesting contrast between institutional trajectories
(such as regime type), which largely follow pre-communist developmental
differences, and individual political attitudes and behavior, where communist exceptionalism
generally trumps post-communist diversity.
Keywords: Eastern Europe; historical legacies; communist development; postcommunist
transition
Over the past decade the study of historical legacies has made a significant comeback
in the study of post-communist politics and of comparative politics more
broadly. In the process, authors have proposed a number of useful distinctions that
can guide our understanding of how the communist and pre-communist past shape
post-communist politics.1 However, for the discussion about whether and how
“Eastern Europe” and “post-communist countries” more broadly are analytically
useful categories, a crucial question is what type of variation historical legacy–based
arguments emphasize. At the most basic level—and simplifying a fair bit—we can
distinguish between explanations that draw on communist legacies to account for the
continued distinctiveness of the former Soviet bloc compared to various non-communist
countries, and studies that link divergent post-communist political and economic
trajectories to longer-term institutional and developmental differences and
555761EEPXXX10.1177/0888325414555761East European Politics and SocietiesPop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies
research-article2014
392  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
therefore treat the communist experience as a relatively short-lived historical episode
that may not be particularly consequential for understanding post-communist
politics.
A first type of explanation, exemplified most prominently by Ken Jowitt’s discussion
of “Leninist legacies,”2 emphasizes the important cultural, developmental, and
institutional imprint of several decades of communism on the countries of the former
Soviet bloc. While acknowledging the existence of variation in pre-communist backgrounds
and communist ruling methods, works rooted in this tradition tend to emphasize
the intra-regional commonalities among the ex-communist countries of Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union, while at the same time emphasizing the crossregional
distinctiveness of the former Soviet bloc.3
The alternative approach to studying historical legacies in post-communist
Eastern Europe, which is rooted perhaps most clearly in the work of Andrew Janos,4
emphasizes the significant pre-communist socio-economic and political diversity
among the East European and Eurasian countries and highlights the remarkable
extent to which these differences survived several decades of communist developmental
efforts and then played a crucial role in shaping the post-communist trajectories
of the region.5 While Janos does not deny the developmental distinctiveness of
late-communist Eastern Europe, in his framework these differences are embedded in
much longer-term unequal developmental patterns reflecting the North-West to
South-East economic and cultural gradients (Wirtschafts- und Kulturgefälle) on the
European continent dating back to the agricultural revolution starting in the fifteenth
century.6 In this view, even though communist regimes attempted to overcome the
massive economic differences separating Eastern and Western Europe through an
aggressive developmental push, while at the same time trying to reduce the significant
economic disparities within the communist bloc, judging by economic output
ratios these efforts were at best moderately successful until the early 1980s, and most
of these gains were lost and even reversed as a result of the economic crisis of the
1980s and early 1990s.7
Even though both of these approaches emphasize longer-term historical legacies,
rather than short-term consequences of post-communist political developments,8
they have fundamentally different implications for our understanding of the meaning
and analytical utility of the term Eastern Europe for the political analysis of contemporary
phenomena in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. From a “Jowittian”
perspective, the shared Leninist legacies provide a powerful rationale for analyzing
the ex-communist countries as belonging to a coherent (though not necessarily uniform)
set of empirical cases that can be meaningfully compared to other sets of countries.9
In this sense, Eastern Europe can still be plausibly used in line with Cold War
usage to include countries as diverse as Poland and Slovenia on the one hand, and
Azerbaijan and even Kyrgyzstan on the other. By contrast, for those embracing a
“Janosian” view of legacies, Eastern Europe may not be a particularly useful category,
both because it arbitrarily dichotomizes what is essentially a much more
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  393
continuous gradation between center and periphery on the European continent, and
because at least in its maximalist definition (mentioned above) it comprises countries
with such dramatically different developmental legacies as to make it difficult to
draw meaningful comparisons.10
Given these fundamental differences, the obvious question to ask is which of
these two visions has greater support based on the political developments and social
scientific findings of the past quarter-century. While an exhaustive answer to this
question would require a book-length manuscript, for the remainder of this article I
offer some tentative answers focusing primarily on how pre-communist and communist
developmental legacies have shaped post-communist political outcomes in a
number of areas. Before doing so, however, I want to discuss two caveats.
The first caveat is of a theoretical nature. Even though the two perspectives presented
above emphasize different legacies and generate different theoretical predictions,
they need not be mutually exclusive. For example, in my own work on
post-communist regime change I find support for both types of legacy arguments: on
the one hand, intraregional differences in democratization conform closely to developmental
differences at the time of the communist collapse, which in turn reflect
pre-communist developmental patterns,11 but on the other hand when placing the
former communist countries in comparative perspective we can identify a democratic
deficit that affects not only the well-known democratic underperformers from
the original pre–World War II Soviet republics but also (albeit to a smaller extent) the
East European satellite states.12 Furthermore, at least some of the theories linking
post-communist political outcomes to pre-communist developmental differences
explicitly incorporate the communist ideological and developmental project and thus
propose mechanisms that are highly specific to the Leninist system. Thus, Darden
and Grzymała-Busse’s13 argument about the link between pre-communist literacy
and anti-communist vote shares in the first post-communist elections emphasizes the
role of national identity (promoted to varying degrees through pre-communist education
systems) in “inoculating” East Europeans against the political indoctrination
project pursued by communist education systems. A similar logic underlies the theoretical
argument in Pop-Eleches and Tucker,14 which conceives of communist exposure
as a distinctive (though not necessarily uniform) mode of political socialization
but at the same time allows for the possibility that different individuals (or social
groups or even countries) would exhibit stronger resistance against this socialization
for reasons that are often linked to pre-communist economic and political developmental
differences.15
The second caveat is methodological and concerns the choice of samples/case
universes. In a sense, this point is fairly obvious: analyses focusing exclusively on
post-communist countries should be expected to be more likely to emphasize intraregional
diversity of outcomes and, therefore, to highlight the role of pre-communist
or communist differences rather than the common Leninist experience of different
East European countries. While this correlation between sample choice and type of
394  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
legacy argument is by no means perfect—after all one can use intraregional comparisons
to highlight communist legacies that apply uniformly across very different East
European countries16—this observation nevertheless highlights a certain “post-communist
studies paradox,” namely, that by highlighting intraregional cross-country
differences, scholars of post-communist politics may inadvertently undermine their
justification for comparing these countries in the first place. By contrast, highlighting
the shared distinctiveness of communist legacies requires systematic comparisons to
other regions and/or types of countries. Somewhat surprisingly, with the partial
exception of comparisons between Eastern and Western Europe in the context of EU
enlargement,17 such studies have been much less frequent than intra-regional comparisons
and in many cases were not primarily driven by a theoretical concern with
communist legacies.18
Communist Development in Comparative Perspective
In this section, I provide a brief sketch of how communist socioeconomic development
efforts affected intraregional developmental differences between (and
within) East European countries and how the Soviet bloc compared to other
regions, and particularly Western Europe / Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) countries and Latin America. While part of the analysis
relies on historical development statistics to capture certain geographic and temporal
patterns, I complement the fairly narrow picture provided by such statistics with an
effort to discuss some of the more difficult-to-quantify peculiarities of the nature of
communist modernization.
Judging by the broad regional economic trajectories in Figure 1—based on GDP
per capita statistics from Maddison19—communism did not fundamentally change
the region’s fortunes relative to the rest of the world. Even though until the 1960s the
Soviet Union and to a lesser extent its East European satellites grew faster than
Western Europe and particularly Latin America, starting in the 1970s the communist
bloc countries started to lose ground against their West European “rivals.” The first
post-communist transition decade further exacerbated this trend, especially in the
countries of the former Soviet Union, and despite making up some ground during the
2000–2008 boom, the East European countries emerged from forty-five to seventy
years of communism and two decades of post-communist reforms exhibiting both
intraregional and interregional developmental gaps that very closely mirrored precommunist
patterns. These findings broadly mirror the communist urbanization
trends discussed by Pop-Eleches20 and confirm the general consensus that after some
impressive initial achievements, which triggered serious concern in the West in the
context of Cold War rivalry, communist modernization efforts largely failed to close
the historical development gap that has separated the Western from the Eastern side
of the European continent.
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  395
Judging by Figure 2, communism also failed to alter fundamentally the relative
development gradient within Eastern Europe. Thus, despite the significant overall
growth and some noticeable temporal differences (such as Romania’s rapid growth
in the 1960s, or Poland’s stagnation in the 1980s), the relative per capita incomes of
the five East European countries in Figure 1 remained largely unchanged from 1950
to 1989. This persistence of intraregional inequality among the socialist “comrades”
suggests that the cross-national redistributive effects of Soviet bloc membership
were quite modest.21 Economic redistribution was more effective within countries, as
communist development efforts tended to target traditionally disadvantaged areas,
but traditional economic differences (e.g., between Czechs and Slovaks or between
Slovenians and Serbs) were still clearly discernible in 1989 and regional redistribution
efforts were at least partly to blame for the disintegration of multiethnic states in
Eastern Europe.22
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the centrality of economic redistribution to
Marxist-Leninist ideology and the resulting emphasis on equitable growth, communist
regimes appear to have been much more effective in reducing domestic economic
inequality. While the absence of reliable income distribution data for the
pre-communist and early communist period makes it difficult to establish the relative
timing, magnitude, and the key mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, the crossnational
inequality patterns in Figure 3 suggest that by 1960 at the latest, communist
countries had flatter income distributions than all but the most egalitarian European
Figure 1
Comparative communist economic performance
396  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
welfare states (such as Sweden). Even though income inequality increased slightly in
the late 1980s as a result of partial economic liberalizations, inequality in East Europe
was still quite low at the outset of the transition, especially when compared to other
developing countries (particularly Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa).
However, this important communist legacy, which applied quite consistently
across different East European countries in 1989 and set them apart as a group from
most other regions, had a surprisingly short half-life. While a certain rise in inequality
was probably inevitable given the far-reaching neoliberal reforms that most countries
in the region underwent in the 1990s, what is striking is the dramatic divergence
of inequality trajectories among different transition countries. Thus, as Figure 3 illustrates,
whereas inequality in Hungary (and most other East-Central European countries)
increased moderately during the first transition decade but then stabilized and
even declined in recent years, in Russia (and much of the former Soviet Union)
income inequality exploded in the first five years of post-communism and has since
stabilized at levels that are closer to Latin America’s notoriously unequal societies
than to their East European counterparts. While it is unclear whether these subregional
differences in economic inequality can be traced back to pre-communist
developmental legacies or whether they are the result of relatively contingent postcommunist
political developments,23 it is obvious that the legacy of communist egalitarianism
no longer applies uniformly to the entire region. Instead, the contrast
between the low to moderate inequality in East-Central Europe and the Balkans and
the high inequality in large parts of the former Soviet Union is likely to reinforce the
Figure 2
Economic evolution of East European countries
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  397
traditional developmental differences between the two subregions and further promote
divergent political outcomes.
Another area in which communism should be expected to have left a distinctive
developmental imprint is education. Whereas in the pre-communist period public education
access and literacy levels ranged from under 20 percent in Albania, Azerbaijan,
and Central Asia, to more than 90 percent in much of East-Central Europe and the
Baltics,24 by 1989 primary school enrollment was quasi-universal and illiteracy had
been largely eradicated across the Soviet bloc. As a result, intraregional differences in
basic education virtually disappeared and the communist countries clearly outperformed
most of the developing world and even many considerably wealthier countries.
Furthermore, pre-primary and secondary school enrollments were dramatically
expanded across the region, and while progress with respect to higher education enrollment
was less impressive compared to the rest of the world, differences between various
communist countries did not neatly replicate historical developmental divides.25
Intra-regional uniformity arguably trumped diversity also with respect to the nature of
communist schooling, including the heavy emphasis on vocational training and technical
education and the efforts to use education systems for political socialization/ideological
indoctrination purposes. While the net effects of communist education on
post-communist political change are an open question—some observers saw communist
modernization as a harbinger of democratization26 while others worried about the
pernicious effects of perverted modernization27—these patterns suggest that education
is an area where we should see a relatively uniform common legacy of communism.
Figure 3
Income inequality during and after communism
398  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
How were these educational achievements affected by the economic upheaval of
the post-communist transition? Perhaps not surprisingly, given the wide range of
overall economic and political trajectories, the effects were quite heterogeneous
across the region. While enrollment in basic education continued to be quasi-universal
in most of the region,28 secondary education enrollment held up better and even
increased in East Central Europe, the Baltics, and much of the Balkans, while in the
most of the interwar Soviet republics secondary education declined by about 50 percent
during the 1990s and then recovered partially and unevenly in the last decade.29
Meanwhile, tertiary education enrollment, which had been comparatively low in
communist Eastern Europe, increased significantly in East-Central Europe but to a
much lesser extent in the former Soviet Union, thereby opening an intraregional
higher education gap that had not existed under communism. If we complement
these enrollment patterns with educational quality considerations, which declined in
most of the region (but probably more sharply in the former Soviet republics that
experienced deeper and longer economic contractions), we get an overall picture
whereby the traditional educational advantages of ex-communist countries in primary
and secondary education are slowly eroding particularly in the former Soviet
Union. However, we should expect the higher basic education “stock” to set the
region apart from countries with comparable economic development for at least
another generation. At the same time, the great heterogeneity of transition trajectories
is also reflected in educational trends, and should be expected to further deepen
or at least perpetuate the differences in economic and political development between
different subregions of the former Soviet bloc.
Communist central planners placed heavy emphasis on industrialization for a
variety of reasons, including an ideological commitment to promoting an industrial
proletariat, and because development of heavy industry was seen as an essential
part of military competition with the West.30 By comparison, services and
agriculture received considerably less attention,31 even though the latter sector
initially accounted for a large part of economic output and for the bulk of employment
in much of the region particularly outside of East-Central Europe. The legacy
of these economic policies at the outset of the transition was an underdeveloped
service sector that accounted for only 44 percent of regional GDP in 1989 (compared
to 54 percent for Latin America and 65 percent in the OECD countries) and
a fairly large agricultural sector, which accounted for roughly 18 percent of GDP
and 30 percent of employment, roughly twice the Latin American average. Not
surprisingly, the relative importance of agriculture was noticeably higher in
Central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of the Balkans, a pattern that reflected precommunist
developmental legacies.32 Even though the overall share of the industrial
sector in the late communist period was comparable to Latin America and the
OECD, the developmental imprint of communism becomes clear when we look at
the much lower energy effectiveness of East European economies, which captures
the greater share of Stalinist energy-intensive industries in the region.33 As
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  399
illustrated in Figure 4, this problem was considerably more pronounced in the
former Soviet republics but also set most of the other East European countries
(with the partial exception of Hungary and the former Yugoslavia) apart from
other regions.
As a result of the significant structural transformation and international orientation
of East European economies after 1989, their sectoral profiles also changed
considerably. The regional share of the service sector rose from 45 percent in 1989 to
55 percent in 2012, while the share of agriculture declined to just under 9 percent of
output and 21 percent of employment. While these changes did not amount to full
convergence towards either Latin American or OECD patterns, these regional averages
mask significant differences between East Central European and Baltic countries,
which had largely converged to West European sectoral profiles by 2012, and
several much more heavily agricultural countries in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and
parts of the Balkans (including Albania and Romania). A similar pattern can be discerned
with respect to the energy effectiveness statistics in Figure 4: thus, whereas
the new East European EU members had largely converged to OECD levels by 2011,
progress has been much weaker in the former Soviet Union, which retains a distinctively
post-communist energy profile (at least partially due to the continued availability
of subsidized Russian energy).
Figure 4
Energy effectiveness
400  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Finally, no discussion of the developmental legacies of communism would be
complete without focusing on what was arguably the most distinctive hallmark of
the communist economic system: the state’s control over and ownership of most of
the economy. Despite some regional variation due to idiosyncratic factors such as
Poland’s failed collectivization of agriculture, the East European countries entered
the 1990s with state sectors ranging from 70–95 percent of GDP. Despite the massive
privatization efforts that most countries initiated in the 1990s, according to
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) estimates, the size
of the state sector still averages between 25 and 30 percent in most in East European
countries (EBRD 2013), which is considerably higher than most of the non-communist
world. Moreover, there is little evidence of further convergence over the
past few years, and in a few countries (including Russia) the trends have actually
been reversed. While the interwar Soviet republics generally retained larger state
sectors, except for a couple of notable exceptions34 the intra-regional differences
have been less pronounced than in other areas, as even several new EU members
(including Slovenia, Latvia, and Romania) had state sectors around 30 percent of
the GDP by 2010 (Table 1).
Overall, then, the developmental patterns discussed in this section conform to
varying degrees to the two legacy conceptions discussed in the introduction. In a
number of areas that set communist countries most clearly apart before 1989—particularly
the ubiquity of basic education access and the high prevalence of state ownership—the
countries of the former Soviet bloc still stand out quite clearly from their
non-communist counterparts and do not differ greatly from each other. For a second
set of factors—particularly GDP/capita and the relative size of agrarian sector—both
the region’s relative backwardness and the patterns of intra-regional differences can
Table 1
Overview of Communist Socio-economic Legacies
Area
Communist
Convergence
Communist
Distinctiveness
Post-comm
Divergence
Post-comm
Distinctiveness
GDP per capita Low/moderate Low Moderate Low
Inequality High High High Moderate
Urbanization Low/moderate Low Low/Moderate Low
Literacy / primary education High High Low High
Secondary education High High Moderate Moderate
Tertiary education High Low/Moderate Moderate Low
Education type High High Moderate Low
Sectoral profile Moderate Moderate/high High Low/moderate
Distorted industrial
development
Moderate/high High High Moderate
State sector size High High Low Moderate/high
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  401
be traced back quite clearly to pre-communist developmental patterns, which were
only partially muted by communist developmental efforts and then reinforced by the
early post-communist recessions.
The third group of factors consists of several “signature” communist developmental
aspects—including low levels of economic inequality, widespread secondary and
relatively restricted tertiary education access, and low energy effectiveness—whose
post-communist resilience varied considerably across different countries. While in
all three areas East European countries ended up with more favorable outcomes—
lower inequality, more widespread secondary and tertiary education, and greater
energy efficiency—the implications for our two legacy explanations are ambiguous.
Thus, we cannot simply conclude that communist legacies were uniformly “stickier”
in some countries, since the Soviet republics had greater continuity in tertiary education
and energy inefficiency, while Eastern Europe preserved communist-era low
income inequality and high secondary education access. On the other hand, except
for education, these patterns cannot be readily traced back to pre-communist
differences.
From Developmental Legacies to Political Outcomes
While this article has been primarily concerned with the developmental legacies
affecting post-communist Eastern Europe, the obvious next question is how these
legacies have shaped the politics of the last twenty-five years. While an exhaustive
answer to this question is beyond the scope of the current article, I sketch out some
tentative answers building on a few prior studies and propose a research agenda that
may help address some of the many unresolved questions about the historical roots
of post-communist political development. In doing so, I focus on three types of
outcomes: institutions, political attitudes, and political behavior.
For a variety of theoretical and normative reasons, one of the issues that received
the most attention in the past two decades has been the transition to democracy or,
more accurately, the transition away from communist one-party states. Given the
dramatic and persistent contrast between the democratic progress in East Central
Europe, the Baltics, and (albeit more slowly and unevenly) in the Balkans and the
mix of semi-authoritarian and fully authoritarian regimes in most interwar Soviet
republics,35 historical legacy arguments on this issue have primarily emphasized
intra-regional diversity, including urbanization, energy intensity and economic
development levels. However, given the high multicollinearity between different
factors, it is difficult to disentangle developmental legacies from other structural factors,
such as ethnic diversity or statehood challenges,36 as well as from non-legacy
explanations like European integration37 or geographic diffusion.38 Since the predictive
power of individual legacies varies substantially as a function of how democracy
is defined and measured—for example, whether we focus on formal institutions, or
the respect for certain political rights and civil liberties, or more demanding
402  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
indicators of democratic governance39—this discussion would benefit from a more
careful theoretical and empirical focus on the mechanisms underlying these broad
correlations. Why, for example, have many of the Balkan states largely converged to
East-Central European (and for that matter West European) standards with respect to
basic political rights and civil liberties, while consistently lagging behind in terms of
corruption and rule of law40?
Despite a growing recent concern about authoritarian backsliding among the erstwhile
East European democratic success stories (especially Hungary), there has been
surprisingly little systematic analysis about the extent of this post-communist democratic
deficit and its link to communist legacies. Pop-Eleches41 shows that even prior
to the current political crisis, ex-communist countries were less democratic than their
socioeconomic development levels would lead us to expect. The study also finds that
the effects of developmental indicators, such as education, on FH democracy vary
systematically between post-communist and non-communist countries. This finding
adds credence to the idea that the different nature of communist modernization is
reflected in different political repercussions and thus suggests the need to rethink the
mechanisms underlying modernization theory. However, we need significantly more
work both cross-nationally and sub-nationally to identify whether these patterns also
apply to other institutional outcomes and to pinpoint more precisely which aspects of
communist modernization are particularly unsuitable to democratic governance.
Given that the post-communist democratic deficit is greater in the original pre–World
War II Soviet republics—countries like Russia and Belarus are remarkably authoritarian
given their socioeconomic development—there are good reasons to expect
that a promising research venue would be a closer look at the interaction between
pre-communist legacies and the communist developmental blueprint. Such research
could build on earlier works highlighting communist institutional diversity42 but
would benefit from a simultaneous emphasis on the important commonalities of
communist regimes.
Another important area where we would expect communist legacies to affect
political institutions is with respect to political parties. Despite some minor variations
in the extent to which the minor opposition parties were tolerated, communist
regimes were very similar in their emphasis on the undisputed political dominance of
the Communist Party, thereby wiping out the pre-communist party systems. Despite
the reintroduction of multiparty elections in most of the region after 1990, East
European party systems have retained a number of distinctive features, including the
central role played by Communist successor parties and the rapid rise and fall of the
parties.43 At the same time, however, there has been a fair amount of diversity within
Eastern Europe in the electoral success of different types of parties: while some
explanations of this diversity have emphasized diverse late-communist legacies,44
others have stressed the role of post-communist political strategies (Table 2).45
Given the sustained political socialization efforts of communist regimes, we should
expect to find a distinctive communist legacy with respect to political attitudes and
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  403
behavior. Indeed, a number of recent studies have shown that post-communist citizens
report weaker support for democracy and markets, are more supportive of welfare
states and redistribution, and are more leftist in ideological terms than citizens of noncommunist
countries.46 Other studies have shown that post-communist citizens are
less likely to belong to civic organizations,47 and to participate in a variety of political
activities, including protests.48 Given that most of these differences applied surprisingly
uniformly across different ex-communist countries and since preliminary evidence
suggests that individual socialization experiences are crucial in explaining
variation in both attitudes and participation,49 it seems safe to assume that communist
education played an important role in driving this process. However, this question
would also greatly benefit from additional focus on a variety of institutional intermediaries,
such as churches, unions, and informal institutions, which have been shown to
play an important role in the transmission of legacy effects.50 Given the aforementioned
persistence of large state sectors in Eastern Europe, another promising explanation
of post-communist exceptionalism builds on Rosenfeld’s51 finding that democratic
support is lower for middle-class respondents who are economically dependent on the
state rather than the private sector.
Post-communist countries also seem to stand out in terms of the interaction
between political values and political participation: whereas in most non-communist
countries citizens with low democratic support levels are also significantly less likely
to be politically active, in ex-communist countries non-democrats are at least as
politically mobilized as democrats.52 This outcome is consistent with communist
political strategies, which mobilized the lower classes in support of the regime while
suppressing potentially threatening middle-class mobilization but this explanation
raises a host of additional questions about the mechanisms through which these
mobilizational patterns have persisted in the post-communist period, and likely
requires closer attention to the role of political parties, including Communist successor
parties, in reproducing these patterns.
Table 2
Overview of Communist Political Legacies
Area
Communist
Convergence
Communist
Distinctiveness
Post-communist
Divergence
Post-communist
Distinctiveness
Regime type High High High Moderate
Political parties High High Moderate/high Moderate
Civic participation Moderate/high High Low/moderate Moderate/high
Political participation Moderate/high High Moderate Moderate
Political attitudes Moderate/high
Variable
Moderate/high Moderate Moderate/high
Attitude-behavior
constellations
Moderate/high Moderate/high Low/moderate Moderate/high
404  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
At the same time, however, we can also find significant variation within the former
Soviet bloc along a variety of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions, and these
differences are often rooted in pre-communist and/or communist legacy differences.
Thus, the post-communist democratic support deficit was more pronounced in the
former Soviet republics,53 arguably at least in part because the effects of communist
socialization were stronger in countries with low pre-communist literacy and weak
pre-communist democratic traditions.54 Similarly, patterns of post-communist partisan
support have been traced to pre-communist differences in church institutions and
educational systems.55 Meanwhile, others have emphasized the role of variation in
communist institutional legacies for explaining different patterns of post-communist
protest activity.56
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical
legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on
the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic
and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew
Janos, highlights the significant and resilient pre-communist, communist and postcommunist
diversity of the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The two approaches
are theoretically distinct and have different implications for the continued analytical
utility of the term Eastern Europe (in its Cold War connotation as referring to the
countries of the Soviet bloc), and therefore it is important to distinguish more clearly
between them when analyzing historical legacies in the former communist countries.
This distinction is even more important considering that the present review of
developmental legacies and their political repercussions reveals that both types of
legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of post-communist transitions.
Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform communist imprint
in areas such as primary education and the importance of the state sector in the economy,
in other areas of socioeconomic development, communism was either unable to
reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect to GDP/capita or the
size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental imprint has been
fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as in the case of the
massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist countries).
Similarly, while we need to be careful about making broad regional generalizations
without incorporating contextual variations,57 individuals across much of the former
Soviet bloc still share a wide range of distinctive political attitudes and political participation
patterns that set them apart from their non-communist counterparts, and
these differences have so far shown little sign of fading away. But at the same time
we have witnessed a significant divergence of post-communist regime trajectories,
which has closely tracked pre-communist developmental legacies.
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  405
These patterns present us with a puzzle about why the relative explanatory power
of pre-communist and communist legacies varies so significantly across different
issue areas. At the most basic level, it is conceivable that some development aspects
matter more for mass attitudes, while others are more important in shaping elite
choices or institutional performance. Identifying which legacies matter for what
types of outcomes is a valuable theoretical exercise for post-communist politics and
comparative politics more broadly. But perhaps the most exciting opportunities for
future research in this area arise once we go beyond the notion of treating pre-communist
and communist legacies as substitutes and instead try to identify how the two
types of legacies interact with each other and with non-legacy factors to produce the
complex and often unpredictable political patterns that have characterized the politics
of post-communism in the last quarter century.
Notes
 1. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen Hanson, “Time, Space, and Institutional Change in Central and
Eastern Europe,” In Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Grzegorz Ekiert and
Stephen Hanson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15–48; Mark Beissinger and Stephen
Kotkin, eds., The Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
 2. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
 3. Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-communist Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, Communism’s Shadow:
The Effect of Communist Legacies on Post-communist Political Attitudes (unpublished book manuscript,
2013); Jeffrey Kopstein and Michael Bernhard, “Post-Communism, the Civilizing Process and the Mixed
Impact of Leninist Violence,” East European Politics and Societies 29 (2015): 379-390.
 4. Andrew C. Janos, “Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-communist
Politics,” East European Politics & Societies 8, no.1 (1993): 1–31; Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe
in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
  5. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World; Keith Darden and Anna Grzymała-Busse, “The
Great Divide: Precommunist Schooling and Postcommunist Trajectories,” World Politics 59, no. 1
(2006); Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change,” Journal of
Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 908–26.
  6. Janos, East Central Europe, 57–58.
  7. Janos, “Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe.”
  8. See, e.g., McFaul’s (“The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative
Transitions in the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 54, no. 2 [2002]: 21–244.) discussion of the impact
of the initial power balance on post-communist regime trajectories, or Grzymała-Busse’s (“Rebuilding
Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies,” Cambridge Studies
in Comparative Politics [New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007]) argument about the importance
of robust competition for patterns of state building among otherwise fairly similar East European
countries.
 9. Such comparative sets could of course be defined either regionally (e.g., Latin America) or in
terms of shared political backgrounds (e.g., former fascist countries or postcolonial states).
406  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
10. Janos himself uses East-Central Europe, which for him includes not just the Visegrad Four countries
but also the Balkans (though not the European former Soviet Union).
11. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-communist Regime Change.”
12. Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Communist Development and the Post-communist Democratic Deficit,” in
Beissinger and Kotkin, The Historical Legacies of Communism.
13. Darden and Grzymała-Busse, “The Great Divide.”
14. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow.
15. Beyond the pre-communist literacy levels discussed by Darden and Grzymała-Busse, we also
include several other factors at both the country level (e.g., pre-communist democratic experience) and
the individual level (e.g., religious denomination or pre-communist education).
16. See, e.g., Tucker’s (“Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the
Czech Republic, 1990-1999” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]) analysis of the link
between economic conditions and votes for old vs. new regime parties in countries as diverse as Russia
and the Czech Republic.
17. See, e.g., Epstein and Jacoby “Eastern Enlargement Ten Years On: Transcending the East–West
Divide?” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 52, no. 1 (2014): 1–16., M. Giurcanu, “Assessing
the Role of European Attitudes in Cross-National Research: Does the Post-Communist Context Matter?”
East European Politics and Societies 29 (2015): 504-518.
18. There are of course a fair number of exceptions, see inter alia Bunce 1998, Beissinger and Young
2002, Pop-Eleches 2008. Pop-Eleches. From economic crisis to reform: IMF programs in Latin America
and Eastern Europe. Princeton University Press, 2008; Bunce, Valerie. “Regional differences in democratization:
The east versus the south.” Post-Soviet Affairs 14, no. 3 (1998): 187–211; Beissinger, Mark,
and M. Crawford Young, eds. Beyond state crisis?: post-colonial Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia in comparative
perspective. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.
19. Angus Maddison, “Historical Statistics. Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita
GDP, 1-2008 AD,” 2010, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/vertical-file_02-2010.xls
(accessed 22 December 2013).
20. Pop-Eleches, “Communist Development.”
21. This may in part reflect resistance from national governments against Soviet regional economic
designs but also the changing priorities of Soviet leaders gradually shifted from the initial post–World
War II strategy of resource extraction from its East European satellites to a growing reliance on economic
subsidies in an effort to prop up the increasingly vulnerable communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
22. Andrew C. Janos, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict and the Dissolution of
Multinational States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
23. See, e.g., Hellman’s (1998) argument that rising inequality is a byproduct of partial economic
reforms, which in turn are the result of the disproportionate political influence of early economic winners
of post-communist economic liberalization. See also Ganev’s (2009) discussion of political capitalism.
Joel Hellman, “Winners take all,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–234; Venelin I Ganev,
“Postcommunist political capitalism: a Weberian interpretation,” Comparative studies in society and history
51, no. 3 (2009): 648–674.
24. Darden and Grzymała-Busse, “The Great Divide.”
25. Thus, higher education enrollment was higher in Kazakhstan than in either Hungary or Poland,
and the unweighted average for the non-Baltic Soviet republics was marginally higher than the average
for the East European satellite states. UNICEF, A Decade of Transition (Regional Monitoring Report, No.
8; Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2001).
26. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
27. Ghia Nodia, “How Different Are Postcommunist Transitions?” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4
(1996): 15–29.
28. Exceptions included temporary drops to about 80 percent in the mid-1990s in countries like
Georgia and Moldova that experienced precipitous economic declines, as well as a more permanent
reduction in Turkmenistan (though official enrollment ratios were still generally above 80 percent
(UNICEF, A Decade of Transition).
Pop-Eleches / Developmental Legacies  407
29. UNICEF, A Decade of Transition; UNICEF, TransMonEE 2013 Database (UNICEF Regional
Office for CEE/CIS, 2013).
30. Janos, East Central Europe.
31. Jowitt, New World Disorder.
32. Pop-Eleches, “Communist Development.”
33. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change.”
34. These outliers are Belarus and Turkmenistan with state sectors of 70 percent and 75 percent,
respectively (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development [EBRD], Transition Report 2013:
Stuck in Transition?).
35. Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik, and Milada Anna Vachudova, “Democracy in the Post-Communist
World: An Unending Quest?” East European Politics &Societies 21, no. 1 (2007): 7–30.
36. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-communist Regime Change.”
37. Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after
Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Milada Anna Vachudova, “External Actors and
Regime Change: How Post-Communism Transformed Comparative Politics” East European Politics and
Societies 29 (2015): 519-530.
38. Jeffrey Kopstein and David Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the
Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53, no. 1 (2000): 1–37.
39. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-communist Regime Change.”
40. Milada Anna Vachudova, “Corruption and Compliance in the EU’s Post-Communist Members and
Candidates,” Journal of Common Market Studies 47 (2009): 43–62.
41. Pop-Eleches, “Communist Development.”
42. Janos, East Central Europe; Herbert Kitschelt, Z. Mansfeldova, R. Markowski, and G. Tóka,
Post-communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-party Cooperation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
43. Kevin Deegan-Krause and Tim Haughton, “Eastern Europe Party System Development as a
Laboratory” (Prepared for the conference “Whither Eastern Europe” Changing Political Science
Perspectives on the Region, ACLS, EEPS, and UF Workshop, University of Florida, 9–11 January 2014).
44. Lenka Bustikova and Herbert Kitschelt, “The Radical Right in Post-communist Europe:
Comparative Perspectives on Legacies and Party Competition,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies
42, no. 4 (2009): 459–83.
45. Anna Grzymała-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties
in East Central Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
46. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow; Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker,
“Communist Socialization and Post-communist Economic and Political Attitudes” Electoral Studies 33
(2014): 77–89; Pontusson, Jonas and Nadja Mosimann, “Union Membership and Preferences for
Redistribution in Europe” (Paper presented at the conference 20th International Conference of
Europeanists-Crisis & Contingency: States of (In)Stability, 2013).
47. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society; Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, “Associated
with the Past? Communist Legacies and Civic Participation in Post-communist Countries,” East
European Politics & Societies 27, no. 1 (2013a): 45–68.
48. Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin
American Transformations Compared (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 1998);
Michael Bernhard and Ekrem Karakoç, “Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship,” World Politics
59, no. 4 (2007): 539–67.
49. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow.
50. Jason Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in
Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society.
51. Bryn Rosenfeld, “The Post-communist Middle Classes and Democratization: Bringing the State
Back In” (paper presented at the APSA Annual Meeting, Chicago, September 2013).
408  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
52. Pop-Eleches, “Communist Development.”
53. Ibid.
54. Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow.
55. Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty; Darden and Grzymała-Busse, “The Great Divide.”
56. Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, “Contentious Politics in New Democracies,” World Politics 50,
no. 4 (1998): 547–81.
57. Jan Kubik, “From Transitology to Contextual Holism: A Theoretical Trajectory of Postcommunist
Studies,” in Postcommunism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony, ed. Jan Kubik and
Amy Linch (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
Grigore Pop-Eleches is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson
School at Princeton University. He has worked on the politics of economic reforms in Eastern Europe and
Latin America, elections and voting in new democracies and non-democracies, and the role of historical
legacies in post-communist regime change and political attitudes. His first book From Economic Crisis
to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe was published by Princeton University
Press in 2009 and his work has also appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of
Politics, World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies and Journal of Democracy.