Anton Shirikov is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Kansas and a research affiliate at New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics. He studies authoritarian propaganda and disinformation as well as the legacies of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Dmitrii Kofanov is a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Center for Governance and Markets (CGM) at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in historical political economy and studies conflict, diversity, and political and economic development in late Imperial Russia.
Yoshiko M. Herrera is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published extensively on Russian politics; nationalism, identity, and ethnic politics; political economy and state statistics (national accounts); and international norms.
Scholars and analysts routinely use labels like “post-communist,” “post-Soviet,” or “Eurasian,” but what substantive traits these labels capture is far from obvious. Formerly communist countries have undergone such dramatic transformations over the last three and a half decades that one may wonder whether post-communism remains a meaningful analytical category. Could it be that using this term inappropriately defines the corresponding countries through an episode of their past that is no longer relevant?
In a recently published study in Problems of Post Communism, we approached this question empirically: if we compared the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe across many diverse dimensions, how much would they still have in common? By examining an extensive data set that included political, economic, demographic, and other characteristics, we found that despite their shared historical experiences, the former communist countries no longer form a distinctive group and often have more in common with countries in other parts of the world than with one another. Our results suggest that we should rethink the meaning of post-communism as a concept. While it may still be relevant for some analytical purposes, it can no longer serve as a broad categorization for the countries of the former Eastern bloc.
Historically, there were many reasons to view the former communist countries as a distinct region. These countries used to have similar institutions, e.g., state ownership of the means of production, central planning, administratively set prices, comprehensive state-sponsored welfare systems, monopolization of power and ideology by ruling communist parties, and omnipresent security agencies overseeing ideological conformity and suppressing dissent. Moreover, many of these countries experienced the same shocks and challenges when they dismantled communist systems and started their respective “transition” processes, which, as many scholars presumed, might have kept them on parallel trajectories.
Given that communist regimes sought to permeate all spheres of social life, some researchers believed that the experience of communism levelled out many previous differences among countries, and that they entered the “transition” under more or less equivalent starting conditions. According to this school of thought, communism must have left an indelible imprint on these countries’ post-communist development, distinguishing them from the rest of the world. Even though communist regimes in various countries differed from one another from the outset, and research shows that various pre-communist legacies continued to affect the political trajectories of formerly communist countries even after the collapse of communism, many scholars still continue to treat post-communist countries as a separate group in their analyses.
To adjudicate this issue, we conducted a comprehensive analysis that looks at 43 key demographic, economic, political, and social characteristics, as well as values and attitudes. We considered 28 former communist countries in comparison with the rest of the world, asking: if we examine these countries across this broad set of important indicators, will they show up as a cohesive and distinct group, or will they be indistinguishable from other countries that did not have experience with communism?
We answer this question by using an advanced statistical technique called “model-based clustering,” which determines whether entities—in this case, countries—form distinctive and cohesive groups that are similar across many characteristics. The model detects such groups in a way that best matches the data. Then, once the clustering shows us what the groups are, all that is left is to see which of these groups contain formerly communist states and whether there is a distinct group of post-communist countries.
We adopted fairly relaxed criteria of what counts as evidence of post-communist distinctiveness. We understood that, given their diverging post-communist trajectories, there would inevitably be some major differences among the various countries. Specifically, we decided that we would see the post-communist world as a distinct group if the model returns a cluster that includes at least half of all former communist countries and that primarily consists of these countries (in other words, if there are not many other, “non-post-communist,” countries in the cluster). Moreover, we made these comparisons at three different points in time, around 1995, 2005, and 2015, to account for transition dynamics.
Our main takeaway is that post-communist countries do not constitute a recognizable group throughout the transition period. We found some evidence of their similarity, but only early in the post-communist transition; these commonalities disappear with time. In particular, the formerly communist countries tended to band together along social indicators like education levels, gender equality, urbanization, and the adoption of communication technologies, but only in 1995 and 2005, not later.
In addition, the former communist countries exhibited lower fertility, lower infant mortality, higher life expectancy, and slower population growth, compared to the world average, but this set of characteristics is not specific to the post-communist world: many other countries are also similar to the former Eastern bloc in that sense. According to our indicators, rather than forming their own distinct group, formerly communist countries are part of a broader, more developed group of countries. Over time, any differences gradually dissipate.
Early in the transition period, former communist nations tended to cluster together in terms of values. We compared these countries to the rest of the world based on data from the World Values Survey. We adopted the value dimensions developed by Inglehart and Welzel, looking at whether individuals exhibit secular-rational or more traditional values and whether they emphasize survival vs. self-expression. In the 1990s, post-communist countries stood out from the rest of the world along these scales, but that is no longer true today.
To sum up, the countries of the former communist bloc do not form a clear-cut group with respect to key political, socio-economic, demographic and attitudinal indicators. Moreover, we also did not see consistent evidence of traditionally presumed regional divisions, such as the “East-West divide’’ between the former Soviet countries and Eastern Europe or a divide between Central Asia and other post-Soviet countries.
Our findings should serve as a caveat to scholars who treat the post-communist countries as a group without explicitly specifying the characteristics that unite them. Still, we do not claim that there is nothing specific to the former communist nations or that the concept of communist legacies should be discarded altogether. There still may persist commonalities in terms of language, religion, material culture, architecture, or transnational ties, but these shared elements remain to be more clearly teased out and specified, as well as evaluated over time. Moreover, such similarities can still serve as objects of geopolitical imaginations, sometimes with tragic consequences—which is another reason to question, rather than to assume, the persistence of shared post-communist attributes.
