The Political Legacies of the Leninist Economic Revolution from Above

The literature on the comparative historical origins of the socio-economic basis of democracy focuses on the transformation of agrarian societies to modern industrial societies.  To date, accounts have concentrated on global regions that have made this transformation under capitalist systems of accumulation – Western Europe, North America, and Latin America.  This piece attempts to expand this literature by taking into account the ways in which states in the other Europe attained socio-economic modernity and explores the ramifications of those patterns for regime change European Leninist regimes broke down in the late twentieth century.