The Legacies of Communist Economic Development for Postcommunist Democratization

Our purpose in this paper is to describe the socio-economic transformation of Communist states in Europe as a product of the violent imposition of a new model of forced accumulation on the region as a product of the Bolshevik transformation of Russia. We begin with a discussion of the role of revolutionary violence in social transformation. We then discuss the roots of the system of accumulation that led to massive social change in the region under Stalin in the Soviet Union and its transfer to other Central and East European countries. We close with a discussion of the role of economic crisis in the failure of the Soviet Bloc and what were the ramifications for regime change posed by the nature of society at the point of the collapse of the Bloc in the period 1989-1991.